University of Innsbruck developed a service-oriented middleware layer for dynamically managing large, real-time interactive online application (ROIA) sessions, consisting of four services: resource allocation service, capacity planning service for prediction and optimised allocation, monitoring for enforcement of QoS parameters, and policy management for transparent credential mapping and tracing. This service-oriented middleware facilitates the management of large ROIA sessions and transparently scales these sessions on distributed resources by intelligently utilising the parallelization features provided by the Real Time Framework.
Innovation
The edutain@grid management middleware adds unique innovations to the current state-of-the-art resource provisioning mechanisms for the highly interactive online application class:
at run-time resource provisioning
dynamical ROIA session scaling on distributed heterogeneous resources
integrated resource monitoring and in-depth ROIA monitoring
quality of service (QoS) enforcement at ROIA session level
control and monitoring facilities for both business and resource provider actors
mediation of network-level security mechanisms preventing destructive attacks and privacy invasions for ROIAs
Added Value for Hosters (resource providers)
The offered management system is developed in Java which enables usage under most operating systems
The resource provisioning in edutain@grid management middleware is realised at run-time, which optimises the utilisation of available resources, and, in turn, can increase the Hoster's income while offering the same resource pool
The dynamical ROIA session scaling opens the market, previously monopolised by the major providers, for medium and small sized Hosters, by making use of fine and coarse grained, heterogeneous resources alike
High level management opportunity offered through the control and monitoring interfaces, along with the available front-ends (i.e. Management Portal – Apache/Gridshpere-based, Management Portal GUI – Java-based)
The novel security level introduced in the edutain@grid architecture, mediated by the management system offers higher reliability of the ROIA sessions by blocking destructive attacks
Added Value for ROIA Provider
The edutain@grid management middleware provides a specialised interface to the ROIA provider enabling high-level session control, monitoring and steering, the provider consequently being able to coordinate ROIA sessions either by manual control or automatised through another middleware
Scalable sessions highly increase the profit potential for the ROIA sessions provider by offering the possibility of just-in-time resource acquisition, thus maintaining the balance between acquired and utilised resources
Load balancing and at-Hoster local session autonomous steering mechanisms relief the provider of the burden of session micro-management allowing it to coordinate sessions at the highest abstraction level (the level of global sessions)
Added Value for End-User
The dynamically scaled ROIA sessions offer the end-users the possibility to interact simultaneously with huge numbers of peers within the virtual ROIA environments
End-users can join secure ROIA sessions which offer stable ROIA sessions and guarantee their privacy
Management Portal Front-End Demonstration
The management middleware includes two control, monitoring and steering interfaces, namely the ROIA provider interface and respectively the management interface. They offer session coordination possibility at different abstraction levels. The management interface addresses the lower level of abstraction and is targeted for use by the resource providers, offering the finest grained level of control over local ROIA sessions. The Management Portal GUI is a proof-of-concept implementation which utilises the afore mentioned management interface. It exposes four views, namely, a resource view where the available resources and their states are presented, a ROIA session control view, a monitoring view (for both, ROIA sessions and resources) and a ROIA deployment view which provides a convenient method of describing ROIA deployments. The following video shows some of the more important concepts and workflows for managing and monitoring ROIA sessions and resources. The presented scenario shows the creation of a local ROIA session (i.e. within the Hoster boundaries), containing a virtual world, divided into two zones (using the RTF zoning functionality), several waves of end-users connecting to the said session and finally a gradual decrease in end-user numbers. Throughout the scenario, load is gradually distributed on available resources (using the RTF replication functionality) and, eventually, when the end-users leave the session, the entire session is down-scaled to a single resource.
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