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Section: New Software and Platforms
Merkat
Keywords: Resource management - Cloud - Elastic scaling - Market mechanisms - Service Level Objectives - HPC
Functional Description
Merkat is a platform that allows users of an organization to automatically manage and scale their applications while maximizing the infrastructure's utilization [12]. Merkat is generic and extensible, allowing users to automate the application deployment and management process. Users have the flexibility to control how many resources are allocated to their applications and to define their own resource demand adaptation policies. Merkat applies an unique approach to multiplex the infrastructure capacity between the applications, by implementing a proportional-share market and allowing applications to adapt autonomously to resource price and their given performance objectives. The price of the acquired resources acts as a control mechanism to ensure that resources are distributed to applications according to the user's value for them. Merkat was evaluated on Grid'5000 with several scientific applications.