[Swift-devel] swift-on-ec2

[Kate Keahey]

I agree that we are talking of a new model that allows a better 
separation between provisioning resources and task management -- the 
interesting aspect of this is that what we are talking about is 
combining coarse-grained provisioning combined with very light-weight 
task management.

In terms of "always" being able to get resources if you pay for them -- 
there really are no miracles though. EC2 will run out of resources 
eventually just like any other provider does, payment is just a 
different way of managing policies. There is interesting work out of the 
HP quartermaster project though that predicts resource demand and the 
tycoon work of course shows how if people need resources they could 
always just bid higher.

And then -- although we deviate from the traditional batch-scheduling, I 
don't think it will go away anytime soon ;-). The interesting challenge 
(what Borja is working on) is how to combine those two models for Grid 
communities.

Ioan Raicu wrote:

> 
> Falkon is certainly about getting more performance from the same hardware. 
> 
> EC2 on the other hand is more about a new paradigm of how resources are 
> acquired.  In the batch-scheduled world, the demand for resources is 
> usually higher than the supply.  In EC2, its likely that the supply for 
> resources is higher than the demand.  With that said, it means that with 
> EC2, it is likely that you could always get more resources now if you 
> were willing to pay for them... this could have implications on the 
> resource allocation and management policies that govern when it makes 
> sense to get more resources and when not to.  Using EC2 might be about 
> performance, but the really interesting part that I see emerging is a 
> new model that deviates from the traditional batch-scheduled systems the 
> Grid community has grown accustomed to.
> 
> Ioan
> 
> -- 
> ============================================
> Ioan Raicu
> Ph.D. Student
> ============================================
> Distributed Systems Laboratory
> Computer Science Department
> University of Chicago
> 1100 E. 58th Street, Ryerson Hall
> Chicago, IL 60637
> ============================================
> Email: iraicu at cs.uchicago.edu
> Web:   http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~iraicu
>        http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/
> ============================================
> ============================================
> 

-- 

Kate Keahey,
Mathematics & CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago