1. Distributed Application Management Using PLuSH Jeannie Albrecht, Christopher Tuttle, Alex C. Snoeren, and Amin Vahdat UC San Diego CSE {jalbrecht, ctuttle, snoeren, vahdat} @ cs.ucsd.edu http://ramp.ucsd.edu/projects/plush Goal: Provide an extensible execution management system for large-scale distributed systems, including PlanetLab and the Grid Motivation Problem: How do we deploy, manage, and maintain distributed applications that simultaneously run on hundreds of heterogeneous physical machines around the world? Existing approaches for finding resources and managing applications are cumbersome, manual, and error-prone; tools exist to address some issues, but utility is limited by lack of integration PLuSH provides a unified environment to support the distributed application design and deployment life cycle on the Grid, PlanetLab, and local site clusters Architecture The PLuSH Controller PLuSH consists of an application controller that communicates with client processes running on each of the available resources An abstract system description specifies the file transfer method, software to install, program execution, and process monitoring details Takes abstract system description and pool of resources as input Uses a resource matcher to select and allocate a subset of resources that meets the user criteria Installs a set of user-defined software packages and project files Configures and starts processes, monitoring the running application After execution is complete, cleanup actions are executed at the clients Experiment Description http://ramp.ucsd.edu/plush/demo/demo.tar 100./demo.exe --runtime=300 Pluggable Framework Research Contributions & Current Status Sample distributed application lifecycle, including the 5 main life cycle stages (blue boxes) and their key underlying components One goal of PLuSH is to allow users to plug in customized, environment-specific components for each phase in the life cycle For example, a Grid user may choose to query MDS aggregators for resource discovery, submit a job to a GRAM-enabled scheduler like PBS for resource acquisition, and use GridFTP for service deployment Research Contributions A high-level specification language for distributed computations that captures the requirements of a broad range of applications Extensibility from the ground up to support a range of mechanisms for resource discovery, resource acquisition, security, and authentication Current Status PLuSH supports application management on PlanetLab and in site clusters Integration with the vGrADS is currently in progress Describe software packages Application Description Resource Monitor Resource Discovery Resource Acquisition Service Deployment Application Control Content Distribution Storage Authentication Access Control The configuration contains component and execution definitions A component is a description of a group of resources rspec is an abstract description of the resources desired The experiment selects previously defined configurations for execution Define a name for the project The resources tag defines which set of resources to use