Jean-Patrick Gelas

Save Watts in Your Grid: Green Strategies for Energy-Aware Framework in Large Scale Distributed Systems

While an extensive set of research project deals with the saving power problem of electronic devices powered by electric battery, few have interest in large scale distributed systems permanently plugged in the wall socket. However, a rapid study shows that each computer, member of a distributed system platform, consume a substantial quantity of power especially when those resources are idle. Today, given the number of processing resources involved in large scale computing infrastructure, we are convinced that we can save a lot of electric power by applying what we called green policies. Those policies, introduced in this article, propose to alternatively switch On and Off computer nodes in a clever way.

Active Networking Support for the Grid

Grid computing is a promising way to aggregate geographically distant machines and to allow them to work together to solve large problems.After studying Grid network requirements, we observe that the network must take part of the Grid computing session to provide intelligent adaptative transport of Grid data streams.By proposing new intelligent dynamic services, active network can be the perfect companion to easily and efficiently deploy and maintain Grid environments and applications.This paper presents the Active Grid Architecture (A-Grid) which focus on active networks adaptation for supporting Grid environments and applications.We focus the benefit of active networking for the grid on three aspects: High performance and dynamic active services, Active Reliable Multicast, and Active Quality of Service.

Designing and evaluating an active grid architecture

Todays computational grids are using the standard IP routing functionality, that has basically remained unchanged for 2 decades, considering the network as a pure communication infrastructure. With the grids distributed system point of view, one might consider to extend the commodity Internets basic functionalities. Higher value functionalities can thus be offered to computational grids. In this paper, we report on our early experiences in building application-aware components and in defining an active grid architecture that would bring the usage of computational grid to a higher level than it is now (mainly batch submission of jobs). To illustrate the potential of this approach, we first present how such application-aware components could be built and then some experiments on deploying enhanced communication services for the grid. We will show how reliable multicast and QoS mechanisms could deploy specific services based on the grid application needs.

Towards the design of a high performance active node

Achieving high performance in active networks is one of the most challenging task. In this paper, we propose an architecture for the design of next generation gigabit active routers. This original architecture allows service deployment of 4 levels: inside network cards, in kernel space, in user space and on distributed computing resources. We deploy and validate this architecture within the Tamanoir execution environment. First experiments on gigabit network platforms are described.

Active and logistical networking for grid computing: the e-Toile architecture

While active networks provide new solutions for the deployment of dynamic services in the network, exposing network processing resources, logistical networking focuses on exposing storage resources inside networks, optimizing the global scheduling of data transport, data storage and computation. In this paper, we show how active and logistical environments working together can improve grid middleware, and provide new and innovative high-level services for grid applications. We have experimented with this approach by combining the Internet Backplane Protocol suite with the Tamanoir Active Node environment. Our target architecture is the French e-Toile Grid infrastructure based on a high performance backbone (Vraiment Tres Haut Debit, VTHD).

Mixing high performance and portability for the design of active network framework with java

The field of active and programmable networks is rapidly expanding. These networks allow users and network designers to easily deploy new services. Active networks must deal with the need of portability for services to be easily implemented in active routers and the need of high performance design to efficiently transport multimedia streams. While most of proposed systems deal with adaptability, flexibility and new protocols by using JAVA, only few systems focus on high performance. We explore the design of intelligent network by proposing the Tamanoir 1 system, a complete framework dedicated to high performance active networking, which allows users to easily deploy and maintain services on distributed active routers. To guarantee the portability, Tamanoir routers, services and tools are programmed in Java. But, high performance aspects are also taken into account by minimizing JAVA software latency with a compiled approach. First experiments and comparisons with other active networks Java-based systems will show the effectiveness and pertinence of our approach.

Road to energy-efficient optical access: greentouch final results

The growing energy footprint of communication networks has raised concern about the sustainability of future network development. The GreenTouch consortium was founded to help counter this trend by developing and integrating green network technologies from the access to the core. In order to evaluate these technologies, an end-to-end network power model was developed in the form of the Green Meter, a tool to assess the overall impact and overall energy efficiency benefits of an entire portfolio of solutions. In this paper, we describe the methodology of the Green Meter for the residential fixed access portion, which was extended to include metro aggregation. A baseline architecture for optical access and metro aggregation networks is defined, and is adapted to other scenarios integrating future technologies. The performance is evaluated each time through a mathematical model that captures the energy savings at the component level and has the ability to compute the overall system-level energy savings. We show that energy efficiency can be improved 29-fold over a decade (2010-2020) with businessas- usual trends, and with the added effort of introducing GreenTouch solutions, this could be further improved to achieve a 257-fold increase in energy efficiency. The results confirm that an emphasis on green network design can indeed have a huge impact on reducing the energy consumption of an optical access infrastructure.

Towards the Design of an Active Grid

Grid computing is a promising way to aggregate geographically distant machines and to allow them to work together to solve large problems. After studying Grid network requirements, we observe that the network must take part in the Grid computing session to provide intelligent adaptative transport of Grid data streams.By proposing new intelligent dynamic services, active network can easily and efficiently deploy and maintain Grid environments and applications. This paper presents the Active Grid Architecture (A-Grid)1 which focuses on active networks adaptation for supporting Grid middlewares and applications.We describe the architecture and first experiments of a dedicated execution environment dedicated to the Grid: Tamanoir-G.

Beyond CPU: Considering memory power consumption of software

ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) are responsible around 2% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions (Gartner, 2007). And according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) recent reports, CO2 emissions due to ICTs are increasing widely. For this reason, many works tried to propose various tools to estimate the energy consumption due to software in order to reduce carbon footprint. However, these studies, in the majority of cases, takes into account only the CPU and neglects all others components. Whereas, the trend towards high-density packaging and raised memory involve a great increased of power consumption caused by memory and maybe memory can become the largest power consumer in servers. In this paper, we model and then estimate the power consumed by CPU and memory due to the execution of a software. Thus, we perform several experiments in order to observe the behavior of each component.

Towards the Design of an Industrial Autonomic Network Node

Programmable and active networks allow specified classes of users to deploy dynamic network services adapted to data streams requirements. Currently most of researches performed on active networks are conducted in research laboratories. In this paper, we explore the design of IAN 2 an Industrial Autonomic Network Node able to be deployed in industrial context. Performance, dynamic programmability and fault-tolerance issues of software and hardware components have been prospected. First experimental evaluations on local platforms are presented.