A technology to expose a cluster as a service in a cloud

Clouds refer to computational resources (in particular, clusters) that are accessible as scalable, on demand, pay-as- you-go services provided in the Internet. However, clouds are in their infancy and lack a high level abstraction. Specifically, there is no effective discovery and selection service for clusters and offer little to no ease of use for clients. Here we show a technology that exposes clusters as Web services in the form of a Cluster as a Service for publishing via WSDL, discovering, selecting and using clusters.

SLA Brokering and Bandwidth Reservation Negotiation Schemes for QoS-aware Internet

We present a novel Service Level Agreement (SLA)-driven service provisioning architecture, which enables dynamic and flexible bandwidth reservation schemes on a per-user or per-application basis. Various session level SLA negotiation schemes involving bandwidth allocation, service start time and service duration parameters are introduced and analyzed. The results show that these negotiation schemes can be utilized for the benefit of both end users and network providers in achieving the highest individual SLA optimization in terms of key Quality of Service (QoS) metrics and price. The inherent characteristics of software agents such as autonomy, adaptability and social abilities offer many advantages in this dynamic, complex, and distributed network environment especially when performing Service Level Agreements (SLA) definition negotiations and brokering tasks. This article also presents a service broker prototype based on Fujitsu's Phoenix Open Agent Mediator (OAM) agent technology, which was used to demonstrate a range of SLA brokering scenarios.