The ATHA Environment: Experience with a User Friendly Environment for Opportunistic Computing

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The ATHA Environment Experience with a User
Friendly Environment for Opportunistic Computing

• M.A.R.Dantas
  
• Department of Informatics (INE)
  
• University of Santa Catarina
  (UFSC)
  
• 88040-900 Florianopolis Brazil
  
  
• Email
  mario_at_inf.ufsc.br
• A. Hosken
• Department of Computer Science
  (CIC)
• University of Brasilia
  (UnB)
• Brasilia Brazil

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Agenda

• RESEARCH MOTIVATION
• OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
• The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
• EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
• CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

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Agenda

• RESEARCH MOTIVATION
• OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
• The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
• EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
• CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

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1. RESEARCH MOTIVATION

• It is observed that the number of computers
  connected to the Internet is growing for a long
  period of time
• Researches mentions that it is difficult to
  estimate when this trend will reverse
• Similar to the Internet, the same phenomenon is
  verified inside several organisations
• Many researchers investigate the possibility of
  using a large amount of resources as a useful
  metacomputer.

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1. RESEARCH MOTIVATION

• Several distributed packages have demonstrated
  the efficiency to execute complex problems, even
  considering the ordinary Internet as a
  distributed computing configuration
• It is interesting to observe that some aspects of
  the computational environment, such as latency of
  the network and co-execution of processes, may
  preclude the use of opportunistic computing for
  certain applications.

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1. RESEARCH MOTIVATION

The opportunistic computing approach considers
the use of spare computational resources to
execute applications which could not be solved
locally. The main goal of this paradigm is to
gather available heterogeneous distributed
resources in computer network environments to
execute distributed and/or parallel
applications.
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1. RESEARCH MOTIVATION

In this talk, we present experience with a user
friendly environment for opportunistic
computing for parallel and distributed
applications in a computer network. The
configuration is called as ATHA.
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Agenda

• RESEARCH MOTIVATION
• OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
• The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
• EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
• CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

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II - OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
In the literature it is possible to find several
research projects, where the main focus is the
efficient utilization of spare loosely couple
resources. These projects different from a
cluster (or grid) approach target to gather
available disposable computing resources from
users (i.e. other users and organizations) free
of charge. In other words, when we consider the
use of a cluster (or a grid) configuration we
understand that we pay for it.
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II - OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
In the opportunistic approach we plan to execute
our applications considering available spare
resources from other users. This approach can
be interesting even inside an organization,
using the private Internet of the institution.
In addition to that, it is important to mention
that some patterns are required for this
utilization. Special parameters such as
operating system, memory and disk space
requirements are some metrics that an
opportunistic framework needs to address. The
goal is to have enough information to form
dynamic configurations to execute parallel
applications.
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Agenda

• RESEARCH MOTIVATION
• OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
• The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
• EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
• CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

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III - The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
The ATHA environment for opportunistic computing
is an enhanced configuration based in our
previous research work. In the configuration
we use Java language, because of the portability
and it allows some interesting classes (e.g.
JCE, Java cryptography extension) that help with
digital signature and cryptography.
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ATHA environment for opportunistic computing
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• Following our initial goal, we built an interface
  which could
• allow users to submit several services to
  servers, examples
• are
• process new tasks,
• gather load information,
• provide information of executed applications,
• inform about the system availability.

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The main ATHA interface
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Agenda

• RESEARCH MOTIVATION
• OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
• The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
• EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
• CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

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IV - EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
In order to verify our proposed opportunistic
framework, we tested the package in a large
organization during a daytime period. The
target was to gather as much as possible spare
machines to execute the RSAChallenge parallel
application.
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The Distributed Environment
Processor Architecture IA32
Clocks 450,700,800,1800 MHz
Cache 512kB
Memory 64,128, 256 MB
Switch Throughput 10-100 MBPS
Operating Systems Windows 98, 2000 e XP
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One feature that is present in the ATHA interface
is a non intrusion characteristic for the owner
of local resources. In other words, we avoided
disturbing owners of the available resources.
Therefore, we start to apply this concept
executing a serial Linpack benchmark to provide
each machine with a weight parameter for
performance. In other words, we built a table
of load indices for the machines of the
environment. Next figure shows individual
performance of processors that we choose to
gather resources.
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The next figure presents some details when
machines enter into the pool of available
resources (i.e. idle status), and when these
computers become heavy loaded (i.e. busy) to
execute our benchmark. It is interesting to
note that the ATHA environment considers every
available machine when it was possible to
provide computation aggregation. However, when
a local user starts to use their machines the
processor was no longer consider into the
configuration.
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The amount of keys that were tested are shown in
the next figure, considering the use of our
opportunistic approach. This figure illustrates
that we were able to test more then a million
keys of the RSAChallenge parallel application.
Without the ATHA environment a special (or
dedicated) machine should be available to
execute this application. The environment was
able to process at a peak a number of million
and seven thousand keys.
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Agenda

• RESEARCH MOTIVATION
• OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
• The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
• EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
• CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

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CONCLUSIONS
The ATHA environment has proved to be successful
executing a parallel application in a real
organization and obtained interesting results.
As an improvement for the framework we are
building new mechanisms to analyze more
precisely workloads of the machines.
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FUTURE WORK

• We are considering
• execute several other applications from the
  organization
• a version of the ATHA framework for executing in
  mobile devices

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• Questions ?