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Section: Overall Objectives
Introduction
The fast evolution of hardware capabilities in terms of wide area communication, computation and machine virtualization leads to the requirement of another step in the abstraction of resources with respect to applications. Those large scale platforms based on the aggregation of large clusters (Grids), huge datacenters (Clouds), collections of volunteer PC (Desktop computing platforms), or high performance machines (Supercomputers) are now available to researchers of different fields of science as well as to private companies. This variety of platforms and the way they are accessed have also an important impact on how applications are designed (i.e., the programming model used) as well as how applications are executed (i.e., the runtime/middleware system used). The access to these platforms is driven through the use of different services providing mandatory features such as security, resource discovery, virtualization, load-balancing, monitoring, etc. Infrastructure/Platform/Software as a Service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) have thus to play an important role in the future development of large scale applications.
The overall idea of the Avalon project-team is to consider the whole system, ranging from resources to applications, to be able to design adequate programming and resources abstractions to provide simple to use abstractions to programmers while enabling efficient exploitation of resources. More precisely, the team is going to focus on large-scale, heterogeneous, and elastic resources – ranging from supercomputers to Clouds and Grids, and to services, component and workflow models – including some domain specific models such as GridRPC or MapReduce. In addition to well-known metrics such as makespan, resource utilization, etc., the team considers other metrics, such as energy efficiency or consumption in particular.
The Avalon team in particular focuses on