Programmatic Access to a Compute Utility
TS-5622

A Compute Utility (CU) is a job scheduling engine at its core that exposes its compute services through a Portal. A portal is meant for a human to interact with the CU and it supports registration, notification, AuthN/AuthZ, procurement, resource-uploading, job-submission and resource-retrieval. A Portal is a tiered architecture like Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) with a presentation tier, business tier and integration tier. A Portal-CU uses the CU as a batch-processing engine. The compute cycles at the back end is the utility being purchased by end users to run compute-intensive tasks. One could draw an analogy between Java EE applications that web-enable back-end transactions and the Portal-CU that web-enables a back-end compute infrastructure. While the portal's HTML interface is useful for humans, it can get in the way for other external applications and services that tries to compose and consume the compute services. A CU can be useful to a much broader community of developers and ISVs if there were APIs that exposed the various services such as User-Services, Job-Services, Business-Services, and Compute-Services etc. This presentation is a reflection on how to design and develop programmatic APIs. What are the domain/object models? How to choose/support the wire protocols? How to design fine-grain security and access-control? What are the common design options? We will propose an alternative to compute with distributed objects using JINI ERI for pluggable transport & security. It will show how to use unicast for a marshaled JINI lookup service and retrieve smart proxies from that service which in turn can access all other services. The presentation will demonstrate how to build a flexible, extensible, pluggable, secure, middle ware that will allow programmatic access to a compute utility. The alternatives proposed in this talk are just as useful to any distributed computing problem that spans across an insecure network.

Watch The Session
You need to be a registered Sun Developer Network member to view this multimedia session. If you are a registered SDN member, please click on "Watch Multimedia" button to log-in to view the multimedia session. If you wish to join SDN, please click here.