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Section: Research Program

Application Mapping and Scheduling

This research axis is at the crossroad of the Avalon team. In particular, it gathers results of the three others research axis. We plan to consider application mapping and scheduling through the following three issues.

Application Mapping and Software Deployment

Application mapping and software deployment consist in the process of assigning distributed pieces of software to a set of resources. Resources can be selected according to different criteria such as performance, cost, energy consumption, security management, etc. A first issue is to select resources at application launch time. With the wide adoption of elastic platforms, i.e., platforms that let the number of resources allocated to an application to be increased or decreased during its execution, the issue is also to handle resource selection at runtime.

The challenge in this context corresponds to the mapping of applications onto distributed resources. It will consist in designing algorithms that in particular take into consideration application profiling, modeling, and description.

A particular facet of this challenge is propose scheduling algorithms for dynamic and elastic platforms. As the amount of elements can vary, some kind of control of the platforms must be used accordingly to the scheduling.

Non-Deterministic Workflow Scheduling

Many scientific applications are described through workflow structures. Due to the increasing level of parallelism offered by modern computing infrastructures, workflow applications now have to be composed not only of sequential programs, but also of parallel ones. New applications are now built upon workflows with conditionals and loops (also called non-deterministic workflows).

These workflows can not be scheduled beforehand. Moreover cloud platforms bring on-demand resource provisioning and pay-as-you-go billing models. Therefore, there is a problem of resource allocation for non-deterministic workflows under budget constraints and using such an elastic management of resources.

Another important issue is data management. We need to schedule the data movements and replications while taking job scheduling into account. If possible, data management and job scheduling should be done at the same time in a closely coupled interaction.

Security Management in Cloud Infrastructure

Security has been proven to be sometimes difficult to obtain  [68] and several issues have been raised in Clouds. Nowadays virtualization is used as the sole mechanism to secure different users sharing resources on Clouds. But, due to improper virtualization of all the components of Clouds (such as micro-architectural components), data leak and modification can occur. Accordingly, next-generation protection mechanisms are required to enforce security on Clouds and provide a way to cope with the current limitation of virtualization mechanisms.

As we are dealing with parallel and distributed applications, security mechanisms must be able to cope with multiple machines. Our approach is to combine a set of existing and novel security mechanisms that are spread in the different layers and components of Clouds in order to provide an in-depth and end-to-end security on Clouds. To do it, our first challenge is to define a generic model to express security policies.

Our second challenge is to work on security-aware resource allocation algorithms. The goal of such algorithms is to find a good trade-off between security and unshared resources. Consequently, they can limit resources sharing to increase security. It leads to complex trade-off between infrastructure consolidation, performance, and security.