Evaluation of PAMS' Adaptive Management Services

Management of large-scale parallel and distributed applications is an extremely complex task due to factors such as centralized management architectures, lack of coordination and compatibility among heterogeneous network management systems, and dynamic characteristics of networks and application bandwidth requirements. The development of an integrated network management framework that is proactive, scalable and robust is a challenging research problem. In this paper, we present our approach to implement a Proactive Application Management System (PAMS). PAMS architecture consists of two main modules: Application Centric Management (ACM) and Management Computing System (MCS). The ACM module provides the application developers with all the tools required to specify the appropriate management schemes to manage any quality of service requirement or application attribute/functionality (e.g., performance, fault, security, etc.). The MCS provides the core management services to enable the efficient proactive management of a wide range of network applications. The services offered by the MCS are implemented using mobile agents. Furthermore, each MCS service can be implemented using several techniques that can be selected dynamically by invoking the corresponding mobile agent template for the service implementation. In this paper, we present our preliminary results of evaluating PAMS management services to manage the performance and fault tolerance execution of three applications of different sizes (small, medium and large). The experimental results demonstrate that our agent-based approach can lead to significant gains in the performance and low overhead fault management of parallel/distributed. For example, the overhead incurred in the application fault management to tolerate one task failure, two task failures, and three task failures in a medium to large size application is less than 0.02%.