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PROJECT: AUTOMATED SERVICE PROVISIONING ENVIRONMENT (ASPEN)
Contents
Overview
Within the next 10 years there will be a paradigm shift in the way that many computing resources are
acquired. This view is supported by industrial research firms such as Forrester Research that have
highlighted "cloud computing" as a disruptive technology. Applications and services are being hosted by
resource providers in the Internet "cloud" removing the need for businesses, institutions and individuals
to purchase and host their own computing resources. This lets them think in terms of the services they
require without sizing and provisioning their own resources. It also enables them to get access to the
latest hardware. Cloud computing has the potential to provide significant cost benefits to small and
medium businesses. IDC, the leading IT analysis firm, in its forecast for 2008 predicts that major
industry players such as IBM and Microsoft will adopt cloud computing significantly to exploit the
lucrative small and medium businesses market. There are many issues that will need to be researched to
make cloud computing widely accessible to Canadian businesses. This proposal seeks funding to study
some of these open issues.
Key technologies that can aid in the development of cloud computing solutions include virtualization
and "Web 2.0" technologies. Virtual machines allow multiple virtual resources, each customized in
terms of the number of processors, memory, operating system and software stack, to be run on the same
physical resource. Furthermore, checkpointing and migration capabilities allow movement of virtual
resources among the physical nodes of a data centre enabling accommodation of new service requests,
system maintenance without disrupting services and balancing of workload among data centre nodes and
between data centres. "Web 2.0" technologies, such as wikis, blogs, mashups and social networking
tools, are used to provide more feature rich service environments and share information. They also
provide users with transparent access to a wide variety of applications.
We are developing an Automated Service Provisioning ENvironment (ASPEN) for data centres.
ASPEN will explore the use of virtual machine technologies to provide an automated, dynamic and
scalable environment that will enable rapid provisioning of services in data centres. We will also explore
how ASPEN can be used to efficiently host applications made available through Web 2.0 technologies
used to create social networking environments.
Our long term objective is for ASPEN to be a comprehensive automated service provisioning environment
for data centres that handles allocation of compute resources, storage, interconnect, network connectivity and security. All of these
aspects are critical to a complete solution but coallocation of these different types of resources is very
complicated. In the short term we plan to focus on automating the
management of the computational resources using virtual machine management technologies and also to
explore how to improve the user experience in interacting with such environments using
Web 2.0 technologies. In particular we plan to focus on the following short term objectives:
- Automated, Dynamic and Scalable Environment - Automation and dynamic adaptation of the
scheduling of large numbers of virtual machines concurrently to meet the service level
agreements of different services being run.
- Efficient Management of Virtual Machine Images - Enable efficient storage and
starting/stopping mechanisms for virtual machine images to provide easy access and reuse and to
satisfy time requirements in service level agreements.
- Virtualization Aware Services - Allow services to take advantage of the underlying virtual
machine technologies to request changes to the environment that they are running in.
- Heterogeneous Services - Provide support for multiple independent service environments with
different software stacks and quality of service requirements in the same data centre.
- User Transparency - Explore how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to improve user expericene and transparency in accessing computing resources.
This project is being done in collaboration with HP Labs. It is utilizing a 1280 core data centre that
was donated to the University of Calgary in large part by HP.
Fire Simulation Demonstrator
For demonstration purposes we developed a
comprehensive user environment, built on top of an initial ASPEN prototype, for the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS),
an application developed by NIST. The environment makes use of the
Facebook social networking platform. A link to a video of the demonstrator
can be found below.
- Demonstrator video including introductory slides - [Flash]
Publications
- R. Curry, C. Kiddle, N. Markatchev, R. Simmonds, Tingxi Tan, Martin Arlitt and Bruce Walker.
"Facebook Meets the Virtualized Enterprise". In Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International
Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC) Conference, pages 286-292,
Munich, Germany, September 15-19, 2008. (Short Paper)
- R. Curry, C. Kiddle, N. Markatchev, R. Simmonds, Tingxi Tan, Martin Arlitt and Bruce Walker.
"Facebook Meets the Virtualized Enterprise". Technical Report 2008-907-20, Department of Computer Science,
University of Calgary, June 18, 2008.
(Extended version of EDOC paper) [pdf]
- R. Curry, C. Kiddle, N. Markatchev, R. Simmonds, Tingxi Tan, Martin Arlitt and Bruce Walker.
"An Automated Resource Provisioning Framework for Data Centres". In Proceedings of the 15th
HP Software University Association (HP-SUA) Workshop, pages 189-200, Marrakech, Morocco,
June 22-25, 2008.
- T. Tan, R. Simmonds, B. Arlt, M. Arlitt and B. Walker. "Image Management in a Virtualized Data Centre".
In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Hot Topics in Measurement & Modeling of Computer Systems (HotMetrics),
Annapolis, Maryland, June 6, 2008.
- R. Curry, C. Kiddle, N. Markatchev, R. Simmonds, Tingxi Tan, Martin Arlitt and Bruce Walker.
"Running Applications Efficiently in Online Social Networks".
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, 36(2):71-74, September 2008.
(Part of the SIGMETRICS 2008 Demo Competition, Annapolis, Maryland, June 2 - 6, 2008.)
Presentations
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