Development of Safety Precautions for a Cloud-Computing Middleware

Background

When running large parallel applications with demands for resources that exceed the capacity the local computing site offers, the deployment in a distributed Grid- or Cloud-Computing environment may help to satisfy these demands. However, since such an environment is a heterogeneous system by nature, there are some drawbacks that, if not taken into account, are limiting its applicability. First of all, one has to apply a Grid- or Cloud-enabled message-passing library in order to have the ability to route messages to remote sites in an efficient way. Then, because the inter-site communication usually constitutes the system's bottleneck, appropriate quality of service parameters should be provided and policed for those connections during the application's execution. And finally, the runtime environment of the parallel application should offer service interfaces in order to enable an interaction between the distributed session entities and the underlying middleware.

At the Chair for Operating Systems, a new library called ISI has been developed whose functionalities meet those requirements in terms of a session layer to be employed in Grid- or Cloud-Computing environments. However, its current service interfaces do not possess any safety facilities and this is what makes it extremely vulnerable to exploits. Therefore, the current version of the ISI library is unfortunately unsuitable for public Grid- or Cloud-Computing environments. Hence, the work of this thesis should eliminate this drawback.

Assignment

• Analysis of the current service interface
• Identification of the hazard potential
• Development of safety precautions

We offer

• Comfortable working-environment
• Good equipped computer infrastructure
• Personal and engaged supervision

Profile of requirements

• Prerequisites for staring a Bachelor's thesis
• Good programming skills in C/C++
• Competence to work autonomous and creative

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