Proceedings of IEEE CCIS2011

A NOVEL ENHANCED EDUCATION APPLICATION OF CLOUD COMPUTING

Guang Li 1, Guisheng Chen2

1 Unit 61906, No138, Huiyuan Street, development district, LangFang City, Hebei Province 065001, China, 2 China institute of electric system engineering, Beijing, China, 100084

hbguangli@gmail.com, bjchengs@gmail.com

Abstract Share and innovation of education resource is one of the urgent issues nowadays, In this paper we proposed an innovatory computing paradigm merging volunteer contributing and Cloud approaches into EduCloud@Home in the education project. This proposal represents a solution for building Clouds, starting from heterogeneous and independent nodes. This can implement a generalization of both Volunteer and Cloud computing by aggregating the computational potentialities of many small, low power systems of rich education resource, exploiting the long tail effect of computing. The basic idea is to reuse “domestic” computing resources to build voluntary contributors’ Clouds in the education application project. With the enhanced EduCloud@Home, anyone can experience the power of Cloud computing, both actively providing teacher or students’ own resources and services, and passively submitting their applications.

1 Introduction Share and innovation of education resource is one of the urgent issues nowadays, a noval computing style is needed to meet such need. Cloud computing is generally defined as a distributed computing paradigm that mixes aspects of Uncertainty computing ,(“. . . virtue computing with words under human-internet interface of the Internet ”(Deyi Li et al,2010)),Grid computing, (“. . . hard ware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities”(Foster, 2002)) Internet Computing (“. . .a computing platform geographically distributed across the Internet”), Utility computing (“a collection of technologies and business practices that enables computing to be delivered seamlessly and reliably across multiple computers, ... available as needed and billed according to usage, much like water and electricity are today”) Autonomic computing (“computing systems that can manage themselves given high-level objectives from administrators”) and

Green computing (a new frontier of Ethical computing starting from the assumption that in next future energy costs will be related to the environment pollution). The nowadays development and the success of Cloud computing is due to the maturity reached by both hardware and software, in particular referring to virtualization and Web technologies. These factors made realistic the vision of computing like gas, water, electricity and telephone. Service maybe the essence of our discuss title here, Cloud computing is strictly related to service oriented science , service computing and IT as a service (ITAAS),in practice Cloud computing is derived from the service-centric role that plays quickly and widely spreading on the IT world. From this view, all capabilities and resources of a Cloud (usually geographically distributed) are provided to users as a service, to be accessed through the Internet without any specific knowledge of the underlying technological supporting infrastructure. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains . In SOA, services are the mechanism by which needs and capabilities are brought together. SOA defines standard interfaces and protocols that allow developers to encapsulate information tools as services that clients can access without knowledge of their internal workings.

2 Requirement of education service @Home In the application project of cloud computing, resources including computing, storage, network bandwidth ,repository and interaction capabilities are offered for public use (Deyi Li et al,2009). Cloud computing adopts a virtualized, dynamically scalable model for organizing, distributing, and using computing resources on demand. In contrast to the traditional model, which relies on desktop resources, cloud resources are part of social infrastructure and may have a profound impact on information technologies and their applications. The development of cloud computing is changing software engineering, configuration of network

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resources and terminals, and acquisition of information and knowledge[1]. Since the concept was proposed in 2007, cloud computing has been promoted by academia and industry and has been transitioning from theory into practice. However, the development of cloud computing technologies and their widespread implementation will be a long-term process because of the profound impact that cloud computing services will bring to the public. Important topics such as the technical basis, service models, and commercial operation of cloud computing have already been widely discussed[2-7]. This article analyzes views on resource virtualization, differences between grid and cloud computing, relationship between high-performance computers and cloud computing centers, and cloud security and standards. Generally numerous projects from industry and academia have been proposed and a urgent focus on Cloud computing has been laid from both academic and engineering centers. This client-server model well fits aims and scopes of commercial Clouds: the business. But, on the other hand, it represents a restriction for scientific Clouds, that have a view closer to Volunteer computing. Volunteer computing is also called Peer-to-Peer computing, Global computing or Public computing),and uses computers volunteered by their owners, as a source of computing power and storage to provide distributed scientific computing . It is behind the “@home” view sharing network connected resources for supporting distributed scientific computing. So the Cloud computing paradigm is applicable also at lower scales, from the single contributing user, that shares their desktops, to research groups, public administrations, social communities, small and medium enterprises, which make available their distributed computing resources to the Cloud. In such scenarios, both free sharing and pay-per-use models can be easily adopted. From the utility point of view, the rise of the “techno-utility complex” and the corresponding increase of computing resources demand. In this sense: “vested economic and political interests could conspire together to build huge technology-based utility industries that preserve and reinforce their power bases” ,In this paper, we suggest to address the problem in a different way: instead of building costly private data centers, we propose a more “democratic” form of Cloud computing, in which the computing resources of single users accessing the Cloud can be shared with the others, in order to contribute to the elaboration of complex problems in various education project. Since this paradigm is very similar to the Volunteer computing one, it can be named EduCloud@Home. Both hardware and software compatibility

limitations and restrictions of Volunteer computing can be solved in Cloud computing environments, allowing to share both hardware and software resources or services.The EduCloud@Home paradigm could be also applied to commercial Clouds in education project, establishing an open computing-utility market where users can both buy and sell their services of education. Since the computing power can be described by a “long-tailed” distribution, in which a high-amplitude population (Cloud providers and commercial data centers) is followed by a low-amplitude population (small data centers and private users) which gradually “tails off” asymptotically, EduCloud@Home can also get the Long Tail effect, providing similar or higher computing capabilities than commercial providers’ data centers in education scenario, by grouping small education computing resources from many single teachers and students.

3 Availability and QoS of EduCloud @Home The necessity of such a new computing paradigm in education is strictly related to the limits of existing Cloud solutions, especially in education resource sharing issues. In the past decade the Grid computing paradigm has been considered as the solution for all the computing problems of education resource planning and sharing: a secure, reliable, performing platform for safely managing geographically distributed resources. But the Grid computing has some bottlenecks: it is sensitive to hardware or software differences or incompatibility; it is not possible to dynamically extend a Virtual Organization by on-line enrolling resources, and consequently is not possible to share local resources dynamically, if they are not initially enrolled in the group; it often does not face QoS and billing problems; it mainly implements data parallelism against task parallelism, making difficult the composition of services; a teacher or student needs to have knowledge of both the distributed system and the application requirements in order to submit and manage jobs. These lacks have been partially faced and solved in Utility and Cloud computing, implementing service oriented paradigms with higher level user friendly interfaces. this means the availability issue in promotion of education project, Utility and Cloud implement on-demand computing paradigms: users commission their computing, pay and get the results. Since they are mainly thought for commercial applications, QoS and business policies have to be carefully addressed. Utility and Cloud computing lack of an open, free viewpoint: as in the Grid computing, it is not possible to enroll resources or services, as also to build custom data

centers by dynamically aggregating resources and services not conceived with this purpose. Moreover, each Cloud has its own interface and services through Multi-tenancy channels, therefore it cannot communicate or interoperate with the other Clouds. Another important issue is the customizability, i.e. the capability of expressing a custom application by means of services.On the other hand the Volunteer computing paradigm is proposed for supporting the philosophy of open computing. It implements an open distributed environment in which resources (not services as in the Cloud) can be shared. But it manifests the same problem of Grid with regard to the compatibility among resources. Therefore due to its purpose, it also does not implement any QoS and billing policy.

4 Typical application scenarios In our propose, several possible application scenarios can be imagined for EduCloud@Home: • Innovation and scientific research centers, communities – the home volunteer computing inspiration of EduCloud@Home provides means for the creation of open, interoperable Clouds for supporting scientific purposes, overcoming the portability and compatibility problems highlighted by the @home projects. Similar benefits could be experienced in public administrations and open communities (social network, peer-to-peer, cloud gaming, etc). Through EduCloud@Home it could be possible to implement education resources and services management policies with QoS requirements (characterizing the scientific project importance) and specifications (QoS classification of resources and services available). A new deal for @home cloud computing that does not take into consideration such aspect, following a best effort approach. • Education resource planning discussion center- planting a EduCloud@Home computing infrastructure in business/commercial locations can bring considerable benefits, especially in small and medium but also in big enterprises. It could be possible to implement own data center with local, existing, off the shelf, resources: usually in any enterprise there exist a capital of stand-alone computing resources for office automation, monitoring, designing and so on. Since such resources are only (partially) used in office hours, by Internet connecting them altogether it becomes possible to build up a EduCloud@Home data center, in which allocate the shared services (web server, file server, archive, database, etc) without compatibility constraints or problems. The interoperability among Clouds allows to buy computing resources from commercial Cloud

providers if needed or, otherwise, to sell the local Cloud computing resources to the same providers. This allows to reduce and optimize business costs according to QoS/SLA policies, improving performances and reliability.For example, this paradigm allows to deal with the flow peaks economy: data centers could be sized for the medium case, and worst cases (peaks) could be managed by buying computing resources from Cloud providers. Moreover, EduCloud@Home drives towards a resources rationalization: all the business processes can be securely managed by web, allocating resources and services where needed. In particular this fact can improve marketing and trading (E-commerce), making available to sellers and customers a lot of customizable services. The interoperability could also point out another scenario, in which private companies buy computing resources in order to resell them. • Social networks, wireless sensor networks, home automation - the Cloud computing approach, where both the software and the computing resources are owned and managed by the service providers, eases the programmers’ efforts in facing the device heterogeneity and prevents application downloads. Mobile application designers should start to consider that their applications, besides to be usable on a small device, will need to interact with the Cloud. Service discovery, brokering, and reliability are important, and services are usually designed to interoperate. In order to consider the arising consequences related to the access of mobile users to service-oriented grid architecture, researchers have proposed new concepts such as the one of a mobile dynamic virtual organization . New distributed infrastructures have been designed to facilitate the extension of Clouds to the wireless edge of the Internet. Among them, the Mobile Service Clouds enables dynamic instantiation, composition, configuration, and reconfiguration of services on an overlay network to support mobile computing. A still open research issue is whether or not a mobile device should be considered as a service provider of the Cloud itself. The use of modern mobile terminals such as smart-phones not just as Web Service requestors, but also as mobile hosts that can themselves offer services in a true mobile peer-to-peer setting is discussed in . Context aware operations involving control and monitoring, data sharing, synchronization, etc, could be implemented and exposed as EduCloud@Home Web services involving wireless and Bluetooth devices, laptop, Ipod, cellphone, household appliances, and so on. EduCloud@Home could be a way for implementing Ubiquitous and Pervasive computing: many computational devices and systems can be engaged simultaneously for performing ordinary activities, and may not

necessarily be aware that they are doing so.

5 Challenges and issues In the application of home education ,in order to implement such a form of computing, the following issues should be taken into consideration: • Education Resources and Services management – a mechanism for managing resources and services offered by Clouds is mandatory. This must be able to enroll, discovery, index, assign and reassign, monitor and coordinate resources and services. A problem to face at this level is the compatibility among resources and services and their portability. • Home member frontend – abstraction is needed in order to provide users with a high level service oriented point of view of the computing system. The frontend provides a unique, uniform access point to the Cloud. It must allow users to submit functional computing requests only providing requirements and specifications, without any knowledge of the system resources deployment. The system evaluates such requirements and specifications and translates them into physical resources’ demand, deploying the elaboration process. Another aspect concerning the frontend is the capability of customizing Cloud services and applications. • Private Security – effective mechanisms are required to provide: authentication, resources and data protection, data confidentiality and integrity. • Education resource and service accessibility, reliability and data consistency – it is necessary to implement redundancy of resources and services, and hosts’ recovery policies since users voluntarily contribute to the computing, and therefore they can asynchronously, at any time, log out or disconnect from the Cloud. •Semantic Interoperability frameworks among Clouds – it should be possible for Clouds to interoperate each other. • QoS and SLA management -for both commercial and open volunteer Clouds (traditionally best effort), in order to discriminate among the applications to be run.

6 Conclusions In this paper we proposed an innovatory computing paradigm merging volunteer contributing and Cloud approaches into EduCloud@Home in the education project. This proposal represents a solution for building Clouds, starting from heterogeneous and independent nodes. This can

implement a generalization of both Volunteer and Cloud computing by aggregating the computational potentialities of many small, low power systems of rich education resource, exploiting the long tail effect of computing. In this way EduCloud@Home opens the Cloud computing world to scientific and academic research centers, as well as to communities or single teachers and student users: anyone can voluntarily support education projects by sharing his/her resources. Fundamental aspects to take into account are availability and so-called Qos issues: in a heterogeneous Cloud we can have resources highly reliable and available ,such as temporary contributors connected only few hours.

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