Wolfgang Ziegler

z-rands

Since the early days of computing centres serving their users with mainframe compute cycles there was always a gap between the computing power offered by a centre and the computing power requested by the users of the centre, both in terms of capacity and performance. Replacing old hardware by new, more powerful one could only close the gap for a li...

Since the early days of mainframe based computing centres serving their users with compute cycles there was always a gap between the computing power offered by a centre and the computing power requested by the users of the centre, both in terms of capacity and performance. Replacing old hardware by new, more powerful one could only close the gap fo...

If you plan a software project with the objective to deliver more than an isolated software artifact you definitely should aim at implementing standards. Standards help creating interoperable solutions that can be used in different environments and that can communicate and exchange data with other applications implementing the same standards—even i...

While projects, developments and applications addressing and using artificial intelligence (AI) are rather multifaceted and their number is constantly increasing, the standardisation activities in the field of artificial intelligence are limited, their number is significantly lower and does not increase at the same pace. The European funded project...

Until today, Cloud providers only offer a limited set of non-negotiable service levels to their customers. Most often these service levels are expressed as guarantees for availability together with the offer to have access to a virtualised environment with a certain performance the customer may select from a number of predefined configurations. Thi...

Advances in translational and personalized medicine require the integration of multiple patient related resources across different organizational bodies. Thus, secure cloud environments for huge data processing, storage and data integration are needed. Moreover, the integration of clinical patient data is indispensable for translational research. A...

Until today, Cloud providers only offer a limited set of non-negotiable service levels to their customers. Most often these service levels are expressed as guarantees for availability together with the offer to have access to a virtualised environment with a certain performance the customer may select from a number of predefined configurations. Thi...

This chapter begins with the basis of standards, including when and where they are appropriate and why they are needed. After presenting a summary of the range and variety of standards and their issuing organizations to provide the reader with the necessary background, the fundamental features unique to cloud-computing standards are covered. Cloud...

Cloud Computing is increasingly used as the platform for IT infrastructure provisioning, application/systems development and end user support of a wide range of core services and applications for businesses and organisations. Cloud Computing is drastically changing the way IT is delivered and used. However, many challenges remain to be tackled. Con...

Frameworks for service level agreements (SLAs) have been developed to allow services to discover and negotiate SLAs dynamically, without direct human intervention. We give a description of the expe- riences of two projects which are building on existing work in SLAs: the main advantages being to obtain better overall services (including pricing) fo...

Patient data describing operations and results of treatment in clinics is stored in clinical information systems as part of the clinical process. Since these documents are unstructured free-texts stored as scanned documents or as documents prepared with a word processing system there was no automated way to find patterns in these documents that ind...

The rapid evolution of the cloud market is leading to the emergence of new services, new ways for service provisioning and new interaction and collaboration models both amongst cloud providers and service ecosystems exploiting cloud resources. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) govern the aforementioned relationships by defining the terms of engagemen...

Until recently the use of applications requiring a software license for execution was quite limited in distributed environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application runtime, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable...

In current Cloud environments customers aiming to select a provider that offers energy efficient infrastructure usually depend on believing in the providers publicity. In general they have little chances to alter the standard contract the big providers are offering. Smaller providers might offer the possibility to include energy efficiency as a cla...

Infrastructure federation is becoming an increasingly important issue for modern Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs): Dynamic elasticity of quasi-static Grid environments, incorporation of special-purpose resources into commoditized Cloud infrastructures, cross-community collaboration for increasingly diverging areas of modern e-Science, a...

We present the Intelligent Application Oriented System (IANOS) resource broker models and internals. The aim of IANOS is to provide an understanding of and asolution to the problem of how to find the best resource for agiven submitted application in order to optimally use aset of HPC resources (an HPCN Grid). Best in the sense “at agiven moment and...

We propose a cloud contextualization mechanism which operates in two stages, contextualization of VM images prior to service deployment (PaaS level) and self-contextualization of VM instances created from the image (IaaS level). The contextualization tools are implemented as part of the OPTIMIS Toolkit, a set of software components for simplified m...

Providing consistent security services in on-demand provisioned Cloud infrastructure services is of primary importance due to multi-tenant and potentially multi-provider nature of Clouds Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment. Cloud security infrastructure should address two aspects of the IaaS operation and dynamic security services provis...

We demonstrate the OPTIMIS toolkit for scalable and dependable service platforms and architectures that enable flexible and dynamic provisioning of Cloud services. The innovations demonstrated are aimed at optimizing Cloud services and infrastructures based on aspects such as trust, risk, eco-efficiency, cost, performance and legal constraints. Ada...

A recent survey of the 451group on Cloud usage highlights software licensing as one of the top five obstacles for Cloud computing, quite similar to what has been observed in the Grid already a couple of years. The reasons are the same: the current praxis of software licensing, both in terms of business models and licensing technology. As a conseque...

Current praxis of software licensing has been identified as major obstacle for Grid computing a couple of years ago already. Recent surveys of Clouds indicate that the same holds true for Cloud computing. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited unti...

Current Cloud environments are offered to their customers in a best effort approach. Instead of guarantees a statistical uptime expectation is communicated to the user with minimal compensations in case of unexpected downtime. In contrast, a service provider intending e.g. to extend his own resources dynamically with Cloud resources in case of peak...

In the last three years activities in Grid computing have changed; in particular in Europe the focus moved from pure research-oriented work on concepts, architectures, interfaces, and protocols towards activities driven by the usage of Grid technologies in day-to-day operation of e-infrastructure and in applicationdriven use cases. This change is a...

The Web Services Agreement specification defines a normative language to formulate Service Level Agreements and a basic protocol to expose service-level descriptions, validate service-level requests, and come to an agreement. This protocol, often called ''take-it-or-leave-it'', allows a service provider and a service consumer to decide whether to a...

UNICORE is a European Grid Technology with more than 10 years of history. Originating from the Supercomputing domain, the latest version UNICORE 6 has turned into a general-purpose Grid technology that follows established standards and offers a rich set of features to its users. The paper starts with an architectural insight into UNICORE 6, highlig...

Current praxis of software licensing has been identified as major obstacle for Grid computing a couple of years ago already. Recent surveys of Clouds indicate that the same holds true for Cloud computing. As a consequence, using commercial applications that require access to a license server for authorisation at run-time has been quite limited unti...

The Phosphorus project focuses on delivering advanced network services to Grid users and applications interconnected by heterogeneous infrastructures. The project is addressing some of the key technical challenges to enable on-demand end-to-end network services across multiple domains. The Phosphorus network concept makes applications aware of thei...

The WS-Agreement specification of the Open Grid Forum defines a language and a protocol for advertising the capabilities of service providers and creating agreements based on templates, and for monitoring agreement compliance at runtime. While the specification, which currently is in the process of transition from a proposed recommendation of the O...

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) represents an agreement between a service user and a provider in the context of a particular service provision. SLAs contain Quality of Service properties that must be maintained by a provider, and as agreed between a provider and a user/client. These are generally defined as a set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs)....

One of the major challenges of in-silico virtual screening pipelines is dealing with increasing complexity of large scale data management along with efficiently fulfilling the high throughput computing demands. Despite the new workflow tools and technologies available in the area of computational chemistry, efforts in effective data management and...

Until recently the use of applications requiring a software license for execution was quite limited in distributed environments. Due to the mandatory centralised control of license usage at application runtime, e.g. heartbeat control by the license server running at the home site of a user, traditional software licensing practices are not suitable...

Grid and Cloud Computing have become very popular over the years. Cloud computing received a real boost through several commercial offers by big companies initially selling their spare CPU cycles to the general public and now making business with dedicated resources. This scheme gets adopted

D-Grid is a German national grid initiative founded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It provides a frame for the collaboration of researchers across Germany and offers access to distributed services and resources. The SLA4D-Grid project will enhance D-Grid by creating a service level agreement (SLA) layer which is transpare...

The UNICORE Grid technology provides a seamless, secure, and intuitive access to distributed Grid resources. UNICORE is a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production worldwide. Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and International projects. In o...

As Grids and service-oriented architectures have evolved to a common infrastructure for providing and consuming services in research and commercial environments, mechanisms are needed to agree on the objectives and the quality of such service provision. There is a clear trend to use electronic contracts between service consumers and one or more ser...

Introduction Background and Related Work SLA Lifecylce An SLA-Based Resource Management–Allocation Architecture Interaction with Grid Resource Management and Scheduling Advance Reservation of Resources Market Models for Resource Allocation Support Case Study Conclusions References

In Germany’s D-Grid project numerous Grid communities are working together to provide a common overarching Grid infrastructure. The major aims of D-Grid are the integration of existing Grid deployments and their interoperability. The challenge lies in the heterogeneity of the current implementations: three Grid middleware stacks and different Virtu...

A high throughput framework for virtual screening (VS) applications has been designed which enables researchers in in-silico drug discovery to deploy large scale time-consuming virtual screening experiments on High Performance/Grid computing environments. Issues related to enabling virtual screening on grids have been addressed extensively in the p...

The first step in finding a "drug" is screening chemical compound databases against a protein target. In silico approaches like virtual screening by molecular docking are well established in modern drug discovery. As molecular databases of compounds and target structures are becoming larger and more and more computational screening approaches are a...

Services in commercial or scientific environments often need to be delivered at a guaranteed service level. This becomes even more important, if composition of services is required, as results will become available for the requester within a predictable timeframe only if the orchestration process may create Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the i...

Service Level Agreements (SLA) may be used to establish agreements on the quality of a service between a service provider and a service consumer. This report gives an overview on current work done on negotiation and re-negotiation of SLAs within the CoreGRID Institute on Resource Management and Scheduling and in the Grid Resource Allocation Agreeme...

The UNICORE grid technology provides a seamless, secure and intuitive access to distributed grid resources. UNICORE is a full-grown and well-tested grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production worldwide. Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and International projects. In or...

The definition of a generic Grid scheduling architecture is the concern of both the Open Grid Forum’s Grid Scheduling Architecture Research Group and a CoreGRID research group of the same name. Such an architecture should provide a blueprint for Grid system and middleware designers and assist them in linking their scheduling requirements to diverse...

In Grid, e-Science and e-Business environments, Service Level Agreements are often used to establish frameworks for the delivery of services between service providers and the organisations hosting the researchers. While this high level SLAs define the overall quality of the services, it is desirable for the end-user to have dedicated service qualit...

Malaria remains a global health concern, which kills over a million people each year. In this paper we present work extending the approach of the WISDOM initiative by focusing on the problems noticed during the first WISDOM challenge against malaria and test the newly established, high bandwidth optical Grid environment VIOLA for advanced bioinform...

In Germany's D-Grid project numerous grid communities are working together to develop a common overarching grid. One major aim of D-Grid is thus to integrate the existing grid deployments and make them interoperable. The major challenge in this endeavor lies in the heterogeneity of the current implementations: three grid middleware and different VO...

A typical task of a grid level scheduling service is the orche stration and coordination of resources in the grid. Especially the co-allocation of resources makes high demands on this service. Co-allocation requires the grid level scheduler to coordinate resource management systems located in different domains. Provided that the site autonomy has t...

A variety of grid middlewares and workflow languages causes the existence of many workflow management systems (WfMS). Formalisms used to represent workflows vary from simple Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) to more complex (non deterministic) Petri Nets. Therefore aworkflowdescription is strictly bound to a particular WfMS and to the computational res...

Software protection and licensing are important topics for both the independent software vendors and software users. In Grid environments, the use of license protected applications is almost impossible and becomes a challenging task. The reasons are twofold: (i) there are no business models of the independent software vendors for the Grid and (ii)...

Service Level Agreements are an integral part on the path towards the commercial uptake of Grids in industry. A paying user of the Grid needs assurances that jobs are processed according to negotiated procedures and requires financial compensation in case these are violated. TheWS-Agreement specification serves this purpose and went into recommenda...

We present the architecture and design of the IANOS scheduling framework. The goal of the new Grid scheduling system is to provide a general job submission framework allowing optimal positioning and scheduling of HPCN applications. The scheduling algorithms used to calculate best-suited resources are based on an objective cost functi on that exploi...

Parallelanddistributedprocessing,althoughwithinthefocusofcomputerscience researchforalongtime,isgainingmoreandmoreimportanceinawidespectrum of applications. These proceedings aim to demonstrate the use of parallel and distributed processing concepts in di?erent application ?elds, and attempt to spark interest in novel research directions to advance...

We present the architecture and implementation of IANOS middleware that is a result of integration of the Intelligent Scheduling Service into the VIOLA meta-scheduling environment. The goal of the new, integrated environment is to provide a general middleware infrastructure allowing optimal positioning and scheduling of HPC Grid applications. The s...

Text mining is inherently more computation-intensive than information retrieval on pre-structured data, and it requires transfer and filtering of huge amounts of data. Grid environments provide a suitable infrastructure for ac-complishing these tasks. We present the mapping and implementation of a standard text mining workflow for the analysis of b...

The Phosphorus(1,2) project focuses on delivering advanced network services to Grid users and applications interconnected by heterogeneous infrastructures. The project is addressing some of the key technical challenges to enable on-demand end-to-end network services across multiple domains. The Phosphorus network concept makes applications aware of...

Service Level Agreements may be used to establish agreements on the quality of a service between a service provider and a service consumer. The roles of service provider and service consumer may realised in different shapes ranging from individuals to institutions, software agents or other systems acting on behalf of physical entities or steered by...

Serial computing has become largely irrelevant for growth in computing performance at around 2003. Having already concluded that to maintain past performance growth rates, general-purpose computing must be overhauled to incorporate parallel computing ...

Reliable authentication and authorisation are crucial for both service providers and their customers, where the former want to protect their resources from unauthorised access and fraudulent use while their customers want to be sure unauthorised access to their data is prevented. In Grid environments Virtual Organisations (VO) have been adopted as...

In SOA-based Grid environments service provider and service consumer usually do not know each other. In order to establish a business relation they must inter alia (i) create a trust relationship, and (ii) set up mechanisms to create reliable, verifiable, and, at least in a commercial environment, also audible agreements with respect to the service...

The co-allocation of resources for the parallel execution o f distributed MPI applications in a Grid environment is a challenging task. On one hand it is mandatory to co-ordinate the usage of computational resources, like for example compute clusters, on the other hand it improves the additional scheduling of network resources the overall performan...

Distributed applications or workflows need to access and use compute, storage and network resources simultaneously or chronologically coordinated respectively. Examples are distributed multi-physics simulations that use the combined computational performance and data storage of multiple clusters. A coordinated reservation and allocation of the reso...

Co-ordinated usage of resources in a Grid environment is a challenging task impeded by the nature of resource usage and provision: Resources reside in different geographic locations, are managed by different organisations, and are by no means accessible via standardised interfaces, protocols or commands. These prerequisites have to be taken into ac...

The UNICORE Grid technology provides a seamless, secure, and intuitive access to distributed Grid resources. UNICORE is a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production worldwide. Beyond this production usage, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and International projects. In o...

The Intelligent Grid Scheduling Service (ISS) aims at finding an optimally suited computational resource for a given application component. An objective cost model function is used to decide it. It includes information on a parametrization of the components and the machines in a Grid, and on the availability of the clusters. The paper presents a de...

Distributed applications or workflows need to access and use compute, storage and network resources simultaneously or chronologically coordinated respectively. Examples are distributed multi-physics simulations that use the combined computational performance and data storage of multiple clusters. A coordinated reservation and allocation of the reso...

In Grid and Service Oriented Architecture-based environments the use of technologies supporting Service Level Agreements, advance reservation, and Virtual Organisations mark the start of a new way accessing distributed resources or services. Experience made so far indicate the potential for overcoming the limitations of the hitherto best effort app...

Demanding applications like distributed multi-physics simulations benefit from the combined computational per-formance and data storage of multiple clusters. A reservation mechanism spanning these clusters ensures the avail-ability of all selected resources. Complex workflows with chronological dependencies are supported. This approach addresses ne...

Running large MPI-applications with resource demands exceeding the local site's cluster capacity could be dis- tributed across a number of clusters in a Grid instead, to sat isfy the demand. However, there are a number of draw- backs limiting the applicability of this approach: communication paths between compute nodes of different clusters usually...

In diesem Beitrag werden Virtuelle Organisationen (VO) in Grids charakterisiert und zwei unterschiedliche Sichtweisen des VO-Managements adressiert: Das Management von Mitgliedschaften im Rahmen von Authentifizierungen und Autorisierungen (VO-interne Prozesse) und das Management von VO-Lebenszyklen. Für die erste Fragestellung haben sich mit VOMS u...