Harmony: Integrated Resource and Reputation Management for Large-Scale Distributed Systems

Advancements in technology over the past decade are leading to a promising future for large-scale distributed systems, where globally-scattered distributed resources are collectively pooled and used in a cooperative manner to achieve unprecedented petascale supercomputing capabilities. The issues of resource management (resMgt) and reputation management (repMgt) need to be addressed in order to ensure the successful deployment of large-scale distributed systems. However, these two issues have typically been addressed separately, despite the significant interdependencies between them: resMgt needs repMgt to provide a cooperative environment for resource sharing, and in turn facilitates repMgt to evaluate multi-faceted node reputations for providing different resources. Current repMgt methods provide a single reputation value for each node in providing all types of resources. However, a node willing to provide one resource may not be willing to provide another resource. In addition, current repMgt methods often guide node selection policy to select the highest-reputed nodes, which may overload these nodes. Also, few works exploited node reputation in resource selection in order to fully and fairly utilize resources in the system and to meet users' diverse QoS demands. We propose a system called Harmony that integrates resMgt and repMgt in a harmonious manner. Harmony incorporates two key innovations: integrated multi-faceted resource/reputation management and multi-QoS-oriented resource selection. The trace data we collected from an online trading platform confirms the importance of multi-faceted reputation and potential problems with highest-reputed node selection. Trace-driven experiments performed on PlanetLab show that Harmony outperforms existing resMgt and repMgt in terms of the success rate, service delay, and efficiency.