Section: New Software and Platforms

Merkat

Contact:

Nikolaos Parlavantzas, Nikolaos.Parlavantzas@irisa.fr

URL:

http://www.irisa.fr/myriads/software/Merkat/

Status:

Version 1.0

License:

TBD

Presentation:

Merkat is a market-based private PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) system, supporting dynamic, fine-grained resource allocation and automatic application management [49] , [48]  [3] . Merkat implements a proportional-share auction that ensures maximum resource utilization while providing incentives to applications to regulate their resource usage. Merkat includes generic mechanisms for application deployment and automatic scaling. These mechanisms can be adapted to support diverse performance goals and application types, such as master-worker, MPI, or MapReduce applications. Merkat is implemented in Python and uses OpenNebula for virtual machine management. Experimental results on the Grid'5000 testbed show that using Merkat increases resource utilization and improves application performance. Merkat is currently being evaluated by EDF R&D using EDF high-performance applications. The development was initiated in the framework of Stefania Costache PhD's thesis.

Active contributors (from the Myriads team):

Stefania Costache, Christine Morin, Nikolaos Parlavantzas.

Impact:

Merkat has been integrated in EDF R&D portal providing access to internal computing resources and is currently used on a testbed at EDF R&D.