Although grid systems have evolved in such a way that they are largely used both in industry and academy, techniques to test and evaluate them, such as simulation and emulation, have limitations on both their applicability and their reliability. We are investigating the utilization of paravirtualization techniques merged with systems management tools to build an automated emulation framework for grid experiments. This framework accesses standard network resources to manage communication among virtual nodes, allowing virtual machines to behave like a real grid environment. The development of this framework involves the mapping of virtual machines to physical hosts, automatic deployment and management of virtual machines, automatic configuration of virtual network and experiment control. In this paper, we address these issues and present results demonstrating the feasibility and advantages of our approach.
Distributed systems emulators built with the aid of virtualization tools allow testing of systems in a testbed whose number of real elements are orders of magnitude smaller than the number of virtual elements being tested. However, to allow testers to benefit from these systems, operation of the virtual environment should be hidden from them and performed automatically by the emulator. Moreover, testers may be unsure on the exact needs of their environment, and thus can request an environment that does not fit the experiment. In this paper we present our achievements in providing an emulation framework able to provide environment reconfiguration if the requested one does not comply with experiment's demands. Also, it supplies services such as execution log, environment monitoring, and automatic management of applications running in the virtual environment.
Egypt's fortunes hinge on the Nile. However, little research to date has evaluated economic efficiency improvements that could be achieved by altering Egypt's agricultural water use patterns. This study develops an integrated catchment scale framework to identify potential economic benefits that can be supported by Egypt's irrigation water use. An optimization framework is developed to identify improvements in national farm income, which can be produced with current water supplies that are compatible with Egypt's hydrological, environmental, and institutional constraints. Results suggest that limited water trading across locations and seasons can increase national farm income by up to 28%. The methods used provide a framework for informing decisions on sustainable use of land and water for improved rural livelihoods in the developing world's irrigated areas.