Philipp Wieder

Cloud computing networking: challenges and opportunities for innovations

Cloud computing materializes the vision of utility computing. Tenants can benefit from on-demand provisioning of compute, storage, and networking resources according to a pay-per-use business model. Tenants have only limited visibility and control over network resources. The owners of cloud computing facilities are also facing challenges in various aspects of providing and efficiently managing IaaS facilities. In this work we present the networking issues in IaaS and federation challenges that are currently addressed with existing technologies. We also present innovative software-defined networking proposals, which are applied to some of the challenges and could be used in future deployments as efficient solutions.

A meta-scheduling service for co-allocating arbitrary types of resources

The Grid paradigm implies the sharing of a variety of resources across multiple administrative domains. In order to execute a work-flow using these distributed resources an instrument is needed to co-allocate resources by reaching agreements with the different local scheduling systems involved. Apart from compute resources to execute the work-flow the co-ordinated usage of other resource types must be also guaranteed, as there are for example a network connectivity with dedicated QoS parameters or a visualisation device. We present a Web Service-based MetaScheduling Service which allows to negotiate a common time slot with local resource management systems to enable the execution of a distributed work-flow. The successful negotiation process results in a formal agreement based on the WS-Agreement recommendation that is currently specified by the GRAAP working group of the Global Grid Forum. As a use case we demonstrate the integration of this MetaScheduling Service into the UNICORE middleware.

Unicore — From project results to production grids

The UNICORE Grid-technology provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed Grid resources. In this paper we present the recent evolution from project results to production Grids. At the beginning UNICORE was developed as a prototype software in two projects funded by the German research ministry (BMBF). Over the following years, in various European-funded projects, UNICORE evolved to a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production at many supercomputing centers worldwide. Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and International research projects, which use existing UNICORE components to implement advanced features, high level services, and support for applications from a growing range of domains. In order to foster these ongoing developments, UNICORE is available as open source under BSD licence at Source Forge, where new releases are published on a regular basis. This paper is a review of the UNICORE achievements so far and gives a glimpse on the UNICORE roadmap.

Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing

Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing provides a unique combination of business-driven application scenarios and advanced research in the area of service-level agreements for Clouds and service-oriented infrastructures. Current state-of-the-art research findings are presented in this book, as well as business-ready solutions applicable to Cloud infrastructures or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) environments. Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing contributes to the various levels of service-level management from the infrastructure over the software to the business layer, including horizontal aspects like service monitoring. This book provides readers with essential information on how to deploy and manage Cloud infrastructures. Case studies are presented at the end of most chapters. Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing is designed as a reference book for high-end practitioners working in cloud computing, distributed systems and IT services. Advanced-level students focused on computer science will also find this book valuable as a secondary text book or reference.

Using SLA for resource management and scheduling - a survey

Service Level Agreements may be used to establish agreements on the quality of a service between a service provider and a service consumer. The roles of service provider and service consumer may realised in different shapes ranging from individuals to institutions, software agents or other systems acting on behalf of physical entitie s or steered by those. This paper gives an overview on the state of the art using Service Level Agreements in the domain of Scheduling and Resource Management. An introduction is given where Service Level Agreements are considered, the technologies used, and what should be accomplished followed by descriptions of the systems that already explicitly implement and use Service Level Agreements.

An analytical model for software defined networking: A network calculus-based approach

Software defined networking (SDN) and OpenFlow as the outcome of recent research and development efforts provided unprecedented access into the forwarding plane of networking elements. This is achieved by decoupling the network control out of the forwarding devices. This separation paves the way for a more flexible and innovative networking. While SDN concept and OpenFlow find their ways into commercial deployments, performance evaluation of the SDN concept and its scalability, delay bounds, buffer sizing and similar performance metrics are not investigated in recent researches. In spite of usage of benchmark tools (like OFlops and Cbench), simulation studies and very few analytical models, there is a lack of analytical models to express the boundary condition of SDN deployment. In this work we present a model based on network calculus theory to describe the functionality of an SDN switch and controller. To the best of our knowledge, this is for the first time that network calculus framework is utilized to model the behavior of an SDN switch in terms of delay and queue length boundaries and the analysis of the buffer length of SDN controller and SDN switch. The presented model can be used for network designers and architects to get a quick view of the overall SDN network deployment performance and buffer sizing of SDN switches and controllers.

Reliable orchestration of resources using WS-Agreement

Co-ordinated usage of resources in a Grid environment is a challenging task impeded by the nature of resource usage and provision: Resources reside in different geographic locations, are managed by different organisations, and the provision of reliable access to these resource usually has to be negotiated and agreed upon in advance. These prerequisites have to be taken into account providing solutions for the orchestration of Grid resources. In this document we describe the use of WS-Agreement for Service Level Agreements paving the way for using multiple distributed resources to satisfy a single service request. WS-Agreement is about to be released as a draft recommendation of the Global Grid Forum and has already been implemented in a number of projects, two of which we will presented in this paper.

SDN-based cloud computing networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a concept which provides the network operators and data centres to flexibly manage their networking equipment using software running on external servers. According to the SDN framework, the control and management of the networks, which is usually implemented in software, is decoupled from the data plane. On the other hand cloud computing materializes the vision of utility computing. Tenants can benefit from on-demand provisioning of networking, storage and compute resources according to a pay-per-use business model. In this work we present the networking issues in IaaS and networking and federation challenges that are currently addressed with existing technologies. We also present innovative software-define networking proposals, which are applied to some of the challenges and could be used in future deployments as efficient solutions. cloud computing networking and the potential contribution of software-defined networking along with some performance evaluation results are presented in this paper.

A Proposal for a Generic Grid Scheduling Architecture

In the past years, many Grids have been deployed and became commodity systems in production environments. While several Grid scheduling systems have already been implemented, they still provide only “ad hoc” and domain-specific solutions to the problem of scheduling resources in a Grid. However, no common and generic Grid scheduling system has emerged yet. In this work we identify generic features of three common Grid scheduling scenarios, and we introduce a single entity called scheduling instance that can be used as a building block for the scheduling solutions presented. We identify the behaviour that a scheduling instance must exhibit in order to be composed with other instances, and we describe its interactions with other Grid services. This work can be used as a foundation for designing common Grid scheduling infrastructures.

Towards SLA-Supported resource management

Achievements and experiences in projects with focus on resource management have shown that the goals and needs of High Performance Computing service providers have not or only inadequately been taken into account in Grid research and development. Mapping real-life business behaviour and workflows within the service provider domain to the electronic level implies focusing on the business rules of the provider as well as on the complexity of the jobs and the current state of the HPC system. This paper describes an architectural approach towards a business-oriented and Service Level Agreement-supported resource management, valuable for High Performance Computing providers to offer and sell their services. With the introduction of a Conversion Factory the authors present a component that is able to combine the Service Level Agreement, the system status, and all business objectives of the provider in order to address the business needs of service providers in the Grid.