title: A generic scheduling architecture for service oriented distributed computing infrastructures
title: Introducing new concepts based on automated negotiation of electronic contracts
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Wieder, Philipp
Publisher: name: Technische Universität Dortmund
Year: 2013
Subjects: subject: Cloud
subject: Distributed computing infrastructures
subject: Generic scheduling architecture
subject: IT Service Management
subject: Resource management
subject: Scheduling
subject: Service level agreements
subject: WS-agreement
subject: 004

description: In state-of-the-art distributed computing infrastructures different kinds of resources are combined to offer complex services to customers. As of today, service-oriented middleware stacks are the work-horses to connect resources and their users, and to implement all functions needed to provide those services. Analysing the functionality of prominent middleware stacks, it becomes evident that common challenges, like scalability, manageability, efficiency, reliability, security, or complexity, exist, and that they constitute major research areas in information and communication technologies in general and distributed systems in particular. One core issue, touching all of the aforementioned challenges, is the question of how to distribute units of work in a distributed computing infrastructure, a task generally referred to as scheduling. Integrating a variety of resources and services while being compliant with well-defined business objectives makes the development of scheduling strategies and services a difficult venture, which, for service-oriented distributed computing infrastructures, translates to the assignment of services to activities over time aiming at the optimisation of multiple, potentially competing, quality-of-service criteria. Many concepts, methods, and tools for scheduling in distributed computing infrastructures exist, a majority of which being dedicated to provide algorithmic solutions and schedulers. We approach the problem from another angle and offer a more general answer to the question of ’how to design an automated scheduling process and an architecture supporting it’. Doing so, we take special care of the service-oriented nature of the systems we consider and of the integration of our solutions into IT service management processes. Our answer comprises a number of assets that form a comprehensive scheduling solution for distributed computing infrastructures. Based on a requirement analysis of application scenarios we provide a concept consisting of an automated scheduling process and the respective generic scheduling architecture supporting it. Process and architecture are based on four core models as there are a model to describe the activities to be executed, an information model to capture the capabilities of the infrastructure, a model to handle the life-cycle of service level agreements, which are the foundation for elaborated service management solutions, and a specific scheduling model capturing the specifics of state-of-the-art distributed systems. We deliver, in addition to concept and models, realisations of our solutions that demonstrate their applicability in different application scenarios spanning grid-like academic as well as financial service infrastructures. Last, but not least, we evaluate our scheduling model through simulations of artificial as well as realistic workload traces thus showing the feasibility of the approach and the implications of its usage. The work at hand therefore offers a blueprint for developers of scheduling solutions for state-of-the-art distributed computing infrastructures. It contributes essential building blocks to realise such solutions and provides an important step to integrate them into IT service management solutions.