Section: New Results

Desktop Grid Computing

Participants : Gilles Fedak, Anthony Simonet.

Assembling and simultaneously using different types of distributed computing infrastructures (DCI) like Grids and Clouds is an increasingly common situation. Because infrastructures are characterized by different attributes such as price, performance, trust, greenness, the task scheduling problem becomes more complex and challenging. In [15] , we presented the design for a fault-tolerant and trust-aware scheduler, which allows to execute Bag-of-Tasks applications on elastic and hybrid DCI, following user-defined scheduling strategies. Our approach, named Promethee scheduler, combines a pull-based scheduler with multi-criteria Promethee decision making algorithm. Because multi-criteria scheduling leads to the multiplication of the possible scheduling strategies, we proposed SOFT, a methodology that allows to find the optimal scheduling strategies given a set of application requirements. The validation of this method is performed with a simulator that fully implements the Promethee scheduler and recreates an hybrid DCI environment including Internet Desktop Grid, Cloud and Best Effort Grid based on real failure traces. A set of experiments shows that the Promethee scheduler is able to maximize user satisfaction expressed accordingly to three distinct criteria: price, expected completion time and trust, while maximizing the infrastructure useful employment from the resources owner point of view. Finally, we present an optimization which bounds the computation time of the Promethee algorithm, making realistic the possible integration of the scheduler to a wide range of resource management software.

The paper [31] concerns the hype idea of Citizen Science and the related paradigm shift: to go from the passive “volunteer computing” to other volunteer actions like “volunteer measurements” under guidance of scientists. They can be carried out by ordinary people with standard computing gadgets (smartphone, tablet, etc.) and the various standard sensors in them. Here the special attention is paid to the system of volunteer scientific measurements to study air showers caused by cosmic rays. The technical implementation is based on integration of data about registered night flashes (by radiometric software) in shielded camera chip, synchronized time and GPS-data in ordinary gadgets: to identify night air showers of elementary particles; to analyze the frequency and to map the distribution of air showers in the densely populated cities. The project currently includes the students of the National Technical University of Ukraine KPI, which are compactly located in Kyiv city and contribute their volunteer measurements. The technology would be very effective for other applications also, especially if it will be automated (e.g., on the basis of XtremWeb or/and BOINC technologies for distributed computing) and used in some small area with many volunteers, e.g. in local communities (Corporative/Community Crowd Computing).

In [25] , we proposed a path for doing Data Science using browsers as computing and data nodes. This novel idea is motivated by the cross-fertilized fields of desktop grid computing, data management in grids and clouds, Web technologies such as Nosql tools, models of interactions and programming models in grids, cloud and Web technologies. We propose a methodology for the modeling, analyzing, implemention and simulation of a prototype able to run a MapReduce job in browsers. This work allows to better understand how to envision the big picture of Data Science in the context of the Javascript language for programming the middleware, the interactions between components and browsers as the operating system. We explain what types of applications may be impacted by this novel approach and, from a general point of view how a formal modeling of the interactions serves as a general guidelines for the implementation. Formal modeling in our methodology is a necessary condition but it is not sufficient. We also make round-trips between the modeling and the Javascript or used tools to enrich the interaction model that is the key point, or to put more details into the implementation. It is the first time to the best of our knowledge that Data Science is operating in the context of browsers that exchange codes and data for solving computational and data intensive programs. Computational and data intensive terms should be understand according to the context of applications that we think to be suitable for our system.

About 80% of the financial market investors fail, the main reason for this being their poor investment decisions. Without advanced financial analysis tools and the knowledge to interpret the analysis, the investors can easily make irrational investment decisions. Moreover, in- vestors are challenged by the dynamism of the market and a relatively large number of indicators that must be computed. In this paper we propose E-Fast, an innovative approach for on-line technical analysis for helping small investors to obtain a greater efficiency on the market by increasing their knowledge. The E-Fast technical analysis platform proto- type relies on High Performance Computing (HPC), allowing to rapidly develop and extensively validate the most sophisticated finance analysis algorithms. In [36] , we aim at demonstrating that the E-Fast im- plementation, based on the CloudPower HPC infrastructure, is able to provide small investors a realistic, low-cost and secure service that would otherwise be available only to the large financial institutions. We describe the architecture of our system and provide design insights. We present the results obtained with a real service implementation based on the Exponential Moving Average computational method, using CloudPower and Grid5000 for the computations’ acceleration. We also elaborate a set of interesting challenges emerging from this work, as next steps towards high performance technical analysis for small investors.