Melbourne School of Engineering Computer Science & Software Engineering

Parallel and Distributed Computation

Overview

The central theme of the Parallel and Distributed Computing Research Group is to design and develop open parallel and distributed systems, programming environments, algorithms, and applications that transparently scales and harness resources from enterprise networks to the Internet. The design challenges arise from the distribution of resources across various administrative domains coupled with their availability varying with time. The fundamental design parameters and issues investigated include: security, resource autonomy, uniform interface, robustness, reliability, scalability, economic incentive for cooperation, quality of service, adaptation, utility-based resource allocation, autonomic management, and service-orientation.

The paragraphs below describe the current activities of the group. For more detailed information, and advice about research opportunities, contact the leader of that project.

Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems

Grid and Utility computing models enable the sharing, selection, leasing, and on-demand aggregation of geographically distributed resources such as computers, databases, applications, and instruments. The Gridbus project, a flagship initiative of the Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory, has been developing fundamental, next-generation cluster and grid technologies that support a true utility-driven, service-oriented computing. The Gridbus Project is actively investigating a number of research probes that include: visual Grid application development tools for rapid creation of distributed applications, resource management and scheduling, competitive economy-based Grid broker for scheduling distributed data-oriented applications, cooperative economy-based cluster scheduler, Web-services based Grid market directory, Grid Bank, Grid portals, Grid accounting services, and Grid simulation.

Project Leader: Dr Rajkumar Buyya.
More Information: http://www.cloudbus.org/
Project Members: Hussein Gibbins, Akshay Luther, and Krishna Nadiminti.
Research Students: Martin Placek, Rajiv Ranjan Manjuka Soysa, Anthony Sulistio, Srikumar Venugopal, Chee Shin Yeo, Jia Yu.
Other Collaborators: Alex Barmouta (University of Western Australia), Professor Wolfgang Gentzsch (Sun Microsystems, USA), Benjamin Khoo (IBM Global Services), Dr Rafael Moreno-Vozmediano (Complutense University of Madrid), and Associate Professor Martin Savior (School of Physics), Dr Brian Smith (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research), Associate Professor Chen-Khong Tham (National University of Singapore), Dr Lyle Winton (School of Physics),
Funding: This project has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the University of Melbourne, Sun Microsystems, the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, Singapore Computer Systems, and Storage Technology Corporation.

Peer- to-Peer Computing

The emergence of massive, autonomous, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems on the Internet is a spectacular phenomenon that has generated a new level of network programming abstraction and presents significant challenges for parallel and distributed computing applications. P2P networks are transient, completely decentralized and potentially disconnected into autonomous sub-networks of activity. Advancing P2P applications from fundamental file sharing towards more general resource sharing, process management, and ultimately towards a P2P operating system, requires significant understanding of P2P algorithms and network programming technologies. As network technology continues to expand into wireless and ad-hoc networking domains, the use of P2P applications becomes increasingly important and complex. This project is addressing open research questions in the following areas: cost optimal topologies, convergence of distributed systems, parallel programming abstractions, collaborative systems, communication complexity, modeling interconnection network properties and emergent Internet structures.

Project Leader: Dr Aaron Harwood.
More Information: http://p2p.csse.unimelb.edu.au/
Project Members: Yi Nutanong, Minh Truong.
Research Students: Rajiv Ranjans, Scott Douglas, Khaled Samahi, Tau Chen Tamm.
Other Collaborators: Dr Ron Balsys (Central Queensland University).
Funding: This project has received funding via ARC Discovery projects and the University of Melbourne.

Distributed Data Management

Wide-area networks storing distributed data have become a reality of our lives. To enable access and querying on distributed data, we need some form of data indexing. Conventional centralized indexes are relatively straight forward to implement but they lead to congestion as the rate of requests increases, and they can form a single point of failure. Index replication and caching may be used to offset some of the congestion and reliability issues. But they do not scale well enough to address the needs of wide-area networks. Besides, central indexes are very difficult to update over certain dynamic networks where many mobile nodes connect and disconnect from the network. This project pursues two major research directions in accessing distributed content. First, we can divide the space that the data lies on with a division algorithm and afterwards assign responsibilities to the members of the network. The key issue in this approach is that the division algorithm should be globally known by all the members of the network and hence can be maintained without an all-to-all communication algorithm. Second, we can divide a conventional central index over the nodes of a network so that connectivity is still preserved without replicating the complete index on each node.

Project Leader: Dr Egemen Tanin.
More Information: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~egemen/

 

Selected Publications, 2001-2004

    Edited Collections

  1. R. Buyya (ed.) (2004), Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Workshop on Grid Computing (Grid 2004), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, California, USA.
  2. B. Gropp, D. Reed, M. Baker, R. Pennington, M. Brown and R. Buyya (eds), Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2002), IEEE Computer Society Press, USA.
  3. C. Wang, D. Katz, F. Lau and R. Buyya (eds), Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2003), IEEE Computer Society Press, USA.

    Journal Articles

  4. D. Abramson, R. Buyya and J. Giddy. (2002) A computational economy for grid computing and its implementation in the Nimrod-G resource broker. Future Generation Computer Systems 18(8) pp.1061-1074.
  5. A. Apon, R. Buyya, H. Jin, and J. Mache. (2004) Cluster computing in the classroom and integration with computing curricula 2001. IEEE Transactions on Education 47(2) pp.188-195.
  6. M. Baker, R. Buyya and D. Laforenza. (2002) Grids and Grid technologies for wide-area distributed computing. Software: Practice and Experience 32(15) pp.1437-1466.
  7. R. Buyya, D. Abramson, J. Giddy and H. Stockinger. (2002) Economic models for resource management and scheduling in Grid computing. Concurrency and Computation-Practice and Experience 14(13-15) pp.1507-1542.
  8. R. Buyya, K. Branson, J. Giddy and D. Abramson. (2003) The Virtual Laboratory: A Toolset to Enable Distributed Molecular Modelling for Drug Design on the World-Wide Grid. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 15(1) pp.1-25.
  9. R. Buyya and M. Murshed. (2002) GridSim: A toolkit for the modeling and simulation of the distributed resource management and scheduling for Grid computing. Concurrency and Computation-Practice and Experience 14(13-15) pp.1507-1542.
  10. M. Chetty and R. Buyya. (2002) Weaving computational grids: how analogous are they with electrical grids?. Computing in Science and Engineering 4(4) pp.61-71.
  11. D. Hoong and R. Buyya. (2004) Guided Google: A meta search engine and its implementation using the Google distributed web services. International Journal of Computers and Applications 26(1) pp.181-187.
  12. J. Sherwani, N. Ali, N. Lotia, Z. Hayat and R. Buyya. (2004) Libra: A computational economy based job scheduling system for clusters. Software: Practice and Experience 34(6) pp.573-590.
  13. A. Sulistio, C. Yeo and R. Buyya. (2004) A taxonomy of computer-based simulations and its mapping to parallel and distributed systems simulation tools. Software: Practice and Experience 34(7) pp.653-673.

    Conference Publications

  14. A. Barmouta and R. Buyya. GridBank: A grid accounting services architecture (GASA) for distributed systems sharing and integration. In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Internet Computing and E-Commerce pp.1-8 Nice, France, April 2003.
  15. S. Burq, S. Melnikoff, K. Branson and R. Buyya. Visual parameteric modeler for rapid composition of parameter-sweep applications for processing on global Grids. In Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Part III (LNCS 2659) pp.739-749 Melbourne, Australia, June 2003.
  16. R. Buyya, S. Date, Y. Mizuno-Matsumoto, S. Venugopal and D. Abramson. Composition and on demand deployment of distributed brain activity analysis application on global Grids. In Proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC 2003) pp.1-10 Hyderabad, India, December 2003.
  17. H. Gibbins and R. Buyya. Gridscape: A tool for the creation of interactive and dynamic Grid testbed web portals. In Distributed Computing - IWDC 2003 (LNCS 2918) pp.131-142 Calcutta, India, December 2003.
  18. A. Harwood and R. Balsys. Peer service networks: distributed P2P middleware. In Proceedings of the APAC Conference and Exhibition on Advanced Computing, Grid Applications and eResearch pp.1-19 Gold Coast, Queensland, October 2003.
  19. A. Harwood and M. Truong. Multi-space distributed hash tables for multiple transport domains. In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Networks pp.283-287 Sydney, Australia, October 2003.
  20. B. Hughes, S. Venugopal and R. Buyya, 2004. Grid-based Indexing of a Newswire Corpus. Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing (Grid 2004). IEEE Computer Society Press. pp 320-327.
  21. M. Placek and R. Buyya. G-Monitor: A web portal for monitoring and steering application execution on global grids. In Challenge of Large Applications in Distributed Environments (CLADE 2003) pp.10-18 Seattle, Washington, June 2003.
  22. A. Sulistio, C. Yeo, R. Buyya. Visual modeler for grid modeling and simulation (GridSim) toolkit. In Computational Science - ICCS 2003, Part III (LNCS 2659) pp.1123-1132 Melbourne, Australia, June 2003.
  23. E. Tanin and A. Harwood. Hashing spatial content over peer-to-peer networks. In Electronic Proceedings of the 2003 Australian Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference pp.1-5 Melbourne, Australia, December 2003.
  24. M. Truong and A. Harwood. Distributed shell over peer-to-peer networks. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications pp.269-275 Las Vegas, Nevada, June 2003.
top of page