John P. Morrison

A survey of Cloud monitoring tools: Taxonomy, capabilities and objectives

a b s t r a c t The efficient management of Cloud infrastructure and deployments is a topic that is currently attracting significant interest. Complex Cloud deployments can result in an intricate layered structure. Understanding the behaviour of these hierarchical systems and how to manage them optimally are challenging tasks that can be facilitated by pervasive monitoring. Monitoring tools and techniques have an important role to play in this area by gathering the information required to make informed decisions. A broad variety of monitoring tools are available, from general-purpose infrastructure monitoring tools that predate Cloud computing, to high-level application monitoring services that are themselves hosted in the Cloud. Surveying the capabilities of monitoring tools can identify the fitness of these tools in serving certain objectives. Monitoring tools are essential components to deal with various objectives of both Cloud providers and consumers in different Cloud operational areas. We have identified the practical capabilities that an ideal monitoring tool should possess to serve the objectives in these operational areas. Based on these identified capabilities, we present a taxonomy and analyse the monitoring tools to determine their strength and weaknesses. In conclusion, we present our reflections on the analysis, discuss challenges and identify future research trends in the area of Cloud monitoring.

Maternal smoking and respiratory distress syndrome

Infants of 603 patients on whom information about smoking habits during pregnancy was available were studied for incidence respiratory distress syndrome. Among the 360 patients who did not smoke, the incidence of respiratory distress syndrome in the neonate was 15.1%, whereas among patients who smoked, the incidence was 9.1%. We speculate that smoking produces a condition of chronic stress in the fetus which brings about an acceleration of fetal pulmonary maturation.

WebCom: A Web Based Volunteer Computer

The World Wide Web has become the largest single possible source of processing power. By coupling CPU time donated by volunteers, researchers and industry have the ability to execute applications that traditionally were in the domain of the supercomputer users. This paper presents one such attempt at creating a system capable of exploiting this abundance of processing power. It is based on an inherently parallel model of computing. The concepts behind computational model are explained and the implementation details are illustrated. The paper presents results obtained from various tests of this implementation.

CLOUDLIGHTNING: A Framework for a Self-organising and Self-managing Heterogeneous Cloud

As clouds increase in size and as machines of different types are added to the infrastructure in order to maximize performance and power efficiency, heterogeneous clouds are being created. However, exploiting different architectures poses significant challenges. To efficiently access heterogeneous resources and, at the same time, to exploit these resources to reduce application development effort, to make optimisations easier and to simplify service deployment, requires a re-evaluation of our approach to service delivery. We propose a novel cloud management and delivery architecture based on the principles of self-organisation and self-management that shifts the deployment and optimisation effort from the consumer to the software stack running on the cloud infrastructure. Our goal is to address inefficient use of resources and consequently to deliver savings to the cloud provider and consumer in terms of reduced power consumption and improved service delivery, with hyperscale systems particularly in mind. The framework is general but also endeavours to enable cloud services for high performance computing. Infrastructure-as-a-Service provision is the primary use case, however, we posit that genomics, oil and gas exploration, and ray tracing are three downstream use cases that will benefit from the proposed architecture.

A framework for heterogeneous middleware security

Summary form only given. With the advent of Web services, achieving seamless interoperability between heterogeneous middleware technologies has become increasingly important. While much work investigating functional interoperability between different middleware architectures has been reported, little practical work has been done on providing a unified and/or interoperable view of security between the different approaches. We describe how Secure WebCom - a distributed metacomputing system - provides interoperability support between the COM+/.NET, CORBA and Enterprise Java Beans middleware security architectures. Secure WebCom uses the KeyNote trust management system to help coordinate the trust relationships between the different middleware systems and their associated security policies. Middleware authorisation policies can be encoded in terms of KeyNote cryptographic certificates, and vice-versa. This provides a unified view of security across heterogeneous middleware systems and also provides the basis for decentralised support of middleware security policies.

Secure Component Distribution Using WebCom

Abstract WebCom is a distributed computing architecture that may be used to distribute application components for execution over a network. A practical trust management system for the WebCom architecture is described. KeyNote-based authorization credentials are used to determine whether a WebCom server is authorised to schedule, and whether a WebCom client is authorised to execute, mobile application components. Secure WebCom provides a meta-language for bringing together the components of a distributed application in such a way that the components need not concern themselves with security issues.

WEBCOM-G: A Candidate Middleware for Grid-Ireland

WebCom-G is a fledgling Grid Operating System, designed to provide independent service access through interoperability with existing middlewares. It offers an expressive programming model that automatically handles task synchronisation – load balancing, fault tolerance, and task allocation are handled at the WebCom-G system level – without burdening the application writer. These characteristics, together with the ability of its computing model to mix evaluation strategies to match the characteristics of the geographically dispersed facilities and the overall problem-solving environment, make WebCom-G a promising grid middleware candidate.

An Evolution of the WebCom Metacomputer

Functional enhancements to the WebCom metacomputer are described which give rise to dynamic reconfigurability and extendability of the computer platform. Component modules and interactions are described, with particular attention to the communications module that enables dynamic reconfigurability. The machines of the metacomputer can be configured to act in client/server or peer to peer mode on a number of interconnection topologies such as NOWs, Clusters or Grids. This paper addresses the dynamically extendable machine structure of WebCom facilitated by this new communications structure.

Graph Partitioning for Reconfigurable Topology

Optical circuit switches have recently been proposed as a low-cost, low-power and high-bandwidth alternative to electronic switches for the design of high-performance compute clusters. An added advantage of these switches is that they allow for a reconfiguration of the network topology to suit the requirements of the application. To realize the full potential of a high-performance computing system with a reconfigurable interconnect, there is a need to design algorithms for computing a topology that will allow for a high-throughput load distribution, while simultaneously partitioning the computational task graph of the application for the computed topology. In this paper, we propose a new framework that exploits such reconfigurable interconnects to achieve these interdependent goals, i.e., to iteratively co-optimize the network topology configuration, application partitioning and network flow routing to maximize throughput for a given application. We also present a novel way of computing a high-throughput initial topology based on the structural properties of the application to seed our co-optimizing framework. We show the value of our approach on synthetic graphs that emulate the key characteristics of a class of stream computing applications that require high throughput. Our experiments show that the proposed technique is fast and computes high-quality partitions of such graphs for a broad range of hardware parameters that varies the bottleneck from computation to communication.

Architecture and implementation of a distributed reconfigurable metacomputer

The use of application-specific co-processors created using reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs) has been shown to realize significant speed increases for many computationally intensive applications. The addition of reconfigurable hardware to clusters composed of commodity machines in order to improve the execution times of parallel applications would, therefore, appear to be a logical step. However, the extra complications introduced by this technique may make the real-world application of such technology appear to be prohibitively difficult. In this paper the design and implementation of a metacomputer designed to simplify the development of applications for clusters containing re-configurable hardware are presented. The operation of the metacomputer is also discussed in some detail, including the process of implementing applications for execution on the metacomputer.