Bis Samstag Abend in AB, ergo zwei Tage Büro-frei: da muss dissertiert werden! Um nicht von den üblichen Verdächtigen abgelenkt zu werden hilft da nur eins: in Klausur im Speicher gehen.

Herr K. in Klausur: Wasser, Kaffe, Buttermlich, Obst – alles da um keine Ausreden zu haben; man beachte besonders das stylishe Quake 3: Arena-Mauspad

Finally, check for the “journal paper” prerequisite for my PhD. Even though I already had a journal publication in IJCAC, I now even have a journal publication that covers my PhD topic: Using service level agreements in a high-performance computing environment.

Abstract

The concept of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) has come to attention particularly in conjunction with Grid computing. SLAs allow for a controlled collaboration between partners, that is service providers and their customers. SLAs have originated in the telecommunication industry but have found broad uptake in the Grid computing community, especially regarding the topics of their automated negotiation, general management and legal implications. High-performance computing (HPC) providers, however, have not been taking up SLAs yet, even though they often provide not only supercomputer resources but at the same time access to cluster or grid resources. This might be due to the fact that SLAs are mostly regarded on a per-job basis, which is not consistent with the contractual model that HPC providers currently use. In this work, we analyze how HPC providers can implement SLAs and what benefits this brings, proposing the usage of SLAs on a long-term basis. We further present a software that has been developed to simulate the scheduling of jobs at an HPC provider site using service levels and analyze how different distributions of service levels between the submitted jobs influence machine usage and average waiting times of jobs. Finally, we present how an HPC provider can practically implement SLA-based scheduling.

The full paper can be downloaded at the “Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience” site.

Ich weiß nicht warum, aber von Herausgebern wird man gerne mit nicht vorhandenen akademischen Graden und Amtsbezeichnungen bezeichnet, bei IGI werde ich zum Beispiel immer als “Prof. Kübert” angeschrieben, warum auch immer. Das war auch bei den letzten beiden E-Mails nicht anders, die ich in Bezug auf das Buch Achieving Real-Time in Distributed Computing: From Grids to Clouds erhalten habe, denn dort habe ich ein Kapitel hauptamtlich verfasst und an einem anderen habe ich mitgeschrieben. Genauer gesagt, beim Kapitel Service Level Agreements for Real-Time Service-Oriented Infrastructures bin ich Erstautor, beim Kapitel Web Service Specifications Relevant for Service Oriented Infrastructures bin ich einer der Co-Autoren.

Das ganze Buch gibt’s übrigens für 143,99 bei Amazon.de, für die einzelnen Kapitel darf man knapp 20€ hinlegen. Wie das mit Büchern so ist, die direkt aus Projekten entstehen: das sind jetzt nicht unbedingt Publikationen auf die ich besonders stolz bin, ist halt im wesentlichen State of the Art.

That was hard labour: initially submitted on March 31st, 2010, my book chapter “Service Level Agreements for Job Control in Grid and High-Performance Computing” has finally been published! The funny thing is that this was the first publication I did regarding my PhD topic – and its on of the last ones to appear.

The chapter is now part of the book “Grid Computing: Towards a Global Interconnected Infrastructure“; thanks to the editor Nikolaos Preve for realizing this book! 153 chapter proposals were submitted in total and only 27 were accepted – less than 20%, so not a bad achievement in making it inside. Due to the copyright agreement I am not allowed to publish the full work, but here is the abstract:

Service level agreements (SLAs) are electronic contracts that are used to describe service levels for a plethora of tasks and situations, regardless of them being consumed offline or online. SLAs are being investigated already for a long time in the area of grid computing and, as well, by classical high performance computing (HPC) providers. Most often, these investigations are either only on a high logical level above or at the middleware or on a low physical level below the middleware. In the first case, components are at best placed in the middleware layer but are not directly communicating with lower-level resources, in the second case SLAs are only used below the middleware and are not visible above. This work presents an approach for a solution to job submission and scheduling – called job control -, using SLAs as long-term contracts in an integrated fashion across layers.

You can find the chapter in the book here on Springer’s page and you can even buy it at Amazon for 95,99€.

Finally published: Greg’s and my journal paper on how to build a private cloud for elastic web hosting. It’s published in the International Journal of Cloud Applications and Computing (IJCAC) and it can be yours if you have 30$ to spare.

I’d really like to provide the PDF free of cost but the copyright agreement I had to sign does not even allow me to host the paper on my own web space – that’s basically what I loathe about scientific publications, but my options are limited here, I need a journal publication for my PhD and with journal publications you don’t really get good copyright deals. If you ever wanted to know how a copyright agreement looks, you can find the one from IGI Global here. The relevant parts are:

The author(s) in consideration of the publication of the above named manuscript also understands:

1. Author(s) agrees to, and does hereby assign all rights, title and interest, including copyrights, in and to the manuscript to Publisher. The author retains the rights to any intellectual property developed by the author and included in the manuscript including, without limitation, any models, theories, or conclusions formulated by the author. While the author may use any and all thoughts and research results developed or accumulated while working on a manuscript, and may rewrite, update, and re‐title them for use in other publications, the author CANNOT use the verbatim text of the manuscript or any part thereof that has been copyrighted by IGI Global without first obtaining the written permission of IGI Global.

(…)

4. Author(s) cannot post the contents of the article on any website or distribute the work to others in either electronic or print forms without the written permission of IGI Global.

Well, at least my PhD thesis will be published under a Creative Commons license.