Sameh A. Fakhouri

Oceano-SLA based management of a computing utility

Oceano is a prototype of a highly available, scaleable, and manageable infrastructure for an e-business computing utility. It enables multiple customers to be hosted on a collection of sequentially shared resources. The hosting environment is divided into secure domains, each supporting one customer. These domains are dynamic: the resources assigned to them may be augmented when the load increases and reduced when load dips. This dynamic resource allocation enables flexible service level agreements (SLAs) with customers in an environment where peak loads are an order of magnitude greater than the normal steady state.

Processor group membership protocols: specification, design and implementation

The specification, design and implementation of a set of protocols to solve the processor group membership problem in distributed systems are presented. These group membership protocols were developed as part of a toolkit for building distributed/parallel applications on a cluster of workstations. The group membership service forms the lowest layer in the toolkit, and is the glue which unifies all other layers. The membership service supports three distinct protocols: weak, strong, and hybrid. These protocols differ significantly in the level of consistency and the number of messages exchanged in reaching agreement. The modular implementation of these protocols and the optimization techniques used to enhance their performance are described.<<ETX>>

Using a utility computing framework to develop utility systems

In this paper we describe a utility computing framework, consisting of a component model, a methodology, and a set of tools and common services for building utility computing systems. This framework facilitates the creation of new utility computing systems by providing a set of common functions, as well as a set of standard interfaces for those components that are specialized. It also provides a methodology and tools to assemble and re-use resource provisioning and management functions used to support new services with possibly different requirements. We demonstrate the benefits of the framework by describing two sample systems: a life-science utility computing service designed and implemented using the framework, and an on-line gaming utility computing service designed in compliance with the framework.

Dynamic resource management in an eUtility

Oceano is management software for a eUtility infrastructure capable of providing cost-effective, autonomic resource allocation for multiple customer or application domains, in response to existent performance and availability conditions. The control layer of Oceano provides mechanisms to manage resources. This layer consists of a resource director and a set of resource managers. The resource director formulates resource configurations and coordinates their execution through resource managers. These resource managers maintain restore state and carry out detailed configuration tasks. This paper describes the Oceano resource management model and its server and application deployment resource managers. A prototype of Oceano has been developed and deployed on an 80 server platform, and has been tested with multiple domains and applications.

Active middleware services in a decision support system for managing highly available distributed resources

We describe a decision support system called Mounties that is designed for managing applications and resources using rule-based constraints in scalable mission-critical clustering environments. Mounties consists of four active service components: (1) a repository of resource proxy objects for modeling and manipulating the cluster configuration; (2) an event notification mechanism for monitoring and controlling interdependent and distributed resources; (3) a rule evaluation and decision processing mechanism; and (4) a global optimization service for providing decision making capabilities. The focus of this paper is on the design of the first three services that together connect and coordinate the distributed resources with the decision making component. We discuss the overall architecture and design of these services. We describe in some detail the asynchronous, concurrent, and pipelined nature of their interactions and the fault tolerance designed in the system. We also describe a general programming paradigm that we have followed in designing these services.