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@inf.ufsc.br
A. Hosken
Department of Computer Science (CIC)
University of Brasilia (UnB)
Brasilia – Brazil
Agenda
I.
RESEARCH MOTIVATION
II.
OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
III. The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
IV.
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
V.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
Agenda
I.
RESEARCH MOTIVATION
II.
OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
III. The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
IV.
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
V.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
I. 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.
I. 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.
I. 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.
I. 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.
Agenda
I.
RESEARCH MOTIVATION
II.
OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
III. The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
IV.
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
V.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
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.
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.
Agenda
I.
RESEARCH MOTIVATION
II.
OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
III. The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
IV.
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
V.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
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.
ATHA environment for opportunistic computing
tasks
missio
n
1
state 1
State1
Master
1
tasks
Work
erInf
o
load
taska
State2
shado
w
state2
Master
2
result
Worke
rs
Hand
held
IBM
Compatible
Cray
Supercomputer
iMa
Clust
er
Legio
n
Lapto
p
Workstat
ion
Cond
or
Glob
us
Mainfra
me
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.
The main ATHA interface
Agenda
I.
RESEARCH MOTIVATION
II.
OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
III. The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
IV.
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
V.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
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.
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
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.
Individual Performance
100
90
80
70
10.67.12.107
60
10.67.12.113
10.67.12.116
MFlops
10.67.12.62
50
10.67.12.75
10.67.12.84
10.67.12.89
40
127.0.0.1
30
20
10
0
00:00
00:20
00:40
Time
01:00
01:20
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.
Global Performance (Linpack)
300
10.67.12.6
2
busy
10.67.12.8
9joint
execution
10.67.12.6
2
idle
250
200
10.67.12.10
7
10.67.12.10
7
idle
idle
150
10.67.12.10
7
Mflops
100
busy
10.67.12.10
7
busy"
50
0
0:00
0:20
Time
0:40
1:00
1:20
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.
% of Execution
1.100.000
1.000.000
1.007.396
900.000
800.000
average
average
700.000
600.000
Mflops
500.000
400.000
300.000
200.000
100.000
0
0:00
0:20
Time
0:40
1:00
1:20
Agenda
I.
RESEARCH MOTIVATION
II.
OPPORTUNISTIC COMPUTING
III. The ATHA ENVIRONMENT
IV.
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
V.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
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.
FUTURE WORK
We are considering :
• execute several other applications from the organization;
•a version of the ATHA framework for executing in mobile
devices;
Questions ?