Achieving self-managed deployment in a distributed environment via utility functions

This dissertation presents algorithms and mechanisms that enable self-managed, scalable and efficient deployment of large-scale scientific and engineering applications in a highly dynamic and unpredictable distributed environment. Typically these applications are composed of a large number of distributed components and it is important to meet the computational power and network bandwidth requirements of those components and their interactions. However satisfying these requirements in a large-scale, shared, heterogeneous, and highly dynamic distributed environment is a significant challenge. As systems and applications grow in scale and complexity, attaining the desired level of performance in this uncertain environment using current approaches based on global knowledge, centralized scheduling and manual reallocation becomes infeasible. This dissertation focuses on the modeling of the application and underlying architecture into a common abstraction and on the incorporations of autonomic features into those abstractions to achieve self-managed deployment. In particular, we developed techniques for automatically identifying application components and their estimated resource requirements within an application and used them in order to model the application into a graph abstraction. We also developed techniques that allow the distributed resources to self-organize in a utility-aware way while assuming minimal knowledge about the system. Finally, to achieve self-managed deployment of application components to the distributed nodes, we designed a scalable and adaptive scheduling algorithm which is governed by a utility function. The utility function, which combines several application and system level attributes, governs both the initial deployment of the application components and their reconfigurations despite the dynamism and uncertainty associated with the computing environment. The experimental results show that it is possible to achieve and maintain efficient deployment by applying the utility function derived in this paper based solely on locally available information and without costly global communication or synchronization. The self-management is therefore decentralized and provides better adaptability, scalability and robustness.