Jens Nimis

What's inside the Cloud? An architectural map of the Cloud landscape

We propose an integrated Cloud computing stack architecture to serve as a reference point for future mash-ups and comparative studies. We also show how the existing Cloud landscape maps into this architecture and identify an infrastructure gap that we plan to address in future work.

Do Clouds Compute? A Framework for Estimating the Value of Cloud Computing

On-demand provisioning of scalable and reliable compute services, along with a cost model that charges consumers based on actual service usage, has been an objective in distributed computing research and industry for a while. Cloud Computing promises to deliver on this objective: consumers are able to rent infrastructure in the Cloud as needed, deploy applications and store data, and access them via Web protocols on a pay-per-use basis. The acceptance of Cloud Computing, however, depends on the ability for Cloud Computing providers and consumers to implement a model for business value co-creation. Therefore, a systematic approach to measure costs and benefits of Cloud Computing is needed. In this paper, we discuss the need for valuation of Cloud Computing, identify key components, and structure these components in a framework. The framework assists decision makers in estimating Cloud Computing costs and to compare these costs to conventional IT solutions. We demonstrate by means of representative use cases how our framework can be applied to real world scenarios.

A Framework for Commercial Grids—Economic and Technical Challenges

This paper argues that the technology of Grid computing has not yet been adopted in commercial settings due to the lack of viable business models. While in academia Grid technology has already been taken up, the sharing approach among non for-profit organizations is not suitable for enterprises. In this paper, the idea of a Grid market is taken up to overcome this Grid adoption gap. We propose a framework for building up a Grid market and identifies the associated economic and technical challenges. Based on this framework, we identify a catalogue of possible market mechanisms which offer a promising fit to the Grid environment’s characteristics and which may thus help to carry the idea of Grid markets from theory to practice.

Cloud service engineering

Building on compute and storage virtualization, Cloud Computing provides scalable, network-centric, abstracted IT infrastructure, platforms, and applications as on-demand services that are billed by consumption. Cloud Service Engineering is the application of a systematic approach to leverage Cloud Computing in the context of the Internet in its combined role as a platform for technical, economic, organizational and social networks. This tutorial introduces concepts and technology of Cloud Computing and Cloud Service Engineering, providing an overview of state-of-the-art in research and practice. We show how to set up a private Cloud that delivers Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Eucalyptus and OpenNebula are popular open source software frameworks for creating on-premise Clouds. Promises, challenges and solutions for integrating services of a private Cloud with public Cloud services such as Amazon EC2 and SQS are discussed. We show how the best of both worlds - private and public Clouds - can be combined to build scalable and secure systems.

SORMA --- Business Cases for an Open Grid Market: Concept and Implementation

Economic mechanisms enhance technological solutions by setting the right incentives to reveal information about demand and supply accurately. Market or pricing mechanisms are ones that foster information exchange and can therefore attain efficient allocation. By assigning a value (also called utility) to their service requests, users can reveal their relative urgency or costs to the service. The implementation of theoretical sound models induce further complex challenges. The EU-funded project SORMA analyzes these challenges and provides a prototype as a proof-of-concept. In this paper the approach within the SORMA-project is described on both conceptual and technical level.

A taxonomy of incentive patterns

1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Incentives Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22.1 Relevance of Incentive Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32.2 Economic Incentive Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32.3 General Characteristics of Incentive Patterns . . . . . 43 Trust Based Incentive Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63.1 The Collective Pattern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63.2 The Community Pattern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Trade Based Incentive Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84.1 Immediate Action in Return . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84.2 Deferred Action in Return . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Taxonomy and Characteristics of Incentive Patterns . . . . . 145.1 A Taxonomy of Incentive Patterns . . . . . . . . . . . 145.2 Characteristics of Incentive Patterns . . . . . . . . . . 146 Incentive Patterns for DIANE: A Case Study . . . . . . . . . 166.1 Specifics of the Application Environment . . . . . . . 176.2 Applicable Incentive patterns for DIANE . . . . . . . 177 Related Work and Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20Acknowledgement 22Bibliography 23Glossary 26I

Benchmarking and robust multi-agent-based production planning and control

Abstract Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer new perspectives compared to conventional, centrally organised architectures in the scope of production planning and control. They are expected to be more flexible and robust while dealing with a turbulent production environment and disturbances. In this paper, an MAS is developed and compared to an Operations Research Job-Shop algorithm using a simulation-based benchmarking scenario. Environmental constraints for a successful application of MAS are identified and classified. Furthermore, the topic of MAS robustness is addressed by applying database technologies on the basis of transactions.

(MC2)2: A Generic Decision-Making Framework and its Application to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a disruptive technology, representing a new model for information technology (IT) solution engineering and management that promises to introduce significant cost savings and other benefits. The adoption of Cloud computing requires a detailed comparison of infrastructure alternatives, taking a number of aspects into careful consideration. Existing methods of evaluation, however, limit decision making to the relative costs of cloud computing, but do not take a broader range of criteria into account. In this paper, we introduce a generic, multi-criteria-based decision framework and an application for Cloud Computing, the Multi-Criteria Comparison Method for Cloud Computing ((MC2)2). The framework and method allow organizations to determine what infrastructure best suits their needs by evaluating and ranking infrastructure alternatives using multiple criteria. Therefore, (MC2)2 offers a way to differentiate infrastructures not only by costs, but also in terms of benefits, opportunities and risks. (MC2)2 can be adapted to facilitate a wide array of decision-making scenarios within the domain of information technology infrastructures, depending on the criteria selected to support the framework.

A Tool for Integrated Design and Implementation of Conversations in Multiagent Systems

Multiagent systems form a promising paradigm for software development in complex application domains, but unfortunately tend to be complex systems themselves. The existing gap between analysis and design of multiagent systems and their implementation leads to an increased programming effort. In this paper, we present a graphical tool which tries to bridge this gap by integrating the design and implementation of agent conversations. The tool is implemented, as a plugin, for the integrated development environment Eclipse. Its use follows a conversation programming workflow which supports Agent UML and finite state machines as graphical notations. It is shown how the in-memory representation based on the description language cpXML, is automatically translated into source code for the multiagent framework JADE.

An infrastructure for an electronic market of scientific literature

The success of the Internet has brought a large quantity of providers offering search and delivery services for scientific literature. We observe the development of an information market, where the value of a piece of information is determined by the law of supply and demand. This situation raises questions as to the future of university libraries. The objective of this paper is to find answers to these problems and to develop an architecture for the integration of information services in the field of scientific literature under the premise of an open, heterogeneous and dynamic market. With the UniCats system, we provide an integration architecture that supports all, customers, providers, and the traditional library. Technical basis is the UniCats environment, a framework for communicating UniCats agents. The most important agent types are trader, wrapper and user agent.