platform description and the QoS description to build
a parametrized objective function to be minimized (or
maximized, depending on the nature of the parame-
ters). The optimization engine drives the simulator to
explore the space of possible configurations and in-
forms the RQM whether a configuration meeting the
demands has been found or not. CHASE can also be
invoked by the RQM component in case that the mon-
itoring system is alerting that the QoS agreed in the
SLA is at risk of violation: by performing new simu-
lations in the up-to-date setting, it informs the RQM
if alternative scheduling decisions (like migrating or
adding more VMs) can solve the problem or if the
violation is unavoidable, in which case the SLA will
have to be renegotiated or terminated.
The MAGDA component is a service hosted into
a virtual machine and implementing the MAGDA
(Aversa et al., 2007) mobile agent platform (a mobile
agent is a Software Agent with an added feature: the
capability to migrate across the network together with
its own code and execution state, following both pull
and a push execution model (Xu and Wims, 2000)).
It is developed using and extending the JADE, a FIPA
compliant agent platform developed by TILAB (Bel-
lifemine et al., 2001). The MAGDA Platform hosts a
set of agents able to perform different kind of bench-
marks, that vary from simple local data sampling (ac-
tual CPU usage, memory available, ...) to distributed
benchmarking (evaluating distributed data collection,
or evaluating the global state with snapshot algo-
rithms). Moreover the mobile agents are able to up-
date an archive of the measurement in order to per-
form historical data analysis. In the Cloud@Home
context, the migration capabilities are of help to carry
on an on-site (i.e., on the resource itself) monitoring.
RQM and SLA-oriented components use the mobile
agents in order to monitor the delivered resources.
Performance indexes are collected and used to en-
force the SLAs. In the case that the C@H User explic-
itly requests the monitoring service, mobile agents
are instructed to migrate to the place where the re-
sources have been activated and start monitoring their
performance at application level. It is also possible
to customize the monitoring procedure and remotely
check the state of the resources, following either a
push (agents autonomously provides information on
resources) or a pull (agents are polled in order to get
information on resources) communication model.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The idea of exploiting unused computing and storage
resources is at the base of the Volunteer computing
as well, according to which private users’ resources
are voluntarily aggregated to serve distributed, mostly
scientific, applications. This work grounds on the
idea of exploiting voluntarily offered resources (data
sensed from mobile devices, single desktops, private
or public Companies’ Data Centers) to build general
purpose clouds that will then re-offer the resources
on an ”as-a-service” basis. The main objective of
the work is to propose a framework (Cloud@Home)
for the integration of both commercial and volunteer-
based clouds, aggregating resources from heteroge-
neous environment, and offering users extra services
to monitor and guarantee the quality of the provided
resources. The architecture of Cloud@Home has
been described in the paper. In the future, we are plan-
ning to integrate the security requirements among the
service level objectives to be guaranteed, and to add
a module for the C@H Users’ billing and accounting
management.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work described in this paper has been par-
tially supported by the MIUR-PRIN 2008 project
“Cloud@Home: a New Enhanced Computing
Paradigm”.
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