Building autonomic clusters: a response to IBM's autonomic computing challenge

IBM has announced Autonomic Computing as one of its Grand Challenges. A list of characteristics was generated to describe an autonomic computing system. Many researchers and research group have responded positively to the challenge by initiating research around one or two of the characteristics identified by IBM as the requirements for Autonomic Computing. We have addressed the IBMs request to contribute to the challenge by building an autonomic operating system that possesses nearly all IBM characteristics. This paper contains our response to the IBMs Autonomic Computing Challenge.

Secure accounting and payment infrastructure for grid computing

In this paper, we propose an architecture of accounting and payment services for service oriented grid computing systems. The proposed accounting and payment services provide the mechanisms for service providers to be paid for authorized use of their resources. It supports the recording of usage data, secure storage of that data, analysis of that data for purposes of billing and so forth. It allows a variety of payment methods, it is scalable, secure, convenient, and reduce the overall cost of payment processing while taking into account, requirements of Grid computing systems.

Cluster operating system support for parallel autonomic computing

The aim of this paper is to show a general design of autonomic elements and initial implementation of a cluster operating system that moves parallel processing on clusters to the computing mainstream using the autonomic computing vision. The significance of this solution is as follows. Autonomic Computing was identified by IBM as one of computing's Grand Challenges. The human body was used to illustrate an Autonomic Computing system that possesses self-knowledge, self-configuration, self optimization, self-healing, and self-protection, knowledge of its environment and user friendliness properties. One of the areas that could benefit from the comprehensive approach created by the autonomic computing vision is parallel processing on non-dedicated clusters. Many researchers and research groups have responded positively to the challenge by initiating research around one or two of the characteristics identified by IBM as the requirements for autonomic computing. We demonstrate here that it is possible to satisfy all Autonomic Computing characteristics.

Beyond pretence: new sensibilities for computing and communication technologies in teacher education

Making particular reference to schools’ traditional relationships with CCTS (and the kinds of ‘pretend’ and ‘artificial’ learning/assessment tasks that this relationship has historically produced), this paper details a research and teaching agenda focused on exploring the potential of having students work on tasks with value to local and/or school communities. The paper maps the informing theories and current practices of schools
participating in the ‘knowledge producing schools’ (KPS) agenda. Particular attention is given to the ways in which KPS schools are better positioned to respond to the needs of diverse student/community populations, particularly those students traditionally perceived as ‘at risk’.

Supporting disconnected operations in mobile computing

Mobile computing has enabled users to seamlessly access databases even when they are on the move. However, in the absence of readily available high-quality communication, users are often forced to operate disconnected from the network. As a result, software applications have to be redesigned to take advantage of this environment while accommodating the new challenges posed by mobility. In particular, there is a need for replication and synchronization services in order to guarantee availability of data and functionality, (including updates) in disconnected mode. To this end we propose a scalable and highly available data replication and management service. The proposed replication technique is compared with a baseline replication technique and shown to exhibit high availability, fault tolerance and minimal access times of the data and services, which are very important in an environment with low-quality communication links.

Parallel I/O scheduling in the presence of data duplication on multiprogrammed cluster computing systems

The widespread adoption of cluster computing as a high performance computing platform has seen the growth of data intensive scientific, engineering and commercial applications such as digital libraries, climate modeling, computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics and image repositories. However, I/O subsystem performance has not been keeping pace with processor and memory performance, and is fast becoming the dominant factor in overall system performance.  Thus, parallel I/O has become a necessity in the face of performance improvements in other areas of computing systems. This paper addresses the problem of parallel I/O scheduling on cluster computing systems in the presence of data replication.  We propose two new I/O scheduling algorithms and evaluate the relative performance of the proposed policies against two existing approaches.  Simulation results show that the proposed policies perform substantially better than the baseline policies.

Multi-cluster computing interconnection network performance modeling and analysis

The overall performance of a distributed system is often depends on the effectiveness of its interconnection network. Thus, the study of the communication networks for distributed systems is very important, which is the focus of this paper. In particular, we address the problem of fat-tree based interconnection networks performance modeling for multi-user heterogeneous multi-cluster computing systems. To this end, we present an analytical model and validate the model through comprehensive simulation. The results of the simulation demonstrated that the proposed model exhibits a good degree of accuracy for various system organizations and under different working conditions.

Analytical communication networks model for enterprise grid computing

This paper addresses the problem of performance analysis based on the communication modeling of large-scale heterogeneous distributed systems, with an emphasis on enterprise Grid computing systems. The study of communication layers is important, as the overall performance of a distributed system often critically hinges on the effectiveness of this part. We propose an analytical model that is based on probabilistic analysis and queuing networks. The proposed model considers the processor as well as network heterogeneity of the enterprise Grid system. The model is validated through comprehensive simulations, which demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits a good degree of accuracy for various system sizes, and under different working conditions.

Pervasive computing at tableside : a wireless web-based ordering system

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a wireless web-based ordering system called iMenu in the restaurant industry. Design/methodology/approach – By using wireless devices such as personal digital assistants and WebPads, this system realizes the paradigm of pervasive computing at tableside. Detailed system requirements, design, implementation and evaluation of iMenu are presented.

Findings – The evaluation of iMenu shows it explicitly increases productivity of restaurant staff. It also has other desirable features such as integration, interoperation and scalability. Compared to traditional restaurant ordering process, by using this system customers get faster and better services, restaurant staff cooperate more efficiently with less working mistakes, and enterprise owners thus receive more business profits.

Originality/value – While many researchers have explored using wireless web-based information systems in different industries, this paper presents a system that employs wireless multi-tiered web-based architecture to build pervasive computing systems. Instead of discussing theoretical issues on pervasive computing, we focus on practical issues of developing a real system, such as choosing of web-based architecture, design of input methods in small screens, and response time in wireless web-based systems.

Optimal multicast tree routing for cluster computing in hypercube interconnection networks

Cluster computation has been used in the applications that demand performance, reliability, and availability, such as cluster server groups, large-scale scientific computations, distributed databases, distributed media-on-demand servers and search engines etc. In those applications, multicast can play the vital roles for the information dissemination among groups of servers and users. This paper proposes a set of novel efficient fault-tolerant multicast routing algorithms on hypercube interconnection of cluster computers using multicast shared tree approach. We present some new algorithms for selecting an optimal core (root) and constructing the shared tree so as to minimize the average delay for multicast messages. Simulation results indicate that our algorithms are efficient in the senses of short end-to-end average delay, load balance and less resource utilizations over hypercube cluster interconnection networks.

A new approach for efficiently achieving high availability in mobile computing

Recent advances m hardware technologies such as portable
computers and wireless communication networks have led to the emergence of mobile computing systems. Thus, availability and accessibility of the data and services become important issues of mobile computing systems. In this paper, we present a data replication and management scheme tailored for such environments In the proposed scheme data is replicated synchronously over stationary sites while for the mobile network, data is replicated asynchronously based on commonly visited sites for each user. The proposed scheme is compared with other techniques and is shown to require less communication cost for an operation as well as provide higher degree of data availability.