Javier Fontan

From infrastructure delivery to service management in clouds

Clouds have changed the way we think about IT infrastructure management. Providers of software-based services are now able to outsource the operation of the hardware platforms required by those services. However, as the utilization of cloud platforms grows, users are realizing that the implicit promise of clouds (leveraging them from the tasks related with infrastructure management) is not fulfilled. A reason for this is that current clouds offer interfaces too close to that infrastructure, while users demand functionalities that automate the management of their services as a whole unit. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new abstraction layer closer to the lifecycle of services that allows for their automatic deployment and escalation depending on the service status (not only on the infrastructure). This abstraction layer can sit on top of different cloud providers, hence mitigating the potential lock-in problem and allowing the transparent federation of clouds for the execution of services. Here, we present Claudia, a service management system that implements such an abstraction layer, and the results of the deployment of a grid service (based on the Sun Grid Engine software) on such system.

Dynamic Provisioning of Virtual Clusters for Grid Computing

Virtual machines can greatly simplify grid computing by providing an isolated, well-known environment, while increasing security. Also, they can be used as the base technology to dynamically modify the computing elements of a grid, so providing an adaptive environment. In this paper we present a Grid architecture that allows to dynamically adapt the underlying hardware infrastructure to changing Virtual Organization (VO) demands. The backend of the system is able to provide on-demand virtual worker nodes to existing clusters and integrate them in any Globus-based Grid. In this way, we establish a basis to deploy self-adaptive Grids, which can support different VOs in shared physical infrastructures and dynamically adapt its software configuration. Experimental results on a prototyped testbed show less than a 10% overall performance loss including the hypervisor overhead.

Experience with the international testbed in the crossgrid project

The International Testbed of the CrossGrid Project has been in operation for the last three years, including 16 sites in 9 countries across Europe. The main achievements in installation and operation are described, and also the substantial experience gained on providing support to application and middleware developers in the project. Results are presented showing the availability of a realistic Grid framework to execute distributed interactive and parallel jobs.

Transparent access to grid-based compute utilities

There is normally the need for different grid architectures depending on the constrains: from enterprise infrastructures, to partner or outsourced ones. We present the technology that enables the creation and combination of different grid architectures, offering the possibility to create federated grids that can be easily deployed as compute utilities on grid infrastructures based on the Globus Toolkit. Then, taking advantage of the uniform and standard interface of the proposed grid-based compute utilities, we present a way to enable transparent access to virtualized grids from local computing infrastructure managed by Sun Grid Engine, although similar approaches could be followed for other resource managers.