AssessGrid - Advanced Risk Assessment and Management for Trustable Grids

Idea of AssessGrid

AssessGrid will address the risk awareness and consideration in SLA negotiation, self-organising fault-tolerant actions, and capacity planning. It will develop and integrate methods for risk assessment and management in all Grid layers. The corner stones are risk management scenarios reflecting the perspective of Grid end-users, brokers, and providers. The results will support all Grid actors by increasing the transparency, reliability, and trustiness as well as providing an objective fundament for planning and management of Grid activities. Thus, AssessGrid will supply Next Generation Grids with additional innovative and required components to close the gap between SLAs as concept and accepted tool for commercial Grid uptake.

The AssessGrid development will be in a Grid standardization context and will produce generic, customisable, and interoperable open-source software for risk assessment, risk management, and decision support in each Grid layer. The outcome quality will be demonstrated in provider environments and in close interaction with customers.

Objectives and Outcomes of AssessGrid

The AssessGrid project aims to satisfy the demands for transparent and understanable risk evaluation by extending the Grid technology with methods for risk assessment and management as core services of future Grids. Since end-users, brokers, and providers have different perspectives on risk enhanced Grd services, they define the three major AssessGrid objectives: the end-user seeks a reliable and trustworthy provider, the broker looks for the best offer for its customer, and the provider aims to reduce the risk of SLA violation. Furthermore, providers need objective measures to lower the execution risk and to analyse their infrastucture in order to remove bottlenecks. Therefore, the main objectives of the AssessGrid project are to provide:

• Mechanisms for risk identification, risk assessment, risk treatment, and risk monitoring on all Grid layers as decisive components for negotiation and enforcement of SLAs as well as the definition of business models.
• Risk-based support for decision making in quality and capacity planning leading to higher productivity and cost-effective usage of virtualized resources
• Risk measures as parameters for self-organizing fault-tolerant systems
• Improved transparency, usability, and trustiness by costumized presentation of confidence and risk information to end-users, brokers, and providers
• Aggregated quality and reliability information of performance as fundament for provider evaluation and competition
• A consistent realization based on existing Grid developments and standards as well as the evaluation of risk management methods in real-world environments.
  

A vertically in all Grid layers integrated risk assessment and management solution will be developed. Additionally, an end-user client and a risk-enhanced broker service will outcome as seperated modules.

For more information please take a look in the AssessGrid brochure.

Form of the Project, Partners

AssessGrid is a STREP funded by the EC in the FP6 IST programme. It has started in April 2006. Prof. Odej Kao from the TU Berlin will coordinate the project for which excellent experts in research and industry syndicate:

• ATOS Origin, Spain: Grid Service Provider and Grid Technolody Adaptor
• CETIC,  Belgium: Software and Process Quality in Grid content
• IAMSR, Abo Akademi University, Finland: Risk Management
• Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing - PC², Germany: Grid Fabric and Resource Management
• TU Berlin, Germany: SLA Negotiation and Grid Fabric
• University of Leeds, United Kingdom: Grid Brokerage and SLAs
• Wincor Nixdorf, Germany: End-user
  

Project Webpage: http://www.assessgrid.eu/