Rocco Aversa

Cloud Agency: A Mobile Agent Based Cloud System

The cloud paradigm appeared on the computing scene in 2005 with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) . After this date, a large set of related technologies has been developed. In the academic world, and especially in the HPC area, cloud computing is in some way in competition with the GRID model, which offers a middleware based approach. One of the solutions proposed is the integration of the two paradigms, in order to use the enormous potential of the existent computational GRIDs in new ways. One of the most diffused problems on this systems is the choice of the correct programming paradigm: many different approaches exist and it is difficult to define which is the approach that best fit with the cloud paradigm. In this paper we propose the integration of a Cloud on GRID architecture with a mobile agent platform. The architecture we propose offer Virtual clusters with full administrative control to final users, adopting an existent GRID architecture and especially its security infrastructure. The mobile agent platform is able to dynamically add and configure services on the virtual clusters. The experience here presented shows that the mobile agent paradigm well fulfills the dynamic properties of the Cloud paradigm and could be a good choice to simply develop application and services able to dynamically adapt themselves to the virtualized environment.

A cloud agency for SLA negotiation and management

Resources management facilities, based on service level agreements, are needed in the Cloud in order to negotiate a collection of inter-connected and virtualized computers between resource providers and consumers. In this paper we present the architectural design of a system named Cloud Agency which aims to respond to this need and to offer added value to the existing Cloud services. This system is in charge to broker the collection of Cloud resources from different providers that fulfills at the best the requirements of users applications. The user is able to delegate to the Agency the necessary checks of the agreement fulfilment, the monitoring of resource utilization and eventually necessary re-negotiations.

Architecturing a sky computing platform

Current Cloud computing solutions force people to be stranded into locked, proprietary systems. In order to overcome this limitation several efforts of the research community are addressing issues such as common programming models, open standard interfaces, adequate service level agreements or portability of applications. In this context, we argue about the need for an open-source Cloud application programming interface and a platform targeted for developing multi-Cloud oriented applications. This paper describes the approach that we propose for a platform that allows the deployment of component-based applications in Cloud environments taking into account multiple Cloud provider offers.

Model-driven engineering of cloud components in MetaMORPhOSY

Cloud architecture is established as a standard for services provisioning. Discovering of services is a hard task since several services have to be analysed. The mOSAIC project aims at providing a framework for searching and interfacing services from multiple vendors. Its main component, the cloud agency, provides searching and wrapping features and the management of Services Level Agreements SLAs. In this scenario, validating services requirements is appealing. Usually users are forced to use SLAs pre-offered by providers that need to reconfigure cloud components in order to meet requests. Model-Driven Engineering MDE methodologies allow for requirements verification during all life cycle of systems. They can be exploited in definition of models for cloud components that have to be used and configured in order to fulfil requested service levers. Here, the MetaMORPhOSY methodology and framework are introduced and applied to the verification of SLAs in the mOSAIC platform.

MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture

Mobile agents mean both a technology and a programming paradigm. They allow for a flexible approach which can alleviate a number of issues present in distributed and Grid-based systems, by means of features such as migration, cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms. In this paper we describe an architecture (MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture) we have designed and we are currently developing to support programming and execution of mobile agent based application upon Grid systems.

Heterogeneous system performance prediction and analysis using PS

PS (PVM simulator), is a simulator of PVM programs which lets users conduct performance prediction and analysis of distributed applications executed in heterogeneous and network computing environments. The article describes the tool and its development environment. As a prediction tool, the PS simulator lets developers obtain extrapolated performance data by estimating the behavior that a parallel application would attain on different types of architectures from traces collected on a workstation or on a scaled down distributed environment. As an analysis tool, it lets developers collect aggregate and analytical indexes related to heterogeneous system performance (such as efficiency, throughput, response time, and individual processor utilization) or traces that can be processed offline by a variety of tools for performance visualization and analysis (such as ParaGraph). It also lets users evaluate the effect of such factors as time spent in blocks of code, processor speed, network latency, and bandwidth on the overall application performance.

Describing Cloud Use Case in MetaMORP(h)OSY

The increasing complexity of services required by users in Cloud Environments usually needs the definition of composite, value added services (VAS). Usage patterns and Use Cases definitions help in defining VAS, but a way to assure that new services reach the required goals with proper qualitative and quantitative properties has to be provided in order to validate design and implementation of composite services. In this paper the MetaMORP(h)OSY methodology and framework are introduced. The methodology uses Model Driven Engineering and Model Transformation techniques to analyze composite services. Due to the complexity of the systems to analyze, MetaMORP(h)OSY exploits Multi Agent System (MAS) in system definition. The methodology is used in order to define a model for a Use Case of the mosaic project.

Intrusion Detection in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing represents both a technology for using computing infrastructures in a more efficient way, and a business model for selling computing resources and services. On the other hand, such complex and distributed architectures become an attractive target for intruders. Cyber-attacks represent a serious danger, which can compromise the quality of service delivered to the customers. In this paper, we investigate the key research topics for supporting distributed intrusion detection in Cloud environments. Moreover, we present a distributed architecture for providing intrusion detection in Cloud Computing, which enables Cloud providers to offer security solutions as a service. It is a hierarchical and multi-layer architecture designed to collect information in the Cloud environment, using multiple distributed security components, which can be used to perform complex event correlation analysis.

A SLA-based interface for security management in cloud and GRID integrations

Cloud Computing is a new computing paradigm. Among the incredible number of challenges in this field two of them are considered of great relevance: SLA management and Security management. The level of trust in such context is very hard to define and is strictly related to the problem of management of SLA in cloud applications and providers. In this paper we will try to show how it is possible, using a cloud-oriented API derived from the mOSAIC project, to build up an SLA-oriented cloud application which enables the management of security features related to user authentication and authorization to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud Provider. As Cloud Provider we will adopt the perf-Cloud solution, which uses GRID-based solutions for security management and service delivery. So the proposed solution can be used in order to build up easily a SLA-based interface for any GRID system.

Performance prediction through simulation of a hybrid MPI/OpenMP application

This paper deals with the performance prediction of hybrid MPI/OpenMP code. The use of HeSSE (Heterogeneous System Simulation Environment), along with an XML-based prototype language, MetaPL, makes it possible to predict hybrid application performance in many different working conditions, e.g., without the fully developed code or in an unavailable system. After a review of hybrid programming techniques and a brief overview of the HeSSE simulation environment, the problems related to the simulation of hybrid code and to its description through trace files are dealt with. The whole application modeling and analysis cycle is presented and validated, predicting the performance of a parallel N-body code on a SMP cluster and comparing it to the timings measured on the real system.