NSF #0834592 Harmony: Efficient Integrated Resource/Trust Management in Large-Scale Distributed Systems (PI)

Advancements in technology over the past decade are leading to a promising future for large-scale distributed systems (LSDS), where globally-scattered distributed resources will be collectively pooled and used in a cooperative manner to achieve unprecedented petascale supercomputing capabilities. Ubiquitous users without preexisting trust relationships have posed a challenge of cooperative resource sharing. These facts necessitate that the issues of resource management (resMgt) and trust management (trustMgt) be addressed in order to ensure the successful deployment of LSDS. However, these two issues are typically addressed separately, despite the significant interdependencies between them: resMgt needs trustMgt to provide a cooperative environment for resource sharing, and in turn facilitates trustMgt to evaluate node multi-faceted trustworthiness in providing various resources. This proposal is aimed at integrating resMgt and trustMgt through the development of a distributed software architecture. The proposed project is built on two key innovations. (1) Lightweight multi-resource management. Unlike most previous multi-resource management approaches that depend on multiple infrastructures and incurring high overhead, or one infrastructure but causing bottlenecks, the project involves a single hierarchically integrated infrastructure without bottlenecks. (2) Integrated multi-faceted trust management. Unlike most previous trustMgt approaches that may not provide correct guidance for resource selection by assigning a node a single trust value for providing all resources, the project offers multi-faceted trust evaluation across multiple resources. Furthermore, it facilitates interaction between trustMgt and resMgt.