Terrain model of the Håkon Mosby Mud Volcano (10 m grid size)

The Håkon Mosby Mud Volcano is a natural laboratory to study geological, geochemical, and ecological processes related to deep-water mud volcanism. High resolution bathymetry of the Håkon Mosby Mud Volcano was recorded during RV Polarstern expedition ARK-XIX/3 utilizing the multibeam system Hydrosweep DS-2. Dense spacing of the survey lines and slow ship speed (5 knots) provided necessary point density to generate a regular 10 m grid. Generalization was applied to preserve and represent morphological structures appropriately. Contour lines were derived showing detailed topography at the centre of the Håkon Mosby Mud Volcano and generalized contours in the vicinity. We provide a brief introduction to the Håkon Mosby Mud Volcano area and describe in detail data recording and processing methods, as well as the morphology of the area. Accuracy assessment was made to evaluate the reliability of a 10 m resolution terrain model. Multibeam sidescan data were recorded along with depth measurements and show reflectivity variations from light grey values at the centre of the Håkon Mosby Mud Volcano to dark grey values (less reflective) at the surrounding moat.

Using Clouds to Scale Grid Resources: An Economic Model

Infrastructure as a Service clouds are a flexible and fast way to obtain (virtual) resources as demand varies. Grids, on the other hand, are middleware platforms able to combine resources from different administrative domains for task execution. Clouds can be used by grids as providers of devices such as virtual machines, so they only use the resources they need. But this requires grids to be able to decide when to allocate and release those resources. Here we introduce and analyze by simulations an economic mechanism (a) to set resource prices and (b) resolve when to scale resources depending on the users’ demand. This system has a strong emphasis on fairness, so no user hinders the execution of other users’ tasks by getting too many resources. Our simulator is based on the well-known GridSim software for grid simulation, which we expand to simulate infrastructure clouds. The results show how the proposed system can successfully adapt the amount of allocated resources to the demand, while at the same time ensuring that resources are fairly shared among users.