While the Cloud computing paradigm is maturing and gaining wide acceptance, topics like Quality of Service assurance and resource monitoring will remain active fields of investigation and research. In this paper, we identify characteristics of the monitoring infrastructure in Cloud environments and we present a new architectural approach. The proposed mechanism is spanning across different levels of the infrastructure, providing monitoring data from the application, virtual and physical infrastructure as well as energy efficiency related parameters. Apart from the collection mechanism, we present a monitoring management and storage framework which lies above the infrastructure layer. By exploiting open source APIs combined with custom components we have come up with a generic yet efficient solution, applicable to public, private and hybrid Cloud scenarios.

Cloud infrastructure providers may form Cloud federations to cope with peaks in resource demand and to make large-scale service management simpler for service providers. To realize Cloud federations, a number of technical and managerial difficulties need to be solved. We present ongoing work addressing three related key management topics, namely, specification, scheduling, and monitoring of services. Service providers need to be able to influence how their resources are placed in Cloud federations, as federations may cross national borders or include companies in direct competition with the service provider. Based on related work in the RESERVOIR project, we propose a way to define service structure and placement restrictions using hierarchical directed acyclic graphs. We define a model for scheduling in Cloud federations that abides by the specified placement constraints and minimizes the risk of violating Service-Level Agreements. We present a heuristic that helps the model determine which virtual machines (VMs) are suitable candidates for migration. To aid the scheduler, and to provide unified data to service providers, we also propose a monitoring data distribution architecture that introduces cross-site compatibility by means of semantic metadata annotations.

Cloud computing is changing the way in which companies deploy and operate ICT based services. This paradigm introduces several advantages compared with traditional data centers, such as a great degree of flexibility, pay-per-use models, and rapid resource provisioning. However, the lack of a well defined supply chain for clouds and an associated information model is limiting the adoption of these technologies. This paper introduces the Cloud Supply Chain, which enables both consuming and providing organizations to clearly determine their position within such a supply chain. The Cloud Supply Chain is the result of our experience from building systems for supply chain businesses combined with our experience of building Service Cloud infrastructures within the RESERVOIR EU research project. This paper discusses the definitions and components of such a supply chain, together with all of the requirements with regards to services and an information model, which are the most pertinent topics for accounting and billing. The underlying basis for this work is a service provisioning process chain that includes service deployment, comprehensive monitoring, accounting and billing, delivering technical as well as business information. Our work presents the first definition of a Cloud Supply Chain, providing a foundation for researchers and businesses in this area.

We present a non-intrusive solution to the increasingly important problem of shared logging for overlapping and federated Grid environments. The solution addresses three usage scenarios of hierarchical Grids, mutual cross-Grid resource utilization, and federated Cloud computing infrastructures. The approach is evaluated by extending the existing SweGrid Accounting System (SGAS) with a light-weight component that makes the system applicable to a wide range of usage scenarios. The proposed architecture is characterized by its simplicity, flexibility, and generality, and the new key component by its non-intrusiveness, flexibility, and ability to manage high load. We present requirements derived from three usage scenarios, and also include an in-depth description of the architecture and design, as well as the implementation and performance evaluation of a new component written for use with SGAS. We conclude from a performance evaluation that the sharing of usage data is not likely to be a limiting performance factor even in large-scale Grid scenarios.

Emerging Cloud computing infrastructures provide computing resources on demand based on postpaid principles. For example, the RESERVOIR project develops an infrastructure capable of delivering elastic capacity that can automatically be increased or decreased in order to cost-efficiently fulfill established Service Level Agreements. This infrastructure also makes it possible for a data center to extend its total capacity by subcontracting additional resources from collaborating data centers, making the infrastructure a federation of Clouds. For accounting and billing, such infrastructures call for novel approaches to perform accounting for capacity that varies over time and for services (or more precisely virtual machines) that migrate between physical machines or even between data centers. For billing, needs arise for new approaches to simultaneously manage postpaid and prepaid payment schemes for capacity that varies over time in response to user needs. In this paper, we outline usage scenarios and a set of requirements for such infrastructures, and propose an accounting and billing architecture to be used within RESERVOIR. Even though the primary focus for this architecture is accounting and billing between resource consumers and infrastructure provides, future support for inter-site billing is also taken into account.

Theoretical perspectives: In this thesis we have chosen to present and discuss the agent theory by Jensen and Meckling. Objectives for good economic management bring to bear with management by objectives and Kaplan and Norton's balanced scorecard. We analyse the auditor's role in the municipal audit and present Carl Liggios theory concerning expectations gap and finally Streeck and Schmitters theory about the structure of regulation. Empirical foundation: From the empirical survey of the 33 municipals of Scania concerning the financial documents for the interim report for 2006 and the auditor reports conclude that 21 percent of the municipals have established and followed up goals for the municipal activity. Approx. 85 percent of the municipals have, according to the auditors, established and followed up financial goals for good economic management. Conclusions: The empirical information has showed that the municipals of Scania do not in general fulfil the law concerning goals for good economic management. Our belief is that the special audit advisers have an important function in the process of implementing goals. The special audit advisers can also be seen as a surety for future development and implementation.

Syfte: Uppsatsens syfte ar att studera hanterandet av mal for god ekonomisk hushallning i kommunen och dess paverkan pa den kommunala revisionen, for att analysera fenomenets roll i styrningen av kommunen. Metod: I enlighet med malet att uppfylla uppsatsens syfte har vi valt att genomfora en kvalitativ undersokning med en deskriptiv ansats. Uppsatsens primardata har inforskaffats genom nio intervjuer av ekonomichefer, politiker och fortroendevalda revisorer i Helsingborgs, Kavlinge och Osby kommun. Vi har aven genomfort fyra intervjuer med sakkunniga bitraden. Sekundardata har samlats in i form av kommunala finansiella dokument. Institutionalia och teorier har samlats in i huvudsak fran lamplig facklitteratur och forskningsartiklar. Teoretiska perspektiv: I uppsatsen har vi valt att presentera och diskutera agentteorin av Jensen och Meckling. Mal for god ekonomisk hushallning kopplas till malstyrning och till Kaplan och Nortons balanserade styrkort. Vi undersoker revisorns roll i den kommunala revisionen, samt presenterar Carl Liggios teori om forvantningsgap och slutligen Streeck och Schmitters teori om regleringens uppbyggnad Empiri: Undersokningen av Skanes 33 kommuners finansiella dokument for delaret 2006, samt revisorernas utlatande visar att ca 21 % av kommunerna har upprattat och foljt upp verksamhetsmal. Ca 85 % har, enligt revisorerna, pa ett tillfredsstallande satt upprattat och foljt upp finansiella mal for god ekonomisk hushallning. Slutsats: Undersokning visar att Skanes kommuner overlag inte uppfyller lagens krav pa finansiella och verksamhetsmassiga mal kopplade till god ekonomisk hushallning. Vidare ser vi de sakkunniga bitradena, det vill saga auktoriserade och certifierade revisorer, som viktiga for att processen med framtagande av mal skall komma igang ute i kommunerna och aven da som garanter for att en framtida utvecklig drivs och utvecklas.

Abstract This thesis considers certain symmetries in partial dierential,equation (PDE) op- erators, and how to exploit these in order to improve computational aspects. Par- ticularly, we study generalized Fourier transforms (GFTs) and how to use them in finite element discretizations of PDEs in geometrically symmetrical domains. GFTs can be used to block-diagonalize operators with certain symmetric properties, and we take advantage of this when solving linear systems of equations. A sparse variant of the GFT, which exploits equivariance and sparsity in the opera-

RESERVOIR : An ICT Infrastructure for Reliable and Effective Delivery of Services as Utilities