Opportunistic Grid Research Articles

Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America. By Douglas A. Guerra (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 264 pp. $69.95)

Douglas Guerra positions his study of nineteenth-century American board games within a broader account of the history of the book. Like the “semantic vectors” arrayed across the printed page of modern novels, the sequences of rules governing leisure-time amusements functioned as a medium for the “circulation of ideas through the arteries of culture” (197), the most important idea of which was the sovereignty of the self. Any skepticism regarding this ambitious argument is convincingly offset by Guerra’s close reading of Milton Bradley’s Checkered Game of Life, which sold more than forty thousand copies soon after its invention in 1860. Play was organized around an opportunistic grid of “wealth,” “matrimony,” “school,” “fame,” “idleness,” “poverty,” “disgrace,” and “jail,” supplemented with behavioral norms that included “truth,” “honor,” and “ambition” and which together encompassed most of the human condition. Navigating this checkerboard of personal prospects required “a frequent choice of moves involving the exercise of judgment,” as Bradley himself exclaimed upon applying for a patent (20). The game of life was accordingly designed as a trial run for life off the board, synopsized by Guerra with an epigraph from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (1855) that presents a similarly robust vision of the individual’s newly open field of play. As such, Milton Bradley and Walt Whitman each promoted “life” into the exclusive subject of those who lived it, a creed that inverted America’s traditional moral economy by re-constituting public order on the basis of private prerogative. The subsequent destruction of fixed hierarchies meant that “I” became the singular expression of my own talent and tenacity, a distinctly modern ethic which gave birth to a distinctly modern cultural hero in these same years, the self-made man. Or, as Guerra quotes Emerson’s pithy characterization of this self-centered gestalt: “You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstances” (47).

Embedded mobile crowd service systems based on opportunistic geological grid and dynamical segmentation

In order to solve these problems such as the demand of geographic information service and the short life of the embedded system, as well as network collapse, and so on, the embedded mobile crowd service systems based on opportunistic geological grid and dynamical split was proposed. Firstly, based on the characteristics of geographical spatial information resources and service time series, a mobile geographic crowd service system was established for providing the sensing data with the mobile geographic crowd service model. Then, according to the embedded equipment complex data of the geographic crowd service system, and the relationship between the geography information service object and the user, the embedded system was proposed based on the opportunity geological grid. Finally, the optimization of the geographic crowd system was realized by the dynamic segmentation of the opportunity geographic grid. The experiment results of the equipment utilization, the life cycle of the crowd network, user satisfaction, and control complexity show that the proposed scheme is more suitable for the embedded network geographic information system.

Design of a multi-agent opportunistic grid computing platform

Opportunistic grid computing is an emergent paradigm that combines idle volunteer nodes from enterprises in different geographic locations into a cost effective, converged high performance commodity computing grid. This paper presents the MAOG design; an implementation process for an infrastructure optimized for sharing computational cycles and disk space from commodity computers utilizing Multi-Agent Systems. The proposed approach brings transparent and pervasive grid user access to resources which would otherwise not be available to their disposal. An appraisal of the code mobility model to be utilized for the MAOG design in two phases (Mobile Agent and Remote Evaluation design paradigms), adopting the Contract Net Protocol is analyzed. This paper presents in detail, the main components that make up the Mobile Agent design, including the message passing model for achieving the specified service objectives.

Towards a Resource Reservation Approach for an Opportunistic Computing Environment

Advanced reservation has been used in grid environments to provide quality of service (QoS) and to guarantee resources available at the execution time. However, in grid subtypes, such as opportunistic grid computing, it is a challenge provides QoS and guarantee of availability resources. In this article, we propose a new advanced reservation approach which offers to a user the possibility to select resources in advance for a future utilization. Therefore, the main goal of this proposal is to offer a best effort feature to a user from an opportunistic configuration. In these types of environments, it is not possible to provide QoS, because, usually, there are no guarantees of resources availability and, consequently, the execution of users applications. In addition, this research work provides a way to organize executions, what it can improve the scheduling and system operations. Experimental results, carried out through a case study, shown the efficiency and relevance of our proposal.

Green flexible opportunistic computing with task consolidation and virtualization

Energy efficiency and high computing power are basic design considerations across modern-day computing solutions due to different concerns such as system performance, operational cost, and environmental issues. Desktop Grid and Volunteer Computing System (DGVCS) so called opportunistic infrastructures offer computational power at low cost focused on harvesting idle computing cycles of existing commodity computing resources. Other than allowing to customize the end user offer, virtualization is considered as one key techniques to reduce energy consumption in large-scale systems and contributes to the scalability of the system. This paper presents an energy efficient approach for opportunistic infrastructures based on task consolidation and customization of virtual machines. The experimental results with single desktops and complete computer rooms show that virtualization significantly improves the energy efficiency of opportunistic grids compared with dedicated computing systems without disturbing the end-user.

Towards an opportunistic grid scheduling infrastructure based on tuple spaces

Abstract One main issue associated with the efficient and effective use of heterogeneous resources in a grid system is the scheduling. Scheduling in a grid system involves a number of challenging issues mainly due to the dynamic nature of the grid. Schedulers on traditional grid infrastructures rely on an information service that provides information about resources capacities and availability. However, in an asynchronous distributed system like a grid providing up-to-date information about resources is difficult. Current scheduling algorithms make scheduling decisions without fully accurate information about resources which can lead to inefficient schedules. This paper proposes a new scheduling infrastructure for grids where resources select tasks they execute, instead of the traditional approach where schedulers finding resources for the tasks. The new proposed approach allows, at any time, to make scheduling decisions with up-to-date/accurate information. Moreover, our infrastructure provides mechanisms to provide a fault tolerant scheduling. The proposed infrastructure is mainly based on the tuple space coordination model. In our evaluation study, a number of experiments with various simulation setting demonstrated the practicability of proposed infrastructure.

Urgent Computing of Storm Surge for North Carolina's Coast

Forecasting and prediction of natural events, such as tropical and extra-tropical cyclones, inland flooding, and severe winter weather, provide critical guidance to emergency managers and decision-makers from the local to the national level, with the goal of minimizing both human and economic losses. This guidance is used to facilitate evacuation route planning, post-disaster response and resource deployment, and critical infrastructure protection and securing, and it must be available within a time window in which decision makers can take appropriate action. This latter element is that which induces the need for urgency in this area. In this paper, we outline the North Carolina Forecasting System (NCFS) for storm surge and waves for coastal North Carolina, which is threatened by tropical cyclones about once every three years. We initially used advanced cyberinfrastructure techniques (e.g., opportunistic grid computing) in an effort to provide timely guidance for storm surge and wave impacts. However, our experience has been that a distributed computing approach is not robust enough to consistently produce the real-time results that end users expect. As a result, our technical approach has shifted so that the reliable and timely delivery of forecast products has been guaranteed by provisioning dedicated computational resources as opposed to relying on opportunistic availability of external resources. Our experiences with this forecasting effort is discussed in this paper, with a focus on Hurricane Irene (2011) that impacted a substantial portion of the US east coast from North Carolina, up along the eastern seaboard, and into New England.

Middleware strategies for clouds and grids in e‐Science

Middleware strategies for clouds and grids in e‐Science

An approach to enhance the efficiency of opportunistic grids

SUMMARYOpportunistic grid computing middleware has as a main concern the need to preserve the performance of the local applications running on machines that donate resources to the grid. This concern, together with the fact that it happens in an extremely dynamic environment, causes the adoption of a treatment based on thetextitbest‐effort principle for grid applications. This means that efficient application management schemes are usually not employed, which results in less than optimal performance as grid applications often need to be restarted due to (often temporary) resource claims by local user applications. This paper presents a method to improve the performance of grid applications, taking into account resource usage profiles for local applications, trying to identify when such resource claims are temporary and avoiding costly actions such as the migration of grid tasks. The approach is proposed as an extension to the InteGrade middleware and its evaluation shows promising results for the efficient management of grid applications. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Adaptive fault tolerance mechanisms for opportunistic environments: a mobile agent approach

SUMMARYThe mobile agent paradigm has emerged as a promising alternative to overcome the construction challenges of opportunistic grid environments. This model can be used to implement mechanisms that enable application execution progress even in the presence of failures such as the mechanisms provided by the MAG middleware (Mobile Agents for Grids). MAG includes retrying, replication, and checkpointing as fault tolerance techniques; they operate independently from each other and they are not capable of detecting changes on resource availability. In this paper, we describe a MAG extension that is capable of migrating agents when nodes fail, which optimizes application progress by keeping only the most advanced checkpoint, and also migrates slow replicas. The proposed approach was evaluated via simulations and experiments, which showed significant improvements. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using a Simple Prioritisation Mechanism to Effectively Interoperate Service and Opportunistic Grids in the EELA-2 e-Infrastructure

Grids currently in production can be broadly classified as either service Grids, composed of dedicated resources, or opportunistic Grids that harvest the computing power of non-dedicated resources when they are idle. While a service Grid provides high and well defined levels of quality of service, an opportunistic Grid provides only a best-effort service. Nevertheless, since opportunistic Grids do not require resources to be fully dedicated to the Grid, they have the potential to assemble a much larger number of resources. Moreover, these Grids cater very well to the execution of the so-called embarrassingly parallel applications, a type of application that is frequently found in practice, and that comprises the largest portion of the typical workload processed in production Grid systems. The EELA-2 e-infrastructure is comprised of a service Grid and an opportunistic Grid that federates computing resources from scientific institutions in both Europe and Latin America. Due to the complementary characteristics of these two types of Grids, a lot of attention has recently been placed in how to interoperate them. In this paper we focus on the less studied problem of assessing the feasibility of such interoperation. We analyse different prioritisation policies that define when the resources of one Grid can be used to run jobs originating from the other. Our results show that in the absence of a suitable prioritisation policy, the benefits that the users of one Grid may have, frequently come with an important negative impact on the users of the other Grid. We also show that a simple reciprocation mechanism is capable of arbitrating the interoperation in such a way that, whenever possible, users profit from the interoperation and, in no case, this benefit leads to a noticeable reduction on the quality of service that the users would experience were the Grids not to interoperate. We conclude discussing how we have implemented, in the context of the EELA-2 project, this prioritisation mechanism, allowing the effective interoperation of a service Grid based on the gLite middleware with an opportunistic Grid that uses the OurGrid middleware.

Reliable management of checkpointing and application data in opportunistic grids

Abstract Opportunistic computational grids use idle processor cycles from shared machines to enable the execution of long-running parallel applications. Besides computational power, these applications may also consume and generate large amounts of data, requiring an efficient data storage and management infrastructure. In this article, we present an integrated middleware infrastructure that enables the use of not only idle processor cycles, but also unused disk space of shared machines. Our middleware enables the reliable distributed storage of application data in the shared machines in a redundant and fault-tolerant way. A checkpointing-based mechanism monitors the execution of parallel applications, saves periodical checkpoints in the shared machines, and in case of node failures, supports the application migration across heterogeneous grid nodes. We evaluate the feasibility of our middleware using experiments and simulations. Our evaluation shows that the proposed middleware promotes important improvements in grid data management reliability while imposing a low performance overhead.

Application execution management on the InteGrade opportunistic grid middleware

The InteGrade project is a multi-university effort to build a novel grid computing middleware based on the opportunistic use of resources belonging to user workstations. The InteGrade middleware currently enables the execution of sequential, bag-of-tasks, and parallel applications that follow the BSP or the MPI programming models. This article presents the lessons learned over the last five years of the InteGrade development and describes the solutions achieved concerning the support for robust application execution. The contributions cover the related fields of application scheduling, execution management, and fault tolerance. We present our solutions, describing their implementation principles and evaluation through the analysis of several experimental results.

Resource use pattern analysis for predicting resource availability in opportunistic grids

AbstractThis work presents a method for predicting resource availability in opportunistic grids by means of use pattern analysis (UPA), a technique based on non‐supervised learning methods. This prediction method is based on the assumption of the existence of several classes of computational resource use patterns, which can be used to predict the resource availability. Trace‐driven simulations validate this basic assumptions, which also provide the parameter settings for the accurate learning of resource use patterns. Experiments made with an implementation of the UPA method show the feasibility of its use in the scheduling of grid tasks with very little overhead. The experiments also demonstrate the method's superiority over other predictive and non‐predictive methods. An adaptative prediction method is suggested to deal with the lack of training data at initialization. Further adaptative behaviour is motivated by experiments which show that, in some special environments, reliable resource use patterns may not always be detected. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

MPI support on opportunistic grids based on the InteGrade middleware

AbstractThe message passing interface (MPI) is a popular programming model for parallel applications. Support for MPI in grid middleware is important for the widespread use of grids for parallel programming. This enables existing parallel applications to be executed on large‐scale grids, as opposed to being restricted to local clusters. In the specific case of opportunistic grids, the use of idle computing power from non‐dedicated computers further adds to the range of resources that can be used. In this paper we present MPICH‐IG, an implementation of the MPI‐2 standard on top of the InteGrade grid middleware. Existing MPI applications can run unmodified, while taking advantage of the InteGrade scheduler to harvest the available computing power from the grid. In addition, fault‐tolerance of MPI applications is achieved through a checkpointing mechanism, which allows applications to be resumed after failures of particular grid nodes. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Strategies for Checkpoint Storage on Opportunistic Grids

This article evaluates several strategies for storing checkpoint data in an opportunistic grid environment, including replication, parity information, and erasure coding. We present a prototype implementation of a distributed checkpoint repository over InteGrade, a multiuniversity grid middleware project to leverage the computing power of idle shared workstations. Using this prototype, we performed several experiments to determine the trade-offs in these strategies between computational overhead, storage overhead, and degree of fault tolerance