A user-centered and autonomic multi-cloud architecture for high performance computing applications

Abstract

First, I would like to thank my supervisors for their support and advices. Next, I would like to thank my thesis's reviewers Christophe Cérin and Jean-Louis Pazat, and the members of my thesis committee: Christine Froidevaux, Célia Ghedini Ralha, and Christine Morin. I appreciate all yours comments and questions.Additionally, I would like to thank the professors Vander Alves, Genaína Rodrigues, Li Weigang, and Jacques Blanc for their comments, suggestions, and discussions.Next, I am very thankful to Katia Evrat and Valérie Berthou for kindly helping me in various administrative works. In addition, I am grateful to the authors that sent me their papers when I requested them.After, I would like to thank all my team members in INRIA, especially Michael Kruse and Taj Muhammad Khan. I also thank my friends Cícero Roberto, Antônio Junior, Éric Silva, André Ribeiro, Francinaldo Araujo, Emerson Macedo, and the former Logus's team. Moreover, I would like to thank the people I collaborated with during the last years.I further acknowledge the financial assistance of CAPES/CNPq through the program science without borders (grant 237561/2012-3) during the year of 2013, and Campus France/INRIA (project Pascale) during the period of February to July and November to December 2014.Last but not least, I would like to thank my parents and my family for their unconditional support and patience.

Statistical analysis of Amazon EC2 cloud pricing models

“…From the user point of view, executing applications in an IaaS cloud is a complex task, which involves several steps. () Minimum requirements specification; Pricing model and instance type selection; Virtual machine image selection; Disk type selection (optional); VM creation; VM configuration; Application execution; Output data transfer; and Instance termination. …”

“…In the Amazon EC2 provider, an instance is placed in a zone inside a geographical region. A region may have several availability zones, which are independent cloud environments composed of one or more data centers. The most popular cloud providers have many regions in multiple continents.…”

“…After having chosen the instance type, the user must choose a Virtual Machine Image (VMI) (step 3) and this depends mainly on the characteristics of the operating system required by the application. After that, the user may specify the type of local disk he/she will use (step 4) . Having the region/zone/instance, the VMI and the type of local disk (optional), the VM can be created (step 5).…”

“…At this moment, the provider selects a physical machine that will host the VM and copies the VMI to this machine. Then, the virtualization layer initiates the VM, assigning an IP to it and beginning to charge for the instance usage . After that, the user connects to the VM, installs his/her applications, and finally transfers input data from his/her local machine to the cloud (step 6).…”

“…The access to cloud functionalities relies basically on three levels of abstraction: software‐as‐a‐service (SaaS), platform‐as‐a‐service (PaaS), and infrastructure‐as‐a‐service (IaaS). While IaaS offers access to the cloud infrastructure, PaaS builds upon the IaaS, providing tools that help cloud applications' design . Finally, SaaS provides the applications themselves and manages in a transparent way the whole computing environment.…”