————————————-
The highlights of research activities and outcomes in 2010 are:

* The Lab successfully assisted its spin-off company, Manjrasoft, which
has released Aneka 2.0 software and filed its PCT patent application to
national phase in USA & India.

* The Lab’s flagship Cloudbus Project has released “open source”
CloudSim 2.0 Toolkit, which is used by several researchers in academia
and industries around the world.

* Members of CLOUDS Lab have authored 30 publications, which include 8
journal papers, and 15 conference papers.

* The Lab successfully hosted research activities of over 20 scholars: 9
PhD students, 7 Research Fellows (5 at PostDoc level and 2 Software
Engineers), and couple of Masters/honours students. Three Ph.D students
have graduated.

* Lab members have received “Best Paper Award” from the 24th IEEE
International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and
Applications (AINA 2010), Perth, Australia, April 20-23, 2010.
————————–

Wish you all a happy, peaceful, and prosperous new year 2011.

Best regards
Raj

The Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at
the University of Melbourne, Australia has released the next-version of
Grid simulation software, the GridSim Toolkit 5.2.

This new version of GridSim brings a new package (i.e. gridsim.fta) that
provides:

* A failure generator based on the Failure Trace Archive (FTA) format.
The provided packages read the tabbed version of the failure traces and generate
a list of events that show the availability/unavailability pattern for each machine
in a grid resource. For more details, see the FTA web site (http://fta.inria.fr) and
the following publication:

Derrick Kondo, Bahman Javadi, Alex Iosup, Dick Epema, The Failure Trace Archive:
Enabling Comparative Analysis of Failures in Diverse Distributed Systems,
In the 10th IEEE/ACM CCGrid, Melbourne, Australia, May, 2010.

* one allocation policy for scheduling of bag of tasks on cluster systems in the
presence of resource failures.

* An implementation of the parallel jobs workload model of DAS-2 for modelling
the workload of clusters. Details about the workload model are available in the
following publication:

Hui Li, David Groep, and Lex Wolters, “Workload Characteristics of a
Multi-cluster Supercomputer”, LNCS 2005, Volume 3277/2005, 176-193.

The version 5.0 of GridSim brings a new package (i.e. gridsim.parallel) that
provides:

* A graphical user interface for debugging resource allocation policies.
* Several allocation policies for scheduling parallel jobs on clusters and
and supercomputers. The policies include aggressive backfilling, conservative
backfilling, advance reservation with conservative backfilling, selective
backfilling and agressive backfilling with multiple resource partitions. The
allocation policies implemented are based on the following research papers:

Ahuva W. Mu’alem and Dror G. Feitelson, Utilization, Predictability,
Workloads, and User Runtime Estimates in Scheduling the IBM SP2
with Backfilling. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed
Systems, 12:(6), pp. 529-543, 2001.

Barry G. Lawson and Evgenia Smirni, Multiple-Queue Backfilling
Scheduling with Priorities and Reservations for Parallel Systems,
2002 Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel
Processing (JSSPP), pp. 72-87, 2002.

Srividya Srinivasan, Rajkumar Kettimuthu, Vijay Subramani, and
Ponnuswamy Sadayappan. Selective Reservation Strategies for Backfill
Job Scheduling. In JSSPP 2002, LNCS 2537, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg,
pp. 55-71, 2002.

* An implementation of the workload model by Lublin and Feitelson for modelling
the workload of clusters and supercomputers. Details about the workload model
are available in the following publication:

Uri Lublin and Dror G. Feitelson, The Workload on Parallel Supercomputers:
Modeling the Characteristics of Rigid Jobs. J. Parallel & Distributed
Comput. 63(11), pp. 1105-1122, Nov 2003.

* A data structure to facilitate the scheduling of jobs and advance reservations.
This data structure is described as an appendix on Marcos Assuncao’s PhD thesis.

* Logging features using Java logging API.

In addition, other improvements have made GridSim more compatible with
Java 5 and 6. Some bugs have been fixed and some changes in SimJava were
required to enable a simulation to be paused and resumed.

All components developed as part of the GridSim Toolkit are released as
“open source” under the GPL license to encourage innovation and pass full
freedom to our users.

The early version of our GridSim toolkit has been used/downloaded by several
academic and commercial organizations around the world including:
University of Southern California (USA), California Institute of Technology (USA),
Argonne National Labs (USA), University of Manchester (UK), CERN,
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (Spain), Indian Institute of Technology,
Tsinghua University (China), Sun Microsystems, IBM Research, Unisys, HP,
Northrop Grumman Information Technology, British Telecom and EMC Corp.

The contributors to the GridSim software (from early to new versions) are:
* Rajkumar Buyya, CLOUDS Lab @ The University of Melbourne.
* Manzur Murshed, GSCIT @ Monash University, Australia.
* Anthony Sulistio, CLOUDS Lab @ The University of Melbourne.
* Gokul Poduval and Chen-Khong Tham,
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering @ National University of Singapore.
* Marcos Dias de Assuncao, INRIA Lyon @ Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon
* Uros Cibej and Borut Robic, Faculty of Computer and Information Service,
The University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
* Agustin Caminero, Department of Computing Systems,
Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM), Spain.
* James Broberg, CLOUDS Lab @ The University of Melbourne.
* Saurabh Garg, CLOUDS Lab @ The University of Melbourne.
* Bahman Javadi, CLOUDS Lab @ The University of Melbourne.

To download the GridSim software, please visit the CLOUDS Lab web site at

http://www.cloudbus.org/gridsim/

Join the GridSim mailing lists at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gridsim

“This is an important milestone for Manjrasoft, as we officially protect our unique and groundbreaking approach to the development and management of Cloud applications,” said Dr. Rajkumar Buyya Manjrasoft Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO). “Manjrasoft’s core technology enables software applications requiring high computation capability to run across a number of networked computers and servers, delivering increased performance and efficiency in a cost effective way. It is one of the many key technical inventions in our ‘Killer Cloud App Development Platform (CAP)’ that will enable enterprises to accelerate their application development, deployments and management in private and public clouds.”

Aneka technology primarily consists of two key components: (1) SDK (Software Development Kit) containing application programming interfaces (APIs) and tools essential for rapid development of applications. Aneka APIs supports three popular Cloud programming models: Task, Thread, and MapReduce; and (2) a Runtime Engine and Platform for managing deployment and execution of applications on private or public Clouds. The potential of Aneka as a CloudEngine has been successfully harnessed by its users and customers in three various sectors including engineering, life science, education, and business intelligence.

Manjrasoft’s patent application consists of 36 distinct claims that describe the company’s unique ability to provide a Grid/Cloud based application development platform on a network of computing nodes, comprising a configurable service container offering foundational services such as message dispatching, communication, network membership and persistence modules, and adapted to host pluggable service modules. When executed at the nodes at least one instance of the container includes a membership service module for maintaining network connectivity between the nodes, at least one instance of the container includes a scheduler service module configured to receive one or more tasks from a client and schedule the tasks on at least one of the nodes, and at least one instance of the container includes an executor service module for receiving one or more tasks from the scheduler service module, executing the tasks so received and returning at least one result to the scheduler service module. These capabilities of container are utilized to create different Cloud application programming models.

In addition, Aneka also comes with Design Explorer, a graphical environment enabling the rapid composition of data parallel applications such as parameter sweeps supporting the execution of the same program with different data sets. One of Manjrasoft’s customers, China Southern Railways, has utilized Aneka Design Explorer for composing Autodesk’s Maya-based rendering of locomotive design frames as Cloud application without any changes to Maya software. Then using Aneka runtime engine, they accelerated rendering operations on an enterprise Cloud built using in-house network of Windows desktop computers.  This fast track approach demonstrates how enterprises can rapidly transform legacy applications into Cloud applications and execute them on Cloud computing infrastructure to solve problems faster with minimal investment.

Other users in life science domain have utilized Aneka to run their applications on public Cloud infrastructure such as Amazon EC2. Aneka supported dynamic leasing of computing capability (i.e., creating Virtual Machines) and managing application execution on them to meet customers Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Additional information on how Aneka will reduce the cost of hardware requirement, accelerating development, easy deployment, improved management capability, and facilitate compliance with QoS/SLA services in private and/or public Cloud is available at the company’s website: http://www.manjrasoft.com/products.html

Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science is awarded to a team or individual for an innovation in computer science that has the potential to improve the lives of many Australians. This prize is awarded as part of Google’s commitment to open innovation that improves the lives of people everywhere.

The Cloudbus Project, led by Professor Rajkumar Buyya, has developed architectural principles and software technologies such as Aneka that enable high-performance, scalable, and energy-efficient Cloud computing.

“We are privileged that our team is one of the finalists for the 2010 Australia Eureka Prize in the ‘Innovation in Computer Science’ category sponsored by Google Australia. This industry-wide recognition is further validation that our platform enables enterprises with the best-of-breed cloud application platform supporting multiple programming models currently available in the market,” said Dr. Rajkumar Buyya, CEO of Manjrasoft. “If an organization is considering adopting a cloud computing architecture for their application, Aneka Platform ensures greater level of agility over developing distributed applications over the cloud paradigms with focus on performance and scalability. Within a matter of time, the Aneka Cloud Application Development Platform can be provisioned on a public, private or a hybrid cloud allowing developers to build and deploy applications for solving problems rapidly on Cloud Computing infrastructure.”

Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch, a former member of the US President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST), stated that the Cloudbus Project features a collection of innovative and original technologies. In particular, Aneka, a middleware for developing computing Clouds, emerges among the similar solutions for its innovative and original features.

Dr. Craig A. Lee, President of the Open Grid Forum (OGF) said “Built on the widely used .NET infrastructure from Microsoft, Aneka provides a market-based approach to resource allocation and scheduling. As the world becomes more connected and interconnected electronically, such market-based approaches will eventually become the lynch pin for managing distributed computing infrastructures.” As the cloud computing concept continues to build more momentum, the concepts from Aneka will gain even more currency for economic advantage and the ability to improve lives.

Dr. Gentzsch said “Aneka constitutes a completely new approach for building heterogeneous private, public, and hybrid Clouds specifically designed with the goal of addressing the scalability needs of institutions that want to rely on Cloud Computing to shape their IT infrastructure.”

I would like to share a pointer to our recent work on Green Cloud
Computing. As you know our CLOUDS Lab at the University of Melbourne has
been working on energy-efficient resource management techniques for Data
Centers since 2007. Based on this experience and its growing importance
for Cloud computing, we have put together an article that offers vision,
identifies key architectural elements for Green Cloud Computing, and
open challenges and presents initial results (see below for details). I
hope you will find it useful.

Full paper can be found at:
http://www.buyya.com/papers/GreenCloud2010.pdf

If you comments and suggestions on improving the work, please let us
know. Thank you.

Cheers
Raj
————————————————————————
Title: Energy-Efficient Management of Data Center Resources for Cloud
Computing: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Open Challenges

Authors: Rajkumar Buyya, Anton Beloglazov, and Jemal Abawajy

Abstract: Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to
users worldwide. Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of
pervasive applications from consumer, scientific, and business domains.
However, data centers hosting Cloud applications consume huge amounts of
energy, contributing to high operational costs and carbon footprints to
the environment. Therefore, we need Green Cloud computing solutions that
can not only save energy for the environment but also reduce operational
costs. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural
elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud computing
environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource
provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between
various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units,
cooling and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy
efficiency and performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a)
architectural principles for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b)
energy-efficient resource allocation policies and scheduling algorithms
considering quality-of-service expectations, and devices power usage
characteristics; and (c) a novel software technology for
energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our approach by
conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the
CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has
immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards
to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.

URL for Full Paper: http://www.buyya.com/papers/GreenCloud2010.pdf

Bibliography:
–
Rajkumar Buyya, Anton Beloglazov, and Jemal Abawajy, Energy-Efficient
Management of Data Center Resources for Cloud Computing: A Vision,
Architectural Elements, and Open Challenges, Proceedings of the 2010
International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing
Techniques and Applications (PDPTA 2010), Las Vegas, USA, July 12-15, 2010.
————————————————————————

The CLOUDS Lab and its flagship Cloudbus Project at The University of
Melbourne, Australia along with collaborators from Pontifical Catholic
University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil is pleased to announce
the release of the new version of its Cloud simulation software, the
CloudSim.

One year has passed since CloudSim 1.0 was released. Since then, Cloud
computing has gained more visibility, and a plenty of new projects, both
in academia and in the industry, emerged. To help developers of such
projects to evaluate new strategies and ideas before actual development,
CloudSim 2.0 offers support for model and simulation of hot topics in
Cloud Computing, including green/power-aware Cloud Computing and
federated Cloud Computing.

At the same time new features were added, major improvements in
simulation core allowed enhanced scalability and performance of
simulations and insertion and removal of simulation entities
during simulation execution. It increases considerably scenarios that
may be addressed in simulations, what we hope will contribute to a wider
adoption of the tool by the research ommunity.

These improvements were possible due to extensive support from the Cloud
Computing research community around the world, which used CloudSim,
appointed bugs, and provided us feedback on new features they would like
to have in future versions the toolkit. Community is invited to
keep contribution to CloudSim.

As in its previous version, all components developed as part of the
CloudSim Toolkit are released as “open source” under the GPL license to
encourage innovation and pass full freedom to our users.

To download the CloudSim software, please visit the Cloudbus Project web
site at:
http://www.cloudbus.org/cloudsim/

The CloudSim Team
Melbourne, May 2010

Let me share upcoming CLOUDS hosted events and recent highlights:
——————
1. As you know our CLOUDS Lab is hosting CCGrid 2010:
The 10th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid
Computing (CCGrid 2010)
in Melbourne from May 17-20, 2010. On behalf of CLOUDS Lab and the
entire organising committee, I would like to invite you to participate
in in this 10th anniversary conference. CCGrid 2010 offers outstanding
technical program featuring keynote talks, tutorials, workshops,
mini-symposiums, posters sessions, IEEE SCALE competition, and research
demos. This year program as a special focus on Cloud Computing.

Highlights of the conference can be found in the attached Call for
Participation. Please share it with your friends, students, colleagues;
and encourage them to participate in CCGrid 2010.

2. In the area of Cloud Computing, recently CLOUDS lab member have
published many papers. They include:

AINA 2010 Papers:
* CloudAnalyst: A CloudSim-based Visual Modeller for Analysing Cloud
Computing Environments and Applications
http://www.buyya.com/papers/CloudAnalyst-AINA2010.pdf
* Minimizing Execution Cost when using Globally Distributed Cloud Services
http://www.buyya.com/papers/AINA2010-NLPSched-Workflow.pdf
* A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based Heuristic for Scheduling
Workflow Applications in Cloud Computing Environments,
http://www.buyya.com/papers/AINA2010-PSOSched-Workflow.pdf

3. One of our AINA 2010 papers has received the Best Paper Award.
Details at: http://www.cloudbus.org/news/BestPaperAward-AINA2010.txt

4. Manjrasoft, spin-off company of the the University of Melbourne
commercialising CLOUDS Lab’s research and innovation, has been
attracting interesting users for its Aneka technology. For details,
check out “Economic Times of India” article on “Clearing hurdles with
cloud computing” appeared on Feb 8, 2010. A copy of which can be found
at: http://www.manjrasoft.com/EconomicTimesIndia-Feb2010.pdf
—————

With this brief note, once again, I like to invite all of you attend
CCGrid 2010. I look forward to see you all in Melbourne!

Best regards
Raj
———————————————————————–
C A L L   F O R   P A R T I C I P A T I O N

The 10th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on
Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2010)
May 17-20, 2010, Melbourne, Australia

http://www.cloudbus.org/ccgrid2010/
http://www.manjrasoft.com/ccgrid2010/

Sponsored by:
IEEE Computer Society / Technical Committee on Scalable Computing
ACM (Association of Computing Machinery)

Hosted/Organised by:
* Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory,
The University of Melbourne, Australia

* ISSNIP: ARC Research Network on Intelligent Sensors,
Sensor Networks and Information Processing

* Manjrasoft Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia

* NSF Center for Autonomic Computing
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA
————————————————————————

OVERVIEW:

In 2010, CCGrid will return to Australia, to Melbourne, to celebrate its
10th anniversary. CCGrid 2010 will have a special focus on three
important and immediate issues that are significantly influencing all
aspects of Cluster, Cloud and Grid computing: Economics, Environment and
Autonomics.
————————————————————————

CCGrid 210 HIGHLIGHTS:

* CCGrid 2010 celebrates its 10th anniversary in Melbourne, Australia.
* CCGrid 2010 has accepted 51 full papers from an exceptionally strong
field of 219 reviewed full paper submissions, resulting in an acceptance
rate of ~23%.
* Hosts 8 workshops/mini-symposiums on HOT topics such as MultiCore
Clusters, Clouds for Business Applications, GPU Clusters, Innovative
Scientific/Medial Applications, and a Doctoral Symposium.
* Hosts 3rd IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE 2010)
* Hosts Plenary Session dedicated for Poster Exhibit and Research Demos

Keynote Presentations:
—————–
1. IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing Lecture:
Title: Enabling the Next Generation of Scalable Clusters
By: Professor William D. Gropp
Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

2.Title: Sky Computing: When Multiple Clouds Become One
By: Professor José A.B. Fortes
BellSouth Eminent Scholar and Director, NSF Center for Autonomic
Computing, The University of Florida, Gainesville, USA

Full Program:

http://www.manjrasoft.com/ccgrid2010/ccgrid2010-program.pdf

http://www.cloudbus.org/ccgrid2010/ccgrid2010-program.pdf

Conference Venue:

The CCGrid 2010 conference will be held at The Langham – Melbourne
The hotel is situated on the banks of the Yarra River offering views of
the Melbourne city skyline, amid Southbank’s al fresco cafes,
restaurants, bars and boutiques, and a short stroll from Federation
Square, the Arts Centre and the Botanical Gardens. For further details,
please visit: http://www.manjrasoft.com/ccgrid2010/ccgrid2010venue.html
————————————————————————-

Prof Raj Buyya has received a finalist award in the “Scopus Young Researcher of the Year 2010″ awards in the category of Engineering and Technology. The award was presented by Elsevier Science and Universities Australia.

This award recognises Raj’s high quality and high impact research contributions including; research impact as evidenced by high citations; research output as evidence by co-authoring over 300 publications, which include 4 textbooks utilised by several universities world-wide; and external impacts such as leadership in the development of software technologies that are used by several academic institutions and commercial enterprises in 40 countries around the world.

Raj and his team’s innovative research has had significant influence on Cloud computing products developed by companies such as Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and Manjrasoft.

The School would like to congratulate Raj on his achievement.
——————————————————————————–

http://asia.elsevier.com/YSRA2010

Rajkumar Buyya, Rajiv Ranjan, Rodrigo N. Calheiros

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands.

This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.

Comments: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference paper
ACM-class: C.2.4
Journal-ref: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP 2010, Busan, South Korea, May 21-23, 2010), LNCS, Springer, Germany, 2010.

Download full paper from: http://www.buyya.com/papers/InterCloud2010.pdf
————————————————————————

Abstract:

Advances in Cloud computing enable new possibilities to Internet applications
developers. Previously, the main concern of Internet applications developers
was deployment and hosting of applications, because it required acquisition of
a server with a fixed capacity, able to handle the expected application peak
demand, installation of the whole software infrastructure of the platform
supporting the application, and configuration of the application itself.
Furthermore, server was underutilized because peak traffic happens only at
specific times. With the advent of the Cloud, solution of this problem became
cheaper and easier with the use of pay-per-use, flexible elastic infrastructure
services offered by Cloud providers. Because several Cloud providers are
available, each one offering different pricing models and located in different
geographic regions, a new concern of application developers is selecting
providers and data center locations for applications. However, there is a lack
of tools that enable developers to evaluate requirements of large-scale Cloud
applications in terms of geographic distribution of both computing servers and
user workloads. To fill this gap in tools for evaluation and modeling of Cloud
environments and applications, in this paper we propose CloudAnalyst. It was
developed to simulate large-scale Cloud applications with the purpose of
studying the behavior of such applications under various deployment
configurations. CloudAnalyst helps developers with insights in how to
distribute applications among Cloud infrastructures and value added services
such as optimization of applications performance and providers incoming with
the use of Service Brokers.

Download full article from:

http://www.gridbus.org/reports/CloudAnalyst2009.pdf