Middleware for Clouds and e-Science

1. BACKGROUND This special issue focuses on middleware for Clouds and e-Science applications, and is based on extended, thoroughly revised papers from the 8th International Workshop on Middleware for Grid, Clouds and e-Science (MGC 2010) and the Workshop on Challenges in e-Science (CIS 2010). The authors were invited to provide extended versions of their original papers taking into account comments and suggestions raised during the peer review process and comments from the audience during the workshops. Relevant contributions have been provided by Beloglazov and Buyya [1], Veiga et al. [2], Klôh et al. [3], Mathias and Baude [4], de Alencar et al. [5], Porto et al. [6], Ogasawara et al. [7], and Oliveira et al. [8]. These contributions focus on: Optimal online deterministic algorithms and adaptive heuristics for energy and performance efficient dynamic consolidation of virtual machines in Cloud data centers; A checkpointing-enabled and resource-aware Java Virtual Machine (VM) for efficient and reliable e-science applications in grid environments; A bicriteria scheduling process with Class of Services support on Grids and Clouds; A component-based middleware for hybrid Grid/Cloud computing platforms; A peer-to-peer scheduling mechanism for workflows in grid computing; A metaphoric trajectory data warehouse for Olympic follow-up; A provenance management system for scientific workflows; and An adaptive parallel execution strategy for Cloud-based scientific workflows. The eighth edition of the MGC workshop series encouraged researchers to submit and present original work related to middleware in Grids, Clouds and e-Science. Within this overall scope, MGC 2010 emphasized issues of scalability in terms of Grids and Clouds, mechanisms for computation and data scaling and adaptive and semantic mechanisms for scaling capabilities across disciplines and over time. The workshop was held in Bangalore India in conjunction with the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 11th International Middleware Conference. The Challenges in eScience Workshop is an initiative of the National Laboratory of Scientific Computing with support from the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science. The event gathered scientists and practitioners to discuss the latest achievements in supporting eScience applications. The availability of more powerful instruments and the deployment of high-speed networks are empowering researchers with unprecedented volume of data that must be cleaned, analysed and interpreted. Achieving this is, nevertheless, far from trivial. A complex computing arsenal composed of Grids and Clouds equipped with multicore machines is driving the development of software to support scientists in the difficult task of understanding the data deluge. In this context, the Challenges in …