Section: Research Program

Experimenting with Clouds

Cloud platforms are challenging to evaluate and study with a sound scientific methodology. As with any distributed platform, it is very difficult to gather a global and precise view of the system state. Experiments are not reproducible by default since these systems are shared between several stakeholder. This is even worsen by the fact that microscopic differences in the experimental conditions can lead to drastic changes since typical Cloud applications continuously adapt their behavior to the system conditions.

Experimentation methodologies for clouds

We propose to combine two complementary experimental approaches: direct execution on testbeds such as Grid'5000, that are eminently believable but rather labor intensive, and simulations (using e.g. SimGrid) that are much more light-weighted, but requires are careful assessment. One specificity of the Myriads team is that we are working on these experimental methodologies per se, raising the standards of good experiments in our community.

We plan to make SimGrid widely usable beyond research laboratories, in order to evaluate industrial systems and to teach the future generations of cloud practitioners. This requires to frame the specific concepts of Cloud systems and platforms in actionable interfaces. The challenge is to make the framework both easy to use for simple studies in educational settings while modular and extensible to suit the specific needs of every advanced industrial-class users.

We aim at leveraging the convergence opportunities between methodologies by further bridging simulation and real testbeds. The predictions obtained from the simulator should be validated against some real-world experiments obtained on the target production platform, or on a similar platform. This (in)validation of the predicted results often improves the understanding of the modeled system. On the other side, it may even happen that the measured discrepancies are due to some mis-configuration of the real platform that would have been undetected without this (in)validation study. In that sense, the simulator constitutes a precious tool for the quality assurance of real testbeds such as Grid'5000.

Scientists need more help to make there Cloud experiments fully reproducible, in the sprit of Open Science exemplified by the HAL Open Archive, actively backed by Inria. Users still need practical solutions to archive, share and compare the whole experimental settings, including the raw data production (particularly in the case of real testbeds) and their statistical analysis. This is a long lasting task to which we plan to collaborate through the research communities gathered around the Grid'5000 and SimGrid scientific instruments.

Finally, since correction and performance can constitute contradictory goals, it is particularly important to study them jointly. To that extend, we want to bridge the performance studies, that constitute our main scientific heritage, to correction studies leveraging formal techniques. SimGrid already includes to exhaustively explore the possible executions. We plan to continue this work to ease the use of the relevant formal methods to the experimenter studying Cloud systems.

Use cases

In system research it is important to work on real-world use cases from which we extract requirements inspiring new research directions and with which we can validate the system services and mechanisms we propose. In the framework of our close collaboration with the Data Science Technology department of the LBNL, we will investigate cloud usage for scientific data management. Next-generation scientific discoveries are at the boundaries of datasets, e.g., across multiple science disciplines, institutions and spatial and temporal scales. Today, data integration processes and methods are largely adhoc or manual. A generalized resource infrastructure that integrates knowledge of the data and the processing tasks being performed by the user in the context of the data and resource lifecycle is needed. Clouds provide an important infrastructure platform that can be leveraged by including knowledge for distributed data integration.