SYSTEM MODELS FOR DISTRIBUTED

AND CLOUD COMPUTING

 SYSTEM MODELS FOR DISTRIBUTED AND CLOUD
•
COMPUTING
Clusters of Cooperative Computers
• Cluster Architecture
• Single-System Image
• Hardware, Software, and Middleware Support
• Major Cluster Design Issues
• Grid Computing Infrastructures
• Computational Grids
• Grid Families
• Peer-to-Peer Network Families
• P2P Systems
• Overlay Networks
• P2P Application Families
• P2P Computing Challenges
• Cloud Computing over the Internet
• Internet Clouds
• The Cloud Landscape
 SYSTEM MODELS FOR DISTRIBUTED AND CLOUD COMPUTING

• Distributed and cloud computing systems are built over a large number of
autonomous computer nodes.

• These node machines are interconnected by SANs, LANs, or WANs in a hierarchical

manner.

• With today’s networking technology, a few LAN switches can easily connect hundreds
of machines as a working cluster.

• A WAN can connect many local clusters to form a very large cluster of clusters.

• In this sense, one can build a massive system with millions of computers connected to
edge networks.
 Clusters of Cooperative Computers

• Clusters are most popular in supercomputing applications.

• In 2009, 417 of the Top 500 supercomputers were built with cluster architecture.

• Laid the necessary foundation for building large-scale grids and clouds.

• P2P networks appeal most to business applications.

• Many national grids built in the past decade were underutilized for lack of reliable middleware or well-coded
applications.

• Potential advantages of cloud computing include its low cost and simplicity for both providers and users.

• A computing cluster consists of interconnected stand-alone computers which work cooperatively as a single
integrated computing resource.

• In the past, clustered computer systems have demonstrated impressive results in handling heavy workloads with
large data sets.
 Architecture of a typical server cluster built around a low-latency, high
Cluster Architecture
bandwidth interconnection network.
• This network can be as simple as a SAN (e.g., Myrinet) or a LAN (e.g., Ethernet).

• To build a larger cluster with more nodes, the interconnection network can be
built with multiple levels of Gigabit Ethernet, Myrinet, or InfiniBand switches.

• Through hierarchical construction using a SAN, LAN, or WAN, one can build
scalable clusters with an increasing number of nodes.

• The cluster is connected to the Internet via a virtual private network (VPN)
gateway.

• The gateway IP address locates the cluster.

• Most clusters have loosely coupled node computers.

• All resources of a server node are managed by their own OS.

 Single-System Image
• Ideal cluster should merge multiple system images into a single-system image
(SSI).

• Cluster designers desire a cluster operating system or some middleware to support

SSI at various levels, including the sharing of CPUs, memory, and I/O across all
cluster nodes.

• An SSI is an illusion created by software or hardware that presents a collection of

resources as one integrated, powerful resource.

• SSI makes the cluster appear like a single machine to the user.

• A cluster with multiple system images is nothing but a collection of independent

computers.
 Hardware, Software, and Middleware Support

• Clusters exploring massive parallelism are commonly known as MPPs.

• Almost all HPC clusters in the Top 500 list are also MPPs.

• The building blocks are computer nodes (PCs, workstations, servers, or SMP), special communication
software such as PVM or MPI, and a network interface card in each computer node.

• Most clusters run under the Linux OS.

• The computer nodes are interconnected by a high-bandwidth network (such as Gigabit Ethernet,
Myrinet, InfiniBand, etc.).

• Special cluster middleware supports are needed to create SSI or high availability (HA).

• Both sequential and parallel applications can run on the cluster

• Using virtualization, one can build many virtual clusters dynamically, upon user demand.
 Major Cluster Design Issues

• A cluster-wide OS for complete resource sharing is not available yet.

• Middleware or OS extensions were developed at the user space to

achieve SSI at selected functional levels.

• Without this middleware, cluster nodes cannot work together effectively

to achieve cooperative computing.

• The software environments and applications must rely on the

middleware to achieve high performance.
 Grid Computing Infrastructures

• In the past 30 years, users have experienced a natural growth path from
Internet to web and grid computing services.

• Internet services such as the Telnet command enables a local computer

to connect to a remote computer.

• A web service such as HTTP enables remote access of remote web pages.

• Grid computing is envisioned to allow close interaction among

applications running on distant computers simultaneously.
 Computational Grids
• Like an electric utility power grid, a computing grid offers an infrastructure that couples computers,
software/middleware, special instruments, and people and sensors together.

• The grid is often constructed across LAN, WAN, or Internet backbone networks at a regional, national, or global
scale.

• The computers used in a grid are primarily workstations, servers, clusters, and supercomputers.

• Personal computers, laptops, and PDAs can be used as access devices to a grid system.

• Figure 1.16 shows an example computational grid built over multiple resource sites owned by different
organizations. applications.
• The resource sites offer complementary computing resources, including workstations, large servers, a mesh of

processors, and Linux clusters to satisfy a chain of computational needs.

• The grid is built across various IP broadband networks including LANs and WANs already used by enterprises

or organizations over the Internet.

• The grid is presented to users as an integrated resource pool as shown in the upper half of the figure.

• Special instruments may be involved such as using the radio telescope in SETI@Homesearch of life in the galaxy.

• At the server end, the grid is a network.

• At the client end, we see wired or wireless terminal devices.

• The grid integrates the computing, communication, contents, and transactions as rented services.

• Enterprises and consumers form the user base, which then defines the usage trends and service characteristics.
 Grid Families
• Grid technology demands new distributed computing models, software/middleware
support, network protocols, and hardware infrastructures.

• National grid projects are followed by industrial grid platform development by IBM,
Microsoft, Sun, HP, Dell, Cisco, EMC, Platform Computing, and others.

• New grid service providers (GSPs) and new grid applications have emerged rapidly,
similar to the growth of Internet and web services in the past two decades.

• In Table 1.4, grid systems are classified in essentially two categories: computational or
data grids and P2P grids.

• Computing or data grids are built primarily at the national level.

 Peer-to-Peer Network Families

• An example of a well-established distributed system is the client-

server architecture.

• Client machines (PCs and workstations) are connected to a central

server for compute, e-mail, file access, and database applications.

• The P2P architecture offers a distributed model of networked systems.

• First, a P2P network is client-oriented instead of server-oriented.

 P2P Systems

• In a P2P system, every node acts as both a client and a server, providing
part of the system resources.

• Peer machines are simply client computers connected to the Internet.

• All client machines act autonomously to join or leave the system freely.

• This implies that no master-slave relationship exists among the peers.

• No central coordination or central database is needed.

• The system is self-organizing with distributed control.

• Figure 1.17 shows the architecture of a P2P network at two abstraction levels.

• Initially, the peers are totally unrelated.

• Each peer machine joins or leaves the P2P network voluntarily.

• Only the participating peers form the physical network at any time.

• Unlike the cluster or grid, a P2P network does not use a dedicated interconnection network.

• The physical network is simply an ad hoc network formed at various Internet domains randomly using the TCP/IP and NAI protocols.

• Thus, the physical network varies in size and topology dynamically due to the free membership in the P2P network.
 Overlay Networks

• Data items or files are distributed in the participating peers.

• Based on communication or file-sharing needs, the peer IDs form an overlay network at the
logical level.

• This overlay is a virtual network formed by mapping each physical machine with its ID,
logically, through a virtual mapping as shown in Figure 1.17.

• When a new peer joins the system, its peer ID is added as a node in the overlay network.

• When an existing peer leaves the system, its peer ID is removed from the overlay network
automatically.

• Therefore, it is the P2P overlay network that characterizes the logical connectivity among the
peers.
 P2P Application Families

• Based on application, P2P networks are classified into four groups, as shown in Table 1.5.

• The first family is for distributed file sharing of digital contents (music, videos, etc.) on the P2P
network.

• This includes many popular P2P networks such as Gnutella, Napster, and BitTorrent, among others.

• Collaboration P2P networks include MSN or Skype chatting, instant messaging, and collaborative
design, among others.

• The third family is for distributed P2P computing in specific applications. For example, SETI@home
provides 25 Tflops of distributed computing power, collectively, over 3 million Internet host machines.

• Other P2P platforms, such as JXTA, .NET, and FightingAID@home, support naming, discovery,
communication, security, and resource aggregation in some P2P applications.
 P2P Computing Challenges
• P2P computing faces three types of heterogeneity problems in hardware, software, and network
requirements.

• There are too many hardware models and architectures to select from; incompatibility exists between
software and the OS; and different network connections and protocols make it too complex to apply in real
applications.

• We need system scalability as the workload increases.

• System scaling is directly related to performance and bandwidth.

• Data location is also important to affect collective performance.

• Data locality, network proximity, and interoperability are three design objectives in distributed P2P
applications.
• P2P performance is affected by routing efficiency and self-organization by participating
peers.

• Fault tolerance, failure management, and load balancing are other important issues in
using overlay networks.

• Lack of trust among peers poses another problem. Peers are strangers to one another.

• Security, privacy, and copyright violations are major worries by those in the industry in
terms of applying P2P technology in business applications

• In a P2P network, all clients provide resources including computing power, storage space,
and I/O bandwidth.

• The distributed nature of P2P networks also increases robustness, because limited peer
failures do not form a single point of failure.
• By replicating data in multiple peers, one can easily lose data in failed nodes.

• On the other hand, disadvantages of P2P networks do exist. Because the system is not
centralized, managing it is difficult.

• In addition, the system lacks security. Anyone can log on to the system and cause
damage or abuse.

• Further, all client computers connected to a P2P network cannot be considered

reliable or virus-free.

• In summary, P2P networks are reliable for a small number of peer nodes.

• They are only useful for applications that require a low level of security and have no
concern for data sensitivity.
 Cloud Computing over the Internet

• Computational science is changing to be data-intensive. Supercomputers must be

balanced systems, not just CPU farms but also Peta scale I/O and networking arrays.

• In the future, working with large data sets will typically mean sending the
computations (programs) to the data, rather than copying the data to the
workstations.

• This reflects the trend in IT of moving computing and data from desktops to large
data centers, where there is on-demand provision of software, hardware, and data as
a service.

• This data explosion has promoted the idea of cloud computing

• Cloud computing has been defined differently by many users and designers.

• For example, IBM, a major player in cloud computing, has defined it as follows: A cloud is a
pool of virtualized computer resources.

• A cloud can host a variety of different workloads, including batch-style backend jobs and
interactive and user-facing applications.”

• Based on this definition, a cloud allows workloads to be deployed and scaled out quickly
through rapid provisioning of virtual or physical machines.

• The cloud supports redundant, self-recovering, highly scalable programming models

that allow workloads to recover from many unavoidable hardware/software failures.

• Finally, the cloud system should be able to monitor resource use in real time to enable
rebalancing of allocations when needed.
 Internet Clouds
• Cloud computing applies a virtualized platform with elastic resources on demand by provisioning hardware,
software, and data sets dynamically (see Figure 1.18).

• The idea is to move desktop computing to a service-oriented platform using server clusters and huge
databases at data centers.

• Cloud computing leverages its low cost and simplicity to benefit both users and providers.

• Machine virtualization has enabled such cost-effectiveness.

• Cloud computing intends to satisfy many user applications simultaneously.

• The cloud ecosystem must be designed to be secure, trustworthy, and dependable.

• Some computer users think of the cloud as a centralized resource pool.

• Others consider the cloud to be a server cluster which practices distributed computing over all the servers
used.
 The Cloud Landscape

• Traditionally, a distributed computing system tends to be owned and operated by an

autonomous administrative domain (e.g., a research laboratory or company) for on-
premises computing needs.

• However, these traditional systems have encountered several performance bottlenecks:

constant system maintenance, poor utilization, and increasing costs associated with
hardware/software upgrades.

• Cloud computing as an on-demand computing paradigm resolves or relieves us from these

problems.

• Figure 1.19 depicts the cloud landscape and major cloud players, based on three cloud
service models.
• Internet clouds offer four deployment modes: private, public, managed,
and hybrid .

• These modes demand different levels of security implications.

• The different SLAs imply that the security responsibility is shared

among all the cloud providers, the cloud resource consumers, and the
thirdparty cloud-enabled software providers.

• Advantages of cloud computing have been advocated by many IT

experts, industry leaders, and computer science researchers.
The following list highlights eight reasons to adapt the cloud for upgraded

• Internet applications and web services:

1. Desired location in areas with protected space and higher energy efficiency

2. Sharing of peak-load capacity among a large pool of users, improving overall utilization

3. Separation of infrastructure maintenance duties from domain-specific application development

4. Significant reduction in cloud computing cost, compared with traditional computing paradigms

5. Cloud computing programming and application development

6. Service and data discovery and content/service distribution

7. Privacy, security, copyright, and reliability issues

8. Service agreements, business models, and pricing policies