Section: Overall Objectives

Challenges

Dependable application execution in the future Internet raises a number of scientific challenges. The Myriads team aims at the design, programming and implementation of autonomous distributed systems and applications.

The underlying computing infrastructure for the Internet of Services is characterized by its very large scale, dynamic nature and heterogeneity. The system scale is to be measured in terms of number of users, services, computers and geographical wingspan. The Internet of Services infrastructure spans multiple sites in multiple administrative domains. Its dynamic nature results from a number of factors such as Internet node volatility (due to computer or network failures, voluntarily connections and disconnections), services evolution (services appearing, disappearing, being modified), and varying demand depending on human being activities.

In a world in which more and more personal, business, scientific and industrial activities rely on services, it is essential to guarantee the high availability of services despite failures in the underlying continuously evolving (dynamic) execution environment. Multiple actors are involved in service provision and computing infrastructures used for service execution are naturally distributed on multiple geographically distant sites belonging to different institutions. On the one hand, service execution infrastructures are often shared by different service providers (that might be competitors) and on the other hand services are accessed by multiple independent, and sometimes unknown, customers. In such an environment, providing confidence to the involved parties is of utmost importance.

Delivering a service depends on myriads of physical and virtualized resources, ranging from memory and CPU time to virtual machines, virtual clusters and other local or remote resources. Providing Quality of Service guarantees to users requires efficient mechanisms for discovering and allocating resources as well as dynamically adjusting resource allocations to accommodate workload variations. Moreover, efficient resource management is essential for minimizing resource supply costs, such as energy costs.

The Internet of Services is characterized by its uncertainty. It is an incommensurable and unpredictable system. Dependable application execution in such a distributed system can only be achieved through autonomic resource and service management. The Myriads project-team objectives are to design and implement systems and environments for autonomous service and resource management in distributed virtualized infrastructures. We intend to tackle the challenges of dependable application execution and efficient resource management in the future Internet of Services.

Experiment-driven research in such a context is in itself a challenge. Confidence in scientific results for such large-scale systems can be greatly improved when they are verified on large-scale experimental testbeds. The Myriads project-team is therefore deeply involved in the management of the Grid'5000 testbed, by hosting its budget, technical director and 3 engineers. Here, the same challenges are faced at a smaller but nevertheless relevant scale for the project, with operational constraints for its experimenters and administrators.