R-ECS: Reliable elastic computing services for building virtual computing environment

Grid computing has gained wide interests for being an innovative approach that leverages existing IT infrastructure for large volume computing/data processing. However, a challenging issue faced by Grid computing is that the available resources often do not match the needs of a specific application requirement because of their heterogeneity, distributive and dynamic nature. The mismatching between resources and application requirement leads to resources underutilization and user frustration. Cloud computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as services can deal with the problem well. In this paper we propose a mechanism of Reliable Elastic Computing Service (R-ECS) based on the Cloud computing concept. ECS aggregates resources to construct a virtual computing environment based on virtualization technologies which reduce the coupling between software and hardware. In addition, it provides services supporting on-demand user-customized resources management, which achieves better resource utilization and user satisfaction. Reliability issue is also addressed by appropriate exception detection and fault recovery. Performance evaluation results show that the user-customized virtual computing environment is efficient and increases resources utilization.