A Negotiation Protocol for Accountable Resource Sharing in e-Science Collaborations

Abstract

The e-Science community is entering an age where: (i) resources can be supplied from various infrastructures to meet dynamic and customised resource provisioning demands; and (ii) no centralised management is required between an e-Scientist collaboration (i.e., a research group) and infrastructures. The independence between research groups and infrastructures for dynamic and customised resource provisioning raises two new issues. First, how to enable an e-Scientist or a research group to reach an agreement dynamically with an infrastructure for customised resource provisioning? Such dynamic resource provisioning agreement would require to be formed in a lightweight manner. Second, how to manage resource sharing for e-Scientists who are members of a research group for such dynamic resource provision? In this scenario, a research group may pay for resources consumed by members and require fine-grained rules followed by the resource provisioning. Previous research proposed negotiation protocols for dynamic and customised resource provisioning to support e-Scientists' computational experiments. However, these protocols assumed that: (i) a research group and an infrastructure are in the same virtual administrative domain, where the infrastructure acts as a resource provider; and (ii) resource sharing management (i.e. resource provisioning based on resource sharing rules within the group and accounting for resource consumption by e-Scientists) is conducted entirely within the provider domain. As a result, resource sharing management available for research groups is coarse-grained. Furthermore, existing protocols consider only negotiation between an e-Scientist and a resource provider, and do not consider communication between a research group and resource provider to inform resource usage by group members. These assumptions are not valid for dynamic resource provisioning collaborations where no virtual administrative domain exists to centrally manage a resource provider and research group. Thus, the approach for resource management must be reconsidered by addressing resource sharing management for a research group and resource provisioning management for resource providers. It should also incorporate a complete resource provisioning lifecycle between independent entities. In this thesis, we propose the Alliance2 protocol, which considers these requirements and offers a solution. The protocol is established upon a novel e-Science collaboration model proposed in this thesis, Alliance2, which re-identifies the involved entities' demands and restructures the resource provisioning lifecycle. The idea of the Alliance2 model is to shift resource sharing management including accounting for group members to research groups to enable fine-grained management. Based on this idea, the Alliance2 protocol: (i) regulates the procedures of negotiation among the engaged entities to reach effective agreements for resource provisioning; and (ii) manages a complete the resource provisioning lifecycle between independent research groups and resource providers. This thesis formally verifies the correctness of the proposed protocol and analyses the features of the protocol via a comparison with related protocols. Furthermore, a testbed is built to evaluate functionalities and negotiation performance of the Alliance2 protocol. This testbed implements production use cases that require dynamic and customised resource provisioning to meet e-Scientists' demands for computational experiments as well as fine-grained resource sharing management for a research group. The evaluated functionalities are derived from the demands of the use cases. That is dynamic and customised resource provisioning required by group members can be managed by a research group on a per job basis via the Alliance2 protocol. The functionality evaluation demonstrates that the Alliance2 protocol can facilitate dynamic resource provisioning to support e-Scientists' customised demands while en

Date of Award	31 Dec 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Rizos Sakellariou (Supervisor)