Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 5.
Screenshot of the JCC (a) and the Mandelbrot user interface (b)
The Mandelbrot design from Section 2 has been implemented using the simple
task-based agent kernel. Service interfaces and implementations are realized as
plain Java files containing only application functionality, because the infrastruc-
ture is capable of adding the required glue for dynamic service binding automat-
ically. The usage of the runtime tools is illustrated in Fig. 5a, showing the JCC
while running the Mandelbrot application on three distributed nodes. The tree
to the left shows the three platforms on the nodes (
alex_neu_896
,
workstation1
,
workstation2
) and the components on each platform. At the bottom, it can be
seen that the main Mandelbrot application including the
display
and
generator
components is running on the local node, while each remote workstation runs
two
calculator
components. At the top of the JCC there are tabs allowing to
administer the remote platforms directly. To the right of the JCC, the debugger
tool is activated for a remote calculator running on workstation1. The tool shows
the current step of the agent as well as a history of previously executed steps
and furthermore allows a stepwise component execution. In Fig. 5b the user in-
terface of the Mandelbrot application is shown, which illustrates the assignment
of completed and ongoing tasks to the four calculator components.
Summary.
The previous sections have illustrated our vision and the current
state of an infrastructure for a private cloud. The current implementation au-
tomatically discovers nodes in local networks and supports manual remote de-
ployment of distributed applications based on the intuitive active components
paradigm. In this respect the infrastructure represents a significant improvement
for the development and management of complex distributed applications in e.g.
company networks. Yet we regard it only as one step towards our ultimate private
cloud infrastructure vision, which has to incorporate automatic monitoring and
reconfiguration abilities as well as transparent remote application management.
