Françoise Baude

Interactive and descriptor-based deployment of object-oriented grid applications

Increasing complexity of distributed applications and commodity of resources through grids are making the tasks of deploying those applications harder. There is a clear need for standard tools allowing versatile deployment and analysis of distributed applications. We present here a solution for the deployment and monitoring of applications written using ProActive, an experimental Java-based library for concurrent, distributed and mobile computing. We describe the use of XML-based descriptor for the deployment part of a distributed application and the use of IC2D (Interactive Control and Debugging of Distribution), for the monitoring and steering of the running application. Those ideas, concepts, and experiments are a contribution towards the construction of integrated environments for component-based grid programming.

GCM: a grid extension to Fractal for autonomous distributed components

This article presents an extension of the Fractal component model targeted at programming applications to be run on computing grids: the grid component model (GCM). First, to address the problem of deployment of components on the grid, deployment strategies have been defined. Then, as grid applications often result from the composition of a lot of parallel (sometimes identical) components, composition mechanisms to support collective communications on a set of components are introduced. Finally, because of the constantly evolving environment and requirements for grid applications, the GCM defines a set of features intended to support component autonomicity. All these aspects are developed in this paper with the challenging objective to ease the programming of grid applications, while allowing GCM components to also be the unit of deployment and management.

A hybrid message Logging-CIC protocol for constrained checkpointability

Communication Induced Checkpointing protocols usually make the assumption that any process can be checkpointed at any time. We propose an alternative approach which releases the constraint of always checkpointable processes, without delaying any message reception nor altering message ordering enforced by the communication layer or by the application. This protocol has been implemented within ProActive, an open source Java middleware for asynchronous and distributed objects implementing the ASP (Asynchronous Sequential Processes) model.

ESB federation for large-scale SOA

Embracing service-oriented architectures in the context of large systems, such as the Web, rises a set of new and challenging issues: increased size and load in terms of users and services, distribution, and dynamicity. A top-down federation of service infrastructure support that we name service cloud and that is capable of growing to the scale of the Internet, is seen as a promising response to such new challenges. In this paper, we define the service cloud concept, its promises and the requirements in terms of architecture and the corresponding middleware. We present some preliminary proofs of concept through the integration of a JBI-compliant enterprise service bus, extended to our needs, and a scalable semantic space infrastructure, both relying on an established grid middleware environment. The new approach offers service consumers and providers a fully transparent, distributed and federated means to access, compose and deploy services on the Internet. Technically, our contribution advances core service bus technology towards the service cloud by scaling the registries and message routers to the level of federations via a hierarchical approach, and by incorporating the communication and coordination facilities offered by a global semantic space.

System and Network Management Itineraries for Mobile Agents

The technology of mobile agents has proven its usefulness for system and network management. In order to be effective, the integration of SNMP-based operations and the use of mobility should be effective. This paper presents a step forwards such an integration, by designing and implementing itineraries of mixed destination types: (1) a destination type that represents a location where a mobile agent migrates (for reaching a remote network for performance purposes, or/and for managing the location using a pure Java function); (2) a destination type that represents a location onto which the agent is not able to migrate, but for which an SNMP-based operation must be executed through a classical client-server interaction. The mixed usage of both kinds of destinations is unified within our solution, and as such greatly simplifies the programming of new system and network management operations.

A component-based middleware for hybrid grid/cloud computing platforms

Current solutions for hybrid grid/cloud computing have been developed to hide from heterogeneity, dynamicity, and distributed nature of resources. These solutions are, however, insufficient to support distributed applications with non‐trivial communication patterns among processes or that are structured so as to reflect the organization of resources they are deployed onto. In this paper, we present a generic, adaptable, and extensible component‐based middleware that seamlessly enables a transition of non‐trivial applications from traditional grids to hybrid grid–cloud platforms. This middleware goes beyond the resolution of well‐known technical challenges for multi‐domain computing, as it offers mechanisms to exploit the hierarchical, heterogeneous, and dynamic natures of platforms. We validate its capabilities and versatility through two use cases: an Internet‐wide federation of Distributed Service Buses and a runtime supporting DD high‐performance computing in heterogeneous computing environments using programming that is similar to message‐passing interface. Performance results show the efficiency and usefulness of our middleware and so contribute to promote research efforts geared toward flexible, on‐demand information technology solutions. Copyright

A parallel object-oriented application for 3D electromagnetism

Summary form only given. Within the trend of object-based distributed computing, we present the design and implementation of a numerical simulation for electromagnetic waves propagation. A sequential Java design and implementation is first presented. Further, a distributed and parallel version is derived from the first, using an active object pattern. In addition, benchmarks are presented on this nonembarrassingly parallel application. A first contribution resides in the sequential object-oriented design that proved to be very modular and extensible; the classes and abstractions are designed to allow both element and volume type methods, furthermore, valid on structured, unstructured, or hybrid meshes. Compared to a Fortran version, the performance of this highly modular version proved to be in the same range. It is also shown how smoothly the sequential version can be distributed, keeping the same structuring and object abstractions, allowing to deal with larger data size. Finally, benchmarks on up to 64 processors compare the performances with respect to sequential and parallel versions, putting that in perspective with a comparable Fortran version.

Combining Grid and Cloud Resources by Use of Middleware for SPMD Applications

Distributed computing environments have evolved from in-house clusters to Grids and now Cloud platforms. We, as others, provide HPC benchmarks results over Amazon EC2 that show a lower performance of Cloud resources compared to private resources., So, it is not yet clear how much of impact Clouds will have in high performance computing (HPC). But hybrid Grid/Cloud computing may offer opportunities to increase overall applications performance, while benefiting from in-house computational resources extending them by Cloud ones only whenever needed. In this paper, we advocate the usage of Proactive, a well established middleware in the grid community, for mixed Grid/Cloud computing, extended with features to address Grid/Cloud issues with little or, no effort for application developers. We also introduce a framework, developed in the context of the Disco Grid project, based upon the Proactive middleware to couple HPC domain-decomposition SPMD applications in heterogeneous multi-domain environments. Performance results, coupling Grid and Cloud resources for the execution of such, kind of highly communicating and processing intensive applications, have shown an overhead of about 15%, which is a non-negligible value, but lower enough to consider using such environments to achieve a better cost-performance trade-off than using exclusively Cloud resources.

Grid-Enabling SPMD Applications through Hierarchical Partitioning and a Component-Based Runtime

Developing highly communicating scientific applications capable of efficiently use computational grids is not a trivial task. Ideally, these applications should consider grid topology 1) during the mesh partitioning, to balance workload among heterogeneous resources and exploit physical neighborhood, and 2) in communications, to lower the impact of latency and reduced bandwidth. Besides, this should not be a complex matter in end-users applications. These are the central concerns of the DiscoGrid project, which promotes the concept of a hierarchical SPMD programming model, along with a grid-aware multi-level mesh partitioning to enable the treatment of grid issues by the underlying runtime, in a seamless way for programmers. In this paper, we present the DiscoGrid project and the work around the GCM/ProActive-based implementation of the DiscoGrid Runtime. Experiments with a non-trivial computational electromagnetics application show that the component-based approach offers a flexible and efficient support and that the proposed programming model can ease the development of such applications.

Grid Application Programming Environments

One challenge of building future grid systems is to provide suitable application programming interfaces and environments. In this chapter, we identify functional and non-functional properties for such environments. We then review three existing systems that have been co-developed by the authors with respect to the identied properties: ProActive, Ibis, and GAT. Apparently, no currently existing system is able to address all properties. However, from our systems, we can derive a generic architecture model for grid application programming environments, suitable for building future systems that will be able to address all the properties and challenges identied.