IEEE-International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Technology, ICRTIT 2011 MIT, Anna University, Chennai. June 3-5, 2011
Mobile Based Payment Model for HPC Clouds Manmohan Brahma#1, G K Patra#2, R P Thangavelu#3, V Anil Kumar#4 #
High Performance Computing Group CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Wind Tunnel Road, Bangalore, India - 5600037 1
[email protected] 2
[email protected] 3
[email protected] 4
[email protected]
Abstract— Use of High Performance Computing (HPC) for modelling and simulation in the areas of engineering, geophysics, biotechnology etc. is not new. However, there has been a growing demand for HPC over the past few years in other non – conventional areas like architecture, graphics design and even gaming. The prohibitive cost of HPC resources, which are considered to be the costliest in the world of computing, forces many not to use them. Especially in countries like India, where implementing an HPC infrastructure has many challenges, many genuine requirements are compromised. Currently only a handful number of organizations both in government and private enterprise can afford to establish HPC facilities of their own. So the biggest question, in the field of computing is that “Is HPC a dream for a common person’s use?” Cloud computing, the future generation computing, could be one solution to realize such dreams. It is a very new concept in the field of computing characterized by three main entities – Software as a service, Platform as a service and Infrastructure as a service. However, it can be a true success if it can be made cost effective, easy to use and hassle free. In this paper we propose a payment model equivalent to prepaid cellular phone payment for HPC as a cloud services for common people. Keywords— High Performance Computing (HPC), Cloud Computing, Mobile Payments
I. INTRODUCTION Can we imagine electric power supply being affordable to only big corporate and government agencies which can pay large amount of money? What if, the bills of the cellular phones need to be paid only through banks, credit cards or pay pal account instead of local vendors? What have made them penetrate so much into the livelihood of humans are the affordability, reliability and easy in dealing with them. Why not High Performance Computing (HPC) be made accessible to common people? Though, the need of HPC to them is a question of debate, it is certain that innovations will happen, once facilities are available. In a country like India HPC is considered to be a dream for common people. Very few corporates and government agencies are powered by these costlier devices exclusively for them. So far HPC has been addressing the growing needs of science and engineering for faster, accurate and cost effective solutions. Studies have shown that HPC utilization very low,
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due to exclusive use policies by organizations. In the last decade concepts like Grid helped to share the unutilized computing cycles to others. However, various issues like portability, software licensing did not make it very popular. The new concept of Cloud has brought a lot of promises not only in HPC but also in every mobile and static device. A cloud is a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources [1]. These resources can be dynamically reconfigured to adjust to a variable load, allowing also for optimal resource utilization. This pool of resources is typically used by a pay – per – use model in which it guarantees service by means of a legal agreement. HPC in cloud is a very new concept, and only a very few HPC clouds are available in the market today. The concept of a cloud in the field of computing is characterized by three main entities – Software as a service, Platform as a service and Infrastructure as a service. As far as availing the services are concerned, technology will provide the mechanism to get physical access. However, complexity comes, when it comes to payment. The real success of a HPC cloud will depend on, how simple the payment mechanism is. In this paper, we propose a new payment model for efficient and easy access to an HPC cloud. The proposal is similar to the one used for prepaid cellular services along with some concepts from credit/debit card payments mechanisms. These days everybody uses a cellular phone. The mechanism of paying the call cost is very simple with regards to a prepaid connection. We need to go for a cellular service provider vendor and pay the money for a certain time period to access cellular services. We suggest a similar kind of payment model through a cellular phone or local vendor to use HPC cloud based services. Thus in a nutshell we would be focusing on HPC as a service to society and its payment through cellular phone. The recent advancements in wireless data infrastructure [2] have created a new channel for cellular payments. We simply need to recharge the cellular phone account balance at any local telephone service provider as a special voucher for HPC services and money will be deducted out of the same account as the usage grows. In section II we will describe the need of HPC for common people. In section III we will deal with current payment mechanisms and their drawbacks. We will provide a brief introduction about the HPC cloud in section IV, followed by the new model for payment in section V. In section VI we will
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IEEE-ICRTIT 2011 discuss an implementation in a controlled environment. Section VII will deal with the model related to dynamic software license management. II. NEED OF HPC FOR COMMON PEOPLE
IV. THE HPC CLOUD The HPC cloud is based on the architecture of a so called cloud and virtualization. It is a four layered model as depicted by Fig.1 [8]. The Hardware, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service).
A. Role of HPC in common people life? A. Hardware It is well understood that scientists and engineers have been the users of HPC since its inception. However, recently the user base has been increasing and it is expected that a common man also will need to use these services in future. A common man can be an architect who needs high-end devices for structural analysis and designing of buildings, a graphic designer who needs high level resources to add special effects, a student who need to carryout project work and even kids whose mom has agreed for high-end gaming on a supercomputer during the vacations. To add to it even, HPC managers need them temporarily to carryout bench mark testing, getting additional expertise before procuring a system for their own organization. B. Why a user should pay per use? Scientist and engineers in government organization or a private corporate, who need to use the HPC facility everyday need to establish their own facility. However, smaller companies like a civil engineering consultancy, a research group at an university or a camera man who rarely needs the HPC cloud should also access and pay only for the time he is going to use the resources. It is similar to people using Internet connections through their mobile phones and money deducted only for the time they browse.
The Hardware refers to the state of art computing and networking equipment capable enough to handle a large load. It includes efficient processing engines, storage solutions, fast networks and larger memory. It comprises fastest supercomputing hardware architectures, such as Intel® Xeon® and Itanium® in hybrid clusters. It can also include the NVIDIA® Tesla GPU or AMD FireStreamTM GPU compute accelerators etc. [3]. It must include a High performance storage system available for scratch space and long term archival of user data. B. Infrastructure as a Service As there would be a larger mass to utilize the resources, a suitable quota management is enforced to distribute the hardware among different users. Infrastructure refers to the Operating System and its virtualization. The same hardware will behave as different machines for different users. They will be allocated with dedicated CPU, Memory, Disk virtually depending upon their accountability and creditability.
III. EXISTING SYSTEMS AND ITS DRAWBACKS In the present scenario HPC facilities are available exclusively to an organization. The organization procures their hardware and establishes it as an asset for them. They provide access to their engineers, scientists and developers for their official benefits. Various companies offer software solutions as a service. They term it cloud computing services. It’s very rare that HPC solutions also are provided as services [13]. Amazon provides EC2 platform as a service [10]. Most HPC cloud based researches are carried out in it. Penguin Computing’s HPC–as–a–service [14], IBM cloud [15] and GoGrid [16] are in the state of improvement. Silicon Graphics International provides HPC devices as Cloud services in collaboration with Nimbis Services Inc. [5]. Basically cloud computing is an emerging issue. Moreover, HPC clouds are very rare. In our work we emphasize on the payment mechanism. The major drawback of the current system with respect to the payment mechanism is as follows. • Trust based agreement only between known entities • Credit card or a pay pal account for paying authority. • Various security concerns in the payment process [6]. • Complexity in costing software licensing
Fig. 1 Cloud Layers
C. Platform as a Service When the environment is used by programmers, the first term they think about is the platform. It points to the programming models, execution method and programming environment. The service should be capable of providing different execution environment.
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Mobile Based Payment Model for HPC Clouds D. Software as a Service The most important from the user point of view is the application software as a service. Here the selected software will be availed to the user as a service [9], which means that they need not have a disk at their client installed with the application software suite. They would be accessing the software online and storing the data back in the cloud. The management of the services of different levels and the user accountability is implemented by an accounting server. In the subsequent section we will discuss this.
gateway. Besides the five main entities there are a couple of other terminologies that are discussed below. A. The SMPP Protocol The SMPP (Short Message Peer – to – Peer) [7]protocol is an open industry layer – 7 TCP/IP protocol for exchanging SMSs between SMS peer entities such as short message service centers. It allows authenticated third parties to submit SMSs in bulk. It is a secure protocol and can sustain large message volumes like 10,000/min.
V. THE MOBILE PAYMENT MODEL FOR HPC CLOUD SERVICES B. Accounting Server In the model, we introduce five main entities which include: A. HPC User B. HPC Cloud Service Provider C. Cellular Service Provider D. 3rd – Party Payment Gateway E. HPC Associated Bank
This sever will keep track of what a user is doing with the HPC Cloud. Basically it will keep track of what kind of resources the user needs for how long and makes an entry in the database. It also deals with the management of the services at the different levels of the cloud. C. Billing Server
A. HPC User A HPC user can be any lay person, a professional architect or a graphic designer, he can be a kid or a student or even a system manager. A person who needs HPC facilities for his work is a HPC user. B. HPC Cloud Service Provider A HPC Cloud service provider is a business targeted organization which consists of a cloud based HPC server, an accounting server, a firewall and a validator. C. Cellular Service Provider The Cellular service provider is an agency which provides services such as telephone calling and messaging. For India it can be BSNL, MTNL or Airtel as cellular service provider. D. 3rd Party Gateway The 3rd Party Gateway will behave as a 3rd Party Payment Gateway for us. In the sense that a 3rd party will guarantee the services offered by the HPC service provider to the user via the cellular service provider and in turn assure the HPC service provider about the payment from the user via a cellular service provider. For its services the gateway authority may charge some amount as service charges from the HPC Cloud Service providers. E. HPC Associated Bank As the name is self explanatory, the collected amounts from the user for the services can be deposited in this bank in the account of the HPC cloud service provider by the 3rd party
This server works in collaboration with the database attached to the accounting server and the cellular service provider. The Accounting server reveals the detailed data about the uses made by the user. The billing server converts the usage details into monetary information and passes it to the cellular service provider. It regularly checks for the user accountability and updates itself to limit the service. The Process The HPC user goes to his nearest telephone subscriber vendor and purchases a HPC telephone value added card and registers his cellular phone to avail HPC resources. The amount deposited can be exclusively used for HPC purpose only. On registration the user receives a secret username and password. In fact this username and password behaves as a secure login id for the first instance. No two users in a same cloud will have identical secure login id. Every cellular service provider is allocated with a set of user-ids. Once the user registers and purchased the top-up card he needs to enable the HPC cellular services by sending the code present in card to the Cellular service provider through an SMS. Here it ends the payment from the user side to the cellular service provider. Hence forth, the users need not bother about the payments until minimum balance is reached. A descriptive view of the model is represented in Fig. 2. Before the user starts using the HPC, he sends an SMS “ACTIVATE MYHPC username” to the service provider gateway to activate the HPC connections. The service centers provide the SMPP interface and SMS services so that billing transactions are preferred securely through SMS via SMSC (Short message service center). The 3rd Party Gateway and the Billing Server has a legal agreement with the telephone service provider to access the SMPP interface and the SMS
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IEEE-ICRTIT 2011 Gateway [4]. The SMS Gateway is a unique short message service messaging tool which accepts SMSs from the users as well as the HPC service provider and stores it in the database as a backup. The SMS gateway, on receiving a SMS from the user immediately passes it on to the cellular service provider billing application. There it checks the user account balance; if it finds sufficient funds to process the request then it makes an entry of the amount owned by the user in the billing server and writes a message in the validator database to allow the particular username. The user then logs in through the secure login id provided to him from his terminal. On entering the secure login id the validator checks the database for the validity of the user, on successful validation it connects to the firewall through VPN. The firewall again checks for the authenticity of the terminal connecting it. Once it passes through the firewall, it connects the HPC Cloud server through the Accounting Server. Thus the user starts accessing the HPC cloud as services from its layered architecture.
Fig. 2 Mobile payment model for HPC Clouds
Once the user logs out of the cloud services, the VPN connection is immediately closed for the particular username and the accounting server writes a detailed usage report to the database. In turn the billing server takes the same data from the database and computes the monetary equivalent of the service usage and informs the cellular service provider to deduct the money from the user account and pay it to the 3rd Party Gateway. Once the cellular service provider pays the required amount to the 3rd Party Gateway, it immediately alerts the user about the transaction details through an SMS. On receiving the amount from cellular service provider the 3rd Party Gateway pays the amount to the HPC Associated bank. The user is assured of the QoS (Quality of Service) from the Cellular service provider. The cellular service provider assures to pay the charges to the 3rd party gateway and in turn the the 3rd party assures the payment to the HPC cloud service provider. All these payment assurance are made through proper SLA (Service Legal Agreements)[12].
VI. CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT IMPLEMENTATION HPC cloud is a relatively new concept in comparison to clouds for other applications. Implementation on a real HPC cloud is a challenge, due to its prohibitive cost and nonavailability of experimentation facility. However, we implemented the proposed architecture in a controlled and simulated environment at CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation (C-MMACS). CSIR C-MMACS has one of the largest HPC facilities in the country with wide range of HPC servers starting with multinode clusters to the multiprocessors shared memory system. In fact the centre hosts the largest shared memory system in the country. The use of the systems is facilitated through a middleware, which takes care of job submission, load balancing, understanding architecture dependencies and also accounting. Currently the systems are used by other CSIR organizations in India though a gateway facility. Though it cannot be considered as a complete HPC cloud, this can be treated as a private cloud, with the usage limited to trusted users only. We simplified our implementation to avoid challenges arising from the involvement of external agencies such as an associated bank, mobile service provider etc. We assumed the availability of the services like payment; authorization and authentication mechanisms are already in place for other applications such as credit cards, prepaid mobile etc with sufficient degree of reliability. In our implementation, a user who wishes to use the HPC facility first goes through a secure gateway authentication system and requests for a number of services and recourses (requirements), such as number of processing cores, computation time, memory, storage etc. The middleware checks the eligibility of the user. The eligibility of the user is defined by the amount of money available (this component is simulated as we do not have such a mechanism in place) in the users account. Each service as well as resources is associated with a rate and the total requested resources are converted to its monetary equivalent and compared with the available balance. If the user has sufficient balance then the requested is processed, otherwise the user is requested to make necessary payment before proceeding to the next step. Following are the certain challenges we faced in the implementation. A. What if the user realizes in middle of a job execution that he needs more resources
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We configured the middleware to dynamically change the resources before the requested resources are exhausted by checking the eligibility periodically (in this case monetary balance). The biggest challenge was, if the user is unaware of the modified requirement, then the jobs are aborted after the available resources are exhausted and hence, results not only in monetary loss but also in fruitless computation. To avoid this we planned to provide some credit facility with a time limit and a warning to the user through mail (SMS can also be
Mobile Based Payment Model for HPC Clouds IX. CONCLUSIONS
implemented). However, we could not test it as the commercial middleware did not have such facility. B. What if the balance reduces to the minimum value during service access? In normal scenario this does not happen. However, to avoid the complication in the previous implementation, we allowed jobs to start without having an initial estimation, but introduced a periodic eligibility check, which results in reaching minimum balance during the service. This is avoided by intimating the user with warning when a minimum balance is reached. After repeated warning if the user does not take necessary steps, then the job will be terminated. Though a preliminary implementation have been done, more testing and implementation needs to be done to understand the pros and cons much better. VII.
The cellular phone based payment model between the HPC user and the HPC service provider is easy for payment anywhere and anytime because it is SMS based. Neither advanced cellular phones nor advanced computers are required to access HPC facilities. From our studies we found that we don’t have sufficient numbers of HPC cloud for running serious HPC applications at this point of time. Most of the clouds are optimized for running business applications. HPC Clouds can become more popular if they can reach more people and in a more convenient way. Sending any SMS for other value added services in mobile phones such as GPRS, SMS etc. is common these days. People are well aware of this kind of mechanisms, so if we add HPC cloud services to these value added services it would be all adding tea. HPC to common people may bring new revolution and create novel applications. REFERENCES
DYNAMIC SOFTWARE LICENSING
[1]
These days in comparison to hardware, software is costly. The concept of cloud computing helps us in this scenario to reduce cost. However, when we talk about HPC software they are also expensive. It would be difficult to install an unlimited user license for particular software. The HPC cloud server would be having a legal agreement with the software solution provider to acquire license from them as and when demanded from the user and will pay for the time they accessed the same. The application vendor would be having a license server, so when a user requests a particular tool the software solution provider grants a license to the HPC cloud server and keeps track of how long the license is installed in the cloud. The payments to the software license provider are made every fortnight.
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
VIII.
NOVELTY AND ADVANTAGES OF THE PROPOSED MODEL
[9]
None of the components of the model are new to the IT enabled world. However, the novelty of the model is the integration of them (being used for different applications) to achieve the target of cheap and easily available HPC facility. The major advantages of this payment model are as follows. • The payment model is easy to implement. • People are aware of these kinds of payment mechanisms. • User identifiers such as login credentials are dynamically assigned to users through secure interface in mobile gateway. • SMS is very cheap these days. • Both user and the service provider are assured of service and payment respectively from a 3rd party.
[10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]
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