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Fig. 1.
Architecture of the Mandelbrot example application
4. Allow transparent application administration
5. Perform dynamic reconfiguration
Although all of the above mentioned challenges are vital for a full-fledged pri-
vate enterprise cloud, the first three are sucient for an initial solution showing
the basic functioning of the cloud. Hence, in this paper mainly the first two
questions are tackled and corresponding solutions are presented. An answer to
question three with regard to an intuitive programming model for distributed
systems has already been given as part of our earlier research work [7] and is
only shortly recapped here. The underlying idea consists in using active compo-
nents, which are software agents with features of components and services. Active
components can be seen as extension of SCA (service component architecture)
[6], which is a promising new paradigm for enterprise system development su-
perseding traditional approaches like Java EE and has been pushed forward by
influential industry players like IBM and Oracle.
1
The last two questions have
been addressed only partially so far and are largely subject of future work.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 calculat-
ing Mandelbrot images will be introduced as a running example. Thereafter, in
Section 3 the novel architecture of an agent-inspired cloud middleware will be
presented. In Section 4 an extensive real world scenario from the area of dis-
tributed workflow management will be described. Section 5 reviews related work
and in Section 6 a conclusion and an outlook to planned future work is given.
2 Running Example
Our approach is illustrated by a running example throughout this paper, that
provides a complete application scenario but is simple enough to be easily un-
derstood. It is called
Mandelbrot
and allows users to render fractal images. To
speed up the rendering process, the system should be able to distribute the
computation across different hosts in a network.
The application is developed based on the active components paradigm in-
troduced in [7] and the implementation is available as part of the open source
1
http://www.osoa.org
