Advanced Manufacturing Collaboration in a Cloud-based App Marketplace

Advanced Manufacturing Apps that perform complex modeling and simulation are now becoming available in Marketplaces. App stakeholders face two fundamental challenges in cloud engineering of the App Marketplaces: (i) orchestration of service chaining through an App Runtime, and (ii) finding a suitable cost model to evaluate App pricing strategies. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a new cloud architecture that aims at supporting an 'App Marketplace' that thrives on agile development, organic collaboration and scalable sales of next generation Manufacturing Apps requiring high-performance simulation and modeling. We describe how we are realizing the vision of this architecture through an App Runtime we have developed that leverages a Resource Brokering Service to create App chaining mechanisms. We also detail a new cost model that could be part of an Accounting Service in our proposed architecture to address the issues of cost accounting and pricing of the Apps faced by the App developers while using cloud infrastructures for hosting their Apps. Lastly, we describe experiments with a real-world implementation of our App Runtime and cost model in a WheelSim testbed that uses NSF GENI Cloud and Ohio Supercomputer Center resources. Our results show benefits to an App developer in terms of: satisfactory user experience, lower design time and lower cost/simulation.