Metaheuristics for Scheduling in Distributed Computing Environments


Book Description

This volume presents meta-heuristics approaches for Grid scheduling problems. It brings new ideas, analysis, implementations and evaluation of meta-heuristic techniques for Grid scheduling, which make this volume novel in several aspects.




Concurrency Control and Reliability in Distributed Systems


Book Description

The major objective of a distributed system is to provide low coast availability of the resources of the system by localizing access and providing insulation against failures of individual components. Since many users can be concurrently accessing the system, it is essential that a distributed system also provide a high degree of concurrency. Research into algorithms has been focused on concurrency, consistency, failure detection, management of replicated copy, and commitment and termination of transactions. This book is a compilation of a subset of research contributions in the area of concurrency control and reliability in distributed systems, with brief explorations of interesting areas, including theoretical and experimental efforts.







Coordination Control of Distributed Systems


Book Description

This book describes how control of distributed systems can be advanced by an integration of control, communication, and computation. The global control objectives are met by judicious combinations of local and nonlocal observations taking advantage of various forms of communication exchanges between distributed controllers. Control architectures are considered according to increasing degrees of cooperation of local controllers: fully distributed or decentralized control, control with communication between controllers, coordination control, and multilevel control. The book covers also topics bridging computer science, communication, and control, like communication for control of networks, average consensus for distributed systems, and modeling and verification of discrete and of hybrid systems. Examples and case studies are introduced in the first part of the text and developed throughout the book. They include: control of underwater vehicles, automated-guided vehicles on a container terminal, control of a printer as a complex machine, and control of an electric power system. The book is composed of short essays each within eight pages, including suggestions and references for further research and reading. By reading the essays collected in the book Coordination Control of Distributed Systems, graduate students and post-docs will be introduced to the research frontiers in control of decentralized and of distributed systems. Control theorists and practitioners with backgrounds in electrical, mechanical, civil and aerospace engineering will find in the book information and inspiration to transfer to their fields of interest the state-of-art in coordination control.




Scheduling Divisible Loads in Parallel and Distributed Systems


Book Description

This book provides an in-depth study concerning a claqss of problems in the general area of load sharing and balancing in parallel and distributed systems. The authors present the design and analysis of load distribution strategies for arbitrarily divisible loads in multiprocessor/multicomputer systems subjects to the system constraints in the form of communication delays. In particular, two system architecture-single-level tree or star network, and linear network-are thoroughly analyzed. The text studies two different cases, one of processors with front-ends and the other without. It concentrates on load distribution strategies and performance analysis, and does not cover issues related to implementation of these strategies on a specific system. The book collates research results developed mainly by two groups at the Indian Institute of Science and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. It also covers results by other researchers that have either appeared or are due to appear in computer science literature. The book also provides relevant but easily understandable numerical examples and figures to illustrate important concepts. It is the first book in this area and is intended to spur further research enabling these ideas to be applied to a more general class of loads. The new methodology introduced here allows a close examination of issues involving the integration of communication and computation. In fact, what is presented is a new "calculus" for load sharing problems.




Optimal and Robust Scheduling for Networked Control Systems


Book Description

Optimal and Robust Scheduling for Networked Control Systems tackles the problem of integrating system components—controllers, sensors, and actuators—in a networked control system. It is common practice in industry to solve such problems heuristically, because the few theoretical results available are not comprehensive and cannot be readily applied by practitioners. This book offers a solution to the deterministic scheduling problem that is based on rigorous control theoretical tools but also addresses practical implementation issues. Helping to bridge the gap between control theory and computer science, it suggests that the consideration of communication constraints at the design stage will significantly improve the performance of the control system. Technical Results, Design Techniques, and Practical Applications The book brings together well-known measures for robust performance as well as fast stochastic algorithms to assist designers in selecting the best network configuration and guaranteeing the speed of offline optimization. The authors propose a unifying framework for modelling NCSs with time-triggered communication and present technical results. They also introduce design techniques, including for the codesign of a controller and communication sequence and for the robust design of a communication sequence for a given controller. Case studies explore the use of the FlexRay TDMA and time-triggered control area network (CAN) protocols in an automotive control system. Practical Solutions to Your Time-Triggered Communication Problems This unique book develops ready-to-use engineering tools for large-scale control system integration with a focus on robustness and performance. It emphasizes techniques that are directly applicable to time-triggered communication problems in the automotive industry and in avionics, robotics, and automated manufacturing.




Distributed System Design


Book Description

Future requirements for computing speed, system reliability, and cost-effectiveness entail the development of alternative computers to replace the traditional von Neumann organization. As computing networks come into being, one of the latest dreams is now possible - distributed computing. Distributed computing brings transparent access to as much computer power and data as the user needs for accomplishing any given task - simultaneously achieving high performance and reliability. The subject of distributed computing is diverse, and many researchers are investigating various issues concerning the structure of hardware and the design of distributed software. Distributed System Design defines a distributed system as one that looks to its users like an ordinary system, but runs on a set of autonomous processing elements (PEs) where each PE has a separate physical memory space and the message transmission delay is not negligible. With close cooperation among these PEs, the system supports an arbitrary number of processes and dynamic extensions. Distributed System Design outlines the main motivations for building a distributed system, including: inherently distributed applications performance/cost resource sharing flexibility and extendibility availability and fault tolerance scalability Presenting basic concepts, problems, and possible solutions, this reference serves graduate students in distributed system design as well as computer professionals analyzing and designing distributed/open/parallel systems. Chapters discuss: the scope of distributed computing systems general distributed programming languages and a CSP-like distributed control description language (DCDL) expressing parallelism, interprocess communication and synchronization, and fault-tolerant design two approaches describing a distributed system: the time-space view and the interleaving view mutual exclusion and related issues, including election, bidding, and self-stabilization prevention and detection of deadlock reliability, safety, and security as well as various methods of handling node, communication, Byzantine, and software faults efficient interprocessor communication mechanisms as well as these mechanisms without specific constraints, such as adaptiveness, deadlock-freedom, and fault-tolerance virtual channels and virtual networks load distribution problems synchronization of access to shared data while supporting a high degree of concurrency







Distributed Space Missions for Earth System Monitoring


Book Description

This title analyzes distributed Earth observation missions from different perspectives. In particular, the issues arising when the payloads are distributed on different satellites are considered from both the theoretical and practical points of view. Moreover, the problems of designing, measuring, and controlling relative trajectories are thoroughly presented in relation to theory and applicable technologies. Then, the technological challenges to design satellites able to support such missions are tackled. An ample and detailed description of missions and studies complements the book subject.