Salvatore Venticinque

Intelligent Distributed Computing

Billions of computing elements continuously collect data and elaborate information nowadays. They range from personal computers to high-performance machines, from virtual machines to physical clusters and from smartphones to embedded systems. Most of them are connected, and this number increases continuously. Such an unlimited amount of spread resources offers challenging opportunities for building new kinds of computing overlay, for inferring collective knowledge and for developing emergent applications. In this context, the emergent field of Intelligent Distributed Computing focuses on the development of a new generation of intelligent distributed systems. It faces the challenges of adapting and combining research in the fields of Intelligent Computing and Distributed Computing. Intelligent Computing develops methods and technology ranging from classical artificial intelligence, computational intelligence and multi-agent systems to game theory. The field of Distributed Computing develops methods and technology to build systems that are composed of interacting and collaborating components. The International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC) has a special interest in (but will not be limited to) novel architectures, systems and methods that facilitate distributed/ parallel/multi-agent biocomputing for solving complex computational and real-life problems. The eighth edition of this conference was held in 2014 in Madrid under the auspicious of Autonomous University of Madrid (www.uam.es). A careful selection from some of the best paper presented at IDC2014 welcomes focused on ‘Intelligent Distributed Computing’ that were selected and invited to be extended for its potential publication at Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience journal. The special issue received submissions of original papers on all aspects of IDC ranging from concepts and theoretical developments to advanced technologies and innovative applications; some of the most relevant areas cover by this special issue includes the following: Intelligent Distributed High-performance Architectures; Organization and Management of Intelligent Distributed Systems; Intelligent Distributed Knowledge Representation and Processing; Networked and Distributed Intelligence and Intelligent Distributed Applications and Case Studies. From the received papers, those with the highest quality were selected and finally accepted. In the next section, a short description of final accepted papers is briefly outlined.

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.

Experiences in building a mOSAIC of clouds

The diversity of Cloud computing services is challenging the application developers as various and non-standard interfaces are provided for these services. Few middleware solutions were developed until now to support the design, deployment and execution of service-independent applications as well as the management of resources from multiple Clouds. This paper focuses on one of these advanced middleware solutions, called mOSAIC. Written after the completion of its development, this paper presents an integrated overview of the mOSAIC approach and the use of its various software prototypes in a Cloud application development process. We are starting from the design concepts and arrive to various applications, as well as to the position versus similar initiatives.

An SLA-based Broker for Cloud Infrastructures

The breakthrough of Cloud comes from its service oriented perspective where everything, including the infrastructure, is provided “as a service”. This model is really attractive and convenient for both providers and consumers, as a consequence the Cloud paradigm is quickly growing and widely spreading, also in non commercial contexts. In such a scenario, we propose to incorporate some elements of volunteer computing into the Cloud paradigm through the Cloud@Home solution, involving into the mix nodes and devices provided by potentially any owners or administrators, disclosing high computational resources to contributors and also allowing to maximize their utilization. This paper presents and discusses the first step towards Cloud@Home: providing quality of service and service level agreement facilities on top of unreliable, intermittent Cloud providers. Some of the main issues and challenges of Cloud@Home, such as the monitoring, management and brokering of resources according to service level requirements are addressed through the design of a framework core architecture. All the tasks committed to the architecture’s modules and components, as well as the most relevant component interactions, are identified and discussed from both the structural and the behavioural viewpoints. Some encouraging experiments on an early implementation prototype deployed in a real testing environment are also documented in the paper.

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.

Cloud Application Monitoring: The mOSAIC Approach

Cloud computing delegates the management of any kind of resources, such as the computing environment or storage systems for example, to the network. The wide-spread permeation of the cloud paradigm implies the need of new programming models that are able to utilize such new features. Once the problem of enabling developers to manage cloud resources in a clear and flexible way is solved, a new problem emerges: the monitoring of the quality of the acquired resources and of the services offered to final users. As the first step, the mOSAIC API and framework aim at offering a solution for the development of interoperable, portable and cloud-provider independent cloud applications. As the second step, this paper introduces the mOSAIC monitoring components that facilitate the building of custom monitoring systems for cloud applications using the mOSAIC API.

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.

An Automated Tool for Smart Water Network Partitioning

Water Network Partitioning (WNP) represents the application of the “divide and conquer” paradigm to a Smart WAter Network (SWAN) that allows the improved application of techniques for water balance and pressure control. Indeed, these techniques can be applied with greater effectiveness by defining smaller permanent network parts, called District Meter Areas (DMAs), created by the insertion of gate valves and flow meters. The traditional criteria for the design of network DMAs are based on empirical suggestions (number of properties, length of pipes, etc.) and on approaches such as ‘trial and error’, even if used together with hydraulic simulation software. Nevertheless, these indications and procedures are very difficult to apply to large water supply systems because the insertion of gate valves modifies the original network layout and may considerably worsen the hydraulic performance of the water network. The proposed tool, based on some graph partitioning techniques, commonly applied in distributed computing, and on an original optimisation technique, allows the automatic design of a WNP comparing different possible layouts that are compliant with hydraulic performance. In this paper, the methodology was tested on a real case study using some performance indices to compare different WNPs. The proposed tool was developed in Phyton and integrates graph partitioning, hydraulic simulation techniques and a heuristic optimisation criterion. It allows the definition of DMAs with resulting performance indices that are very similar to the original network layout.

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.

Multi-objective Decision Support for Brokering of Cloud SLA

The selection of Cloud providers, whose offers best fit the requirements of a particular application, is a complex issue due to the heterogeneity of the Cloud services, resources, technology and service levels offered by the several providers. In this paper, we illustrate a model for the resolution of a problem of choice between alternatives, when numerous and often contradictory points of view must be taken simultaneously in consideration. We describe its implementation inside Cloud Agency to broker the proposals that best fit users needs.