Section: Scientific Foundations

Resource abstractions

Computing resources and infrastructures have a wide variety of characteristics in terms of reliability, performance, service quality, price, energy consumption, etc. Moreover, resource usage and access differ from batch scheduler, reservation, on-demand, best-effort, virtualized, etc.

The Avalon team addresses issues related to the provision of the necessary resource abstractions to allow efficient resource usage, the accurate description of resource properties, and the efficient management of the complexity of hybrid distributed infrastructures.

The challenge is threefold: $i)$ providing the adequate resource management services to cope with large scale, heterogeneous, volatile, and elastic infrastructures, $ii)$ combining several DCIs together, $iii)$ providing feedback on how applications make use of resources, which implies for instance energy monitoring facility.

The Avalon team aims at designing and evaluating adapted services such as job scheduler, decentralized resource discovery, data management, monitoring systems, or QoS services. Moreover, the team studies at which level in the design stack advanced features, such as QoS, reliability, security, have to/can be provided.

Our methodology consists in designing experiments involving the investigated services. Therefore, the team closely collaborates with large-scale infrastructure operators and designers such as CC-IN2P3, Grid'5000 , FutureGrid or the International Desktop Grid Federation. We aim at making use of existing DCIs services as much as possible and develop new services otherwise. In the past years, the team members have gained a recognized experience in designing middleware systems for distributed and parallel computing that rely on different resource abstractions: data management and data-intense computing (BitDew, Diet ), workflows (Diet ), component model (HLCM ). In the next years, we plan to improve these systems or develop new services with respect to challenges related on determining how resources are found, queried, accessed, used, and released. For example, the Avalon team contributes to energy monitoring services as well as to information services, and job submission services for elastic resources.