La ROADEF
La R.O.A.D
Evénements
Prix
Publications
Plus
Forums
Connexion
Livre blanc

FT post-doctoral position

Forum 'Emplois' - Sujet créé le 2007-05-04

Proposition for post-doctoral position

Title: Computational economics and market negotiation protocols for large scale Grid systems

General Information:

Contract Type: Post-doctoral fellowship for a duration of 12-18 months
Starting date: October-December 2007
Domain: Grid computing and resource management
Institution: France Telecom R&D Division MAPS/AMS
Locality: Paris/France


Context


The FTRD Magneto research project – in which the post-doctoral research will take place, participates within an international collaborative project -- Grid4All is an EC funded FP6 Call5 IST project focalizing on implementation of middleware and services for large scale grids. Grid4All aims to enable domestic users, non-profit organisations such as schools, and small enterprises, to share their resources and to access massive Grid resources when needed, envisioning a future in which access to resources is democratised, readily available, co-operative, and inexpensive. Examples include home users of an image editing application, school projects like volcanic eruption simulations, or small businesses doing data mining. Cooperation examples include joint homework between pupils, and international collabora-tion such as the edition of a multilingual newsletter between schools from different countries.
We target small communities such as domestic users, schools and small enterprises, thus combining for-profit or non-profit users and providers, harnessing their resources added to those of operated IT centres, to form on-demand service oriented Grids, avoiding preconfig-ured infrastructures.
The main technical issues addressed within this project addresses support for multiple ad-ministrative and management authorities, self-management by combining the strong points of structured overlay P2P networks and that of component models, on-demand resource alloca-tion, heterogeneity, volatility, and fault tolerance.
The proof-of-concept of the Grid4All platform will be demonstrated by two application catego-ries:
 Digital multimedia content processing services for the domestic user. This will show the relevance of Grid4All for a residential user – on demand utility like access to re-sources on the internet
 Collaborative learning tools and systems for communities such schools. An increasing number of activities within schools require resources beyond the typical environment provided from within the school. Moreover schools may join together dynamically to form learning communities. Such a community may also be augmented with re-sources allocated from the network. One application category retained is a shared whiteboard.


Grid4All aims to enable resource sharing dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organisations. VOs are composed of a number of autonomous entities (representing different individuals and organisations), each of which has a range of capabilities and resources at its disposal. These entities are autonomous and self-interested, but benefit from pooled resources. Notion of VOs underpins Grid computing. Within Grid4All we focus on autonomic management ca-pabilities for virtual organisations. In particular one of the capabilities is that of allocation of resources required to maintain the operations of the virtual organisation.

To address formation, maintenance, and management of virtual organisations in environ-ments such as the internet – characterized by scale, autonomy and self-interest of partici-pants, Grid4All proposes the following approach:
o Component models applied to decentralized and autonomic Grid services mapped on structured peer-to-peer overlay services. Peer-to-peer overlays have basic properties of adaptation and reorganization (typically when nodes join or leave), whereas component models address dynamic (re)deployment and adaptability to constantly changing environments, through its self-modification capabilities.
o Self-managing and self-organizing peer-to-peer overlay services to implement dy-namic virtual organisations spanning multiple management domains. Contrarily to ex-isting notions of virtual organisations, whose users and providers are largely static, the lifetime of Grid4All virtual organizations may range from few hours to potentially years. Moreover, participants may be transient, and subject their participation to dy-namic constraints and policies, hence requiring self-managing and self-organizing properties.

Area of work

The focus of work covered within this post-doctoral opportunity concentrates on the aspect resource allocation for virtual organisations through the implementation of a resource market place. The market place provides a set of services that allow participants to sell and acquire resources through either mediated or non-mediated negotiations.

Understanding the limitations of a centralized market place (service) that proposes a fixed number of market negotiation mechanisms, the approach that we have taken within Grid4All is to enable an open market place where there is no persistent entity that operates the role of a mediator between the participants needing to trade. Participants within Grid4All, that is, either virtual organizations which need to acquire resources, or providers that want to sell their resources, should be allowed to select an appropriate market mechanism that best re-sponds to their needs – an application that needs to acquire multiple types of resources as a bundle is best served through a combinatorial auction. This is nevertheless not necessary in the case of an application that may accept variable quantities of CPU resource. These par-ticipants should be able to spontaneously create a market when a need arises – to sell, to buy, or even to mediate. This approach to 'decentralization' also relies on market information services that allow participants to learn about and to appreciate the current market situations.

Grid4All requires a generic market negotiation framework that permits plugging in of negotia-tion strategies and policies. Experimentation of different market allocation mechanisms re-quires a framework facilitating the specification and design of new market protocols.

Hence the focus of work within Grid4All is directed in two parts:
 Architecture, framework, and tools that enable the construction of open resource market places
o Facilitate developers and designers to design, specify, and prototype new market protocols and mechanisms
o Provide tools to create and instantiate spontaneous markets through a 'fac-tory' or repository containing executable templates
o Facilitate the interaction of participants (consumers and providers) at a given running market negotiation session
 Study of a concrete set of market negotiation protocols (mechanisms)


Description of Work

Our current work-in-progress is focused on (i) a software framework for the development of market based negotiation mechanisms and (ii) methodology and tools for the specification of the market protocols.

The successful candidate will participate within the continuation of this work and also impor-tantly complement this work within the area of market mechanisms. Market mechanisms have been largely studied in the last years, resulting in the growth in electronic commerce. Auctions have been found to be an efficient economic mechanism in resource allocation in distributed environments. Allocation mechanisms of Grid resources (computational, storage, applications, data, multi-media objects, etc), should take into consideration specific require-ments such as:
 Applications may require that the specified resources are allocated entirely (in a bun-dle)
 Resources are not homogeneous in their qualifications (for example, there are CPUs of different processing capacities)
 Resource allocation may need to be constrained in time, network location etc.
 Accepted levels of aggregation – aggregated storage capacity may need to be allo-cated from a constrained number of physical disks

The activities of the post-doctoral fellow will focus on the development of market negotiation mechanisms and protocols. This includes:
• Study and proposition of suitable market based negotiation and coordination protocols taking into consideration Grid4All application categories and use scenarios
• Development of efficient algorithms for the resolution of the allocation problem
• Implementation of the above within the confines of the previously cited frame-work
o Propose adequate extensions in case of need
• Documentation in English

The work will be conducted within the France Telecom R&D research unit Magneto focusing on distributed software architectures and infrastructures. Grid4All being a collaborative pro-ject the work will be conducted in collaboration with other external partners within the Grid4All project.



Qualification

The successful candidate will contribute to and participate in the design, specification, and implementation of decentralized markets for Grid4All virtual organisations. Decentralized service/resource discovery, publisher subscriber dissemination infrastructure and services will be implemented within related work packages. The design of the market place will rely on such services.
The ideal candidate will have acquired academic qualifications equivalent to a PhD thesis in computer and management sciences with knowledge of software engineering. Development skills in Java are a necessity. The candidate will possess skills within one or more of the fol-lowing areas:
• Multi-agent coordination systems
• Large scale distributed systems architecture and algorithms
• Computational economics and optimization techniques

Teamwork, autonomy, and the ability to work effectively with academic and industrial part-ners are important qualifications for this position. Experience within economic models for resource allocation is a plus. Writing of documentation in English is a must.


Environment
The candidate will work within the France Telecom R&D Division MAPS/AMS laboratory spe-cialized in distributed middleware architecture and technologies. The cross-disciplinary na-ture of work implies collabo