Workshops and Tutorials
The 2012 International Workshop on Mobile Cloud and Ubiquitous Computing (Mobi-Cloud 2012)
http://idc.hust.edu.cn/gpc2012/
(Due to some reasons, the tutorial for this event has been cancelled.)
Tutorial: Combining Grid, Cloud and Volunteer Computing
Speaker: Professor Nabil Abdennadher
University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland (HES-SO), hepia Geneva.
It’s well known that the developments environments used in Grid, Volunteer computing (VC) and Cloud are very different. The key differences between these three platforms are based on theoretical concepts as well as implementations:
1.Virtualization technology in Grid environments is still in its first stages, while it is considered as thecornerstone of Cloud.
2. The majority of Grids and volunteer computing is employed to harness idle computing capacity for large computational jobs. In contrast, Clouds are already used for very different kinds of applications
3. Access to Grid resources is realized via a specific and complex middleware. In contrast interactionwith resources in the Cloud are established via standard Web protocols.
4. The approach to the development of applications is very different in Grids/VC and Clouds. In Grids and VC, the user typically needs to generate an executable file of his application. This executable is then transferred to and executed on the remote resources in the Grid and/or VC. Clouds allow a fundamentally different approach to software development: the user dynamically assembles existing functionalities to a full application on the platform as such.
This tutorial deals with the last aspect of these four points. Its aim is to propose a set of concepts and tools used to bridge these three large-scale distributed systems: Grid, Cloud and Volunteer Computing.
Concretely speaking, we propose a common library used to develop high performance applications that could be deployed on Grid, VC and Cloud without any re-writing. The following platforms/middlewares will be used during the practical part:
1. the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) middleware
2. the XtremWeb-CH volunteer computing platform (XWCH: www.xtremwebch.net)
3. the cloud platformsAmazon, Azure and Venus-C
The tutorial is composed of theoretical and practical parts. The theoretical part will deal with the following aspects:
- Grid and Volunteer computing vs. Cloud computing
- Overview of ARC, XWCH, Amazon, Venus-C and Azure platforms
- How to develop applications for ARC, XWCH, Amazon, Venus-C and Azure platforms
- A common high-level API for large scale distributed systems
During the practical part, the students will be able to:
- Write his/her own application
- Deploy his/her application by using one or several of these bridges: ARC/XWCH, XWCH/Amazon and XWCH/Azure.