Measured characteristics of futuregrid clouds for scalable collaborative sensor-centric grid applications

The emergence of cloud technology has raised a renewed emphasis on the issue of scalable on-demand computing. Cloud back-end support of small devices such as sensors and mobile phones is one important application. We report our preliminary study of measured characteristics of distributed cloud computing infrastructure for collaboration sensor-centric applications on the FutureGrid. We focus on understanding the characteristics of the underlying network and its impact on multipoint, distributed cloud scalability. We report our findings in areas of performance, scalability and reliability at the network level using standard network performance tools. We measure data at the message level using the NaradaBrokering system by the Indiana University Community Grids Laboratory which supports a large number of practical communication protocols. Results are also presented at the collaboration and communication applications level using the Anabas sensor-centric grid framework, a message-based sensor service management and sensor-centric application development framework. Geographically distributed and heterogeneous clouds in the FutureGrid are used because of their support for scalable simulations. Our preliminary data indicates that a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure like FutureGrid coupled with a flexible collaborative sensor-centric grid framework is suitable for the study and development of new, scalable, collaborative sensor-centric system software and applications.