A user-level secure grid file system
A grid-wide distributed file system provides convenient data access interfaces that facilitate fine-grained cross-domain data sharing and collaboration. However, existing widely-adopted distributed file systems do not meet the security requirements for grid systems. This paper presents a Secure Grid File System (SGFS) which supports GSI-based authentication and access control, end-to-end message privacy, and integrity. It employs user-level virtualization of NFS to provide transparent grid data access leveraging existing, unmodified clients and servers. It supports user and application-tailored security customization per SGFS session, and leverages secure management services to control and configure the sessions. The system conforms to the GSI grid security infrastructure and allows for seamless integration with other grid middleware. A SGFS prototype is evaluated with both file system benchmarks and typical applications, which demonstrates that it can achieve strong security with an acceptable overhead, and substantially outperform native NFS in wide-area environments by using disk caching.

title: Autonomic resource management in virtualized data centers using fuzzy logic-based approaches
abstract: Data centers, as resource providers, are expected to deliver on performance guarantees while optimizing resource utilization to reduce cost. Virtualization techniques provide the opportunity of consolidating multiple separately managed containers of virtual resources on underutilized physical servers. A key challenge that comes with virtualization is the simultaneous on-demand provisioning of shared physical resources to virtual containers and the management of their capacities to meet service-quality targets at the least cost. This paper proposes a two-level resource management system to dynamically allocate resources to individual virtual containers. It uses local controllers at the virtual-container level and a global controller at the resource-pool level. An important advantage of this two-level control architecture is that it allows independent controller designs for separately optimizing the performance of applications and the use of resources. Autonomic resource allocation is realized through the interaction of the local and global controllers. A novelty of the local controller designs is their use of fuzzy logic-based approaches to efficiently and robustly deal with the complexity and uncertainties of dynamically changing workloads and resource usage. The global controller determines the resource allocation based on a proposed profit model, with the goal of maximizing the total profit of the data center. Experimental results obtained through a prototype implementation demonstrate that, for the scenarios under consideration, the proposed resource management system can significantly reduce resource consumption while still achieving application performance targets.

title: Cooperative Autonomic Management in Dynamic Distributed Systems
abstract: The centralized management of large distributed systems is often impractical, particularly when the both the topology and status of the system change dynamically. This paper proposes an approach to application-centric self-management in large distributed systems consisting of a collection of autonomic components that join and leave the system dynamically. Cooperative autonomic components self-organize into a dynamically created overlay network. Through local information sharing with neighbors, each component gains access to global information as needed for optimizing performance of applications. The approach has been validated and evaluated by developing a decentralized autonomic system consisting of multiple autonomic application managers previously developed for the In-VIGO grid-computing system. Using analytical results from complex random network and measurements done in a prototype system, we demonstrate the robustness, self-organization and adaptability of our approach, both theoretically and experimentally.

title: Supporting application-tailored grid file system sessions with WSRF-based services
abstract: This paper presents novel service-based grid data management middleware that leverages standards defined by WSRF specifications to create and manage dynamic grid file system sessions. A unique aspect of the service is that the sessions it creates can be customized to address application data transfer needs. Application-tailored configurations enable selection of both performance-related features (block-based partial file transfers and/or whole-file transfers, cache parameters and consistency models) and reliability features (file system copy-on-write checkpointing to aid recovery of client-side failures; replication, autonomous failure detection and data access redirection for server-side failures). These enhancements, in addition to cross-domain user identity mapping and encrypted communication, are implemented via user level proxies managed by the service, requiring no changes to existing kernels. Sessions established using the service is mounted as distributed file systems and can be used transparently by unmodified binary applications. The paper analyzes the use of the service to support virtual machine based grid systems and workflow execution, and also reports on the performance and reliability of service managed wide-area file system sessions with experiments based on scientific applications (NanoMOS/Matlab, CHID, GAUSS and SPECseis).

title: On the Use of Virtualization and Service Technologies to Enable Grid-Computing
abstract: The In-VIGO approach to Grid-computing relies on the dynamic establishment of virtual grids on which application services are instantiated. In-VIGO was conceived to enable computational science to take place In Virtual Information Grid Organizations. Having its first version deployed on July of 2003, In-VIGO middleware is currently used by scientists from various disciplines, a noteworthy example being the computational nanoelectronics research community (http://www.nanohub.org). All components of an In-VIGO-generated virtual grid – machines, networks, applications and data – are themselves virtual and services are provided for their dynamic creation. This article reviews the In-VIGO approach to Grid-computing and overviews the associated middleware techniques and architectures for virtualizing Grid components, using services for creation of virtual grids and automatically Grid-enabling unmodified applications. The In-VIGO approach to the implementation of virtual networks and virtual application services are discussed as examples of Grid-motivated approaches to resource virtualization and Web-service creation.

title: Distributed File System Virtualization Techniques Supporting On-Demand Virtual Machine Environments for Grid Computing
abstract: This paper presents a data management solution which allows fast Virtual Machine (VM) instantiation and efficient run-time execution to support VMs as execution environments in Grid computing. It is based on novel distributed file system virtualization techniques and is unique in that: (1) it provides on-demand cross-domain access to VM state for unmodified VM monitors; (2) it enables private file system channels for VM instantiation by secure tunneling and session-key based authentication; (3) it supports user-level and write-back disk caches, per-application caching policies and middleware-driven consistency models; and (4) it leverages application-specific meta-data associated with files to expedite data transfers. The paper reports on its performance in wide-area setups using VMware-based VMs. Results show that the solution delivers performance over 30% better than native NFS and with warm caches it can bring the application-perceived overheads below 10% compared to a local-disk setup. The solution also allows a VM with 1.6 GB virtual disk and 320 MB virtual memory to be cloned within 160 seconds for the first clone and within 25 seconds for subsequent clones.

title: Capacity Bounds of SIMO Systems with Co-Channel Interferers
abstract: The exact calculation of the ergodic and outage capacity for Rayleigh fading single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channels in the presence of unequal-power Rayleigh fading interferers is mathematically quite challenging due to the complicated distribution of the capacity. In this paper, a SIMO system with M receive antennas and N interferers is considered. Based on some statistical results, the closed-form upper and lower bound for the ergodic and outage capacity are derived respectively. These bounds are shown to be simple to compute and appear to be quite tight.

title: Iterative Turbo Channel Estimation for OFDM System over Rapid Dispersive Fading Channel
abstract: Coherent OFDM detection requires accurate channel state information (CSI). Mobile radio channels are both time and frequency dispersive, especially at high vehicular speeds, which makes channel estimation a challenging problem in system design. Conventional preamble-based and pilot-aided channel estimation require numerous reference signals, which significantly compromises the system throughput. This paper proposes a novel low complexity iterative turbo channel estimation technique which makes use of preamble, pilots and soft decoded data information in an iterative fashion to improve the system performance over the time and frequency selective fading channel while maintaining the system throughput. The numerical and analytical results show that the proposed technique can approach the performance of systems with perfect CSI with much fewer preamble and pilots symbols compared to existing channel estimation methods.

title: CoS-based QoS management framework for grid services
abstract: In service oriented grid environment, quality of service (QoS) support becomes more and more important. In this paper, we propose a QoS management framework which is based on class of service (CoS) for grid services, called CQEF. By using CoS instead of SLA in grid environment, grid service users and providers will no longer need to negotiate for a complex SLA. This will reduce the overhead effectively. In addition, using CoS means the whole grid service lifecycle has to be changed. We discuss these modifications during different phases of CQEF, including CoS definition, service registration and discovery, service deployment and monitoring. A CoS-based resource management mechanism is also presented to show how to guarantee the resource requirements of arrived requests.

title: Exploring knowledge of sub-domain in a multi-resolution bootstrapping framework for concept detection in news video
abstract: In this paper, we present a model based on a multi-resolution, multi-source and multi-modal (M3) bootstrapping framework that exploits knowledge of sub-domains for concept detection in news video. Because the characteristics and distributions of data in different sub-domains are different, we model and analyze the video in each sub-domain separately using a transductive framework. Along with this framework, we propose a "pseudo-Vapnik combined error bound" to tackle the problem of imbalanced distribution of training data in certain segments of sub-domains. For effective fusion of multi-modal features, we utilize multi-resolution inference and constraints to permit evidences from different modal features to support each other. Finally, we employ a bootstrapping technique to leverage unlabeled data to boost the overall system performance. We test our framework by detecting semantic concepts in the TRECVID 2004 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is effective.

title: A unified mobility model for analysis and simulation of mobile wireless networks
abstract: We propose a novel mobility model, named Semi-Markov Smooth (SMS) model, to characterize the smooth movement of mobile users in accordance with the physical law of motion in order to eliminate sharp turns, abrupt speed change and sudden stops exhibited by existing models. We formulate the smooth mobility model by a semi-Markov process to analyze the steady state properties of this model because the transition time between consecutive phases (states) has a discrete uniform distribution, instead of an exponential distribution. Through stochastic analysis, we prove that this model unifies many good features for analysis and simulations of mobile networks. First, it is smooth and steady because there is no speed decay problem for arbitrary starting speed, while maintaining uniform spatial node distribution regardless of node placement. Second, it can be easily and flexibly applied for simulating node mobility in wireless networks. It can also adapt to different network environments such as group mobility and geographic constraints. To demonstrate the impact of this model, we evaluate the effect of this model on distribution of relative speed, link lifetime between neighboring nodes, and average node degree by ns-2 simulations.