SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol: Letting applications talk to each other

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is a hub-based communication standard for the exchange of data and control between participating client applications. It has been developed within the context of the Virtual Observatory with the aim of enabling specialised data analysis tools to cooperate as a loosely integrated suite, and is now in use by many and varied desktop and web-based applications dealing with astronomical data. This paper reviews the requirements and design principles that led to SAMP's specification, provides a high-level description of the protocol, and discusses some of its common and possible future usage patterns, with particular attention to those factors that have aided its success in practice.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for Virtual Observatory special issue of Astronomy and Computin

BRAHMS: Novel middleware for integrated systems computation

Biological computational modellers are becoming increasingly interested in building large, eclectic models, including components on many different computational substrates, both biological and non-biological. At the same time, the rise of the philosophy of embodied modelling is generating a need to deploy biological models as controllers for robots in real-world environments. Finally, robotics engineers are beginning to find value in seconding biomimetic control strategies for use on practical robots. Together with the ubiquitous desire to make good on past software development effort, these trends are throwing up new challenges of intellectual and technological integration (for example across scales, across disciplines, and even across time) - challenges that are unmet by existing software frameworks. Here, we outline these challenges in detail, and go on to describe a newly developed software framework, BRAHMS. that meets them. BRAHMS is a tool for integrating computational process modules into a viable, computable system: its generality and flexibility facilitate integration across barriers, such as those described above, in a coherent and effective way. We go on to describe several cases where BRAHMS has been successfully deployed in practical situations. We also show excellent performance in comparison with a monolithic development approach. Additional benefits of developing in the framework include source code self-documentation, automatic coarse-grained parallelisation, cross-language integration, data logging, performance monitoring, and will include dynamic load-balancing and 'pause and continue' execution. BRAHMS is built on the nascent, and similarly general purpose, model markup language, SystemML. This will, in future, also facilitate repeatability and accountability (same answers ten years from now), transparent automatic software distribution, and interfacing with other SystemML tools. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Description and Experience of the Clinical Testbeds

This deliverable describes the up-to-date technical environment at three clinical testbed demonstrator sites of the 6WINIT Project, including the adapted clinical applications, project components and network transition technologies in use at these sites after 18 months of the Project. It also provides an interim description of early experiences with deployment and usage of these applications, components and technologies, and their clinical service impact

Distributed multimedia systems

A distributed multimedia system (DMS) is an integrated communication, computing, and information system that enables the processing, management, delivery, and presentation of synchronized multimedia information with quality-of-service guarantees. Multimedia information may include discrete media data, such as text, data, and images, and continuous media data, such as video and audio. Such a system enhances human communications by exploiting both visual and aural senses and provides the ultimate flexibility in work and entertainment, allowing one to collaborate with remote participants, view movies on demand, access on-line digital libraries from the desktop, and so forth. In this paper, we present a technical survey of a DMS. We give an overview of distributed multimedia systems, examine the fundamental concept of digital media, identify the applications, and survey the important enabling technologies.published_or_final_versio

CrownLabs - A Collaborative Environment to Deliver Remote Computing Laboratories

The coronavirus pandemic hit the entire education sector hard. All students were sent home and lectures started to be delivered through video-conferencing systems. CrownLabs is an open-source project providing an answer to the problem of delivering remote computing laboratories. Simplicity is one of its main characteristics, requiring nothing but a simple web browser to interact with the system and being all heavyweight computations performed at the university premises. Cooperation and mentoring are also encouraged through parallel access to the same remote desktop. The entire system is built up using components from the Kubernetes ecosystem, to replicate a "cloud grade" infrastructure, coupled with custom software implementing the core business logic. To this end, most of the complexity has been delegated to the infrastructure, to speed up the development process and reduce the maintenance burden. An extensive evaluation has been performed in both real and simulated scenarios to validate the overall performance: the results are encouraging, as well as the feedback from the early adopters of the system

REAL-TIME LOGISTICS - Case Development of a Shipment Status Display System for a Large Manufacturing Company

As traditional heavy industry businesses transform into global solutions providers, their business models change into project-based and their supply networks expand. Project business faces greater uncertainty within the supply chain than traditional business, thus requires greater need for data exchange within the supply chain. Numerous information systems have provided the organization with a wealth of data. However project management often faces great challenges to utilize it for better visibility on project delivery status, as well as to communicate that to stakeholders. In response to the need for better usage and presentation of transactional project logistical data, a real-time shipment status display system has been developed. The complete system offers an intuitive, up-to-date, fast, and reliable display that is accessible through a wide range of devices. In this thesis, the system is customized to run on public displays. In term of development methodology, spiral axiomatic design approach is adopted to ensure maximum independence of components. The end result is a system comprising of two independent sub-systems: one is for data collection and the second one is for presentation. Modern web technologies such as ASP.NET MVC4, HTML5, and CSS3 have been used to develop the presentation sub-system. The thesis contributes a software artifact that complements information systems that are either too much focused on transactional data or unable to communicate project logistics data to stakeholders. It also demonstrates the use of axiomatic system design in developing modern web platforms.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

WhiteHaul: An Efficient Spectrum Aggregation System for Low-Cost and High Capacity Backhaul over White Spaces

We address the challenge of backhaul connectivity for rural and developing regions, which is essential for universal fixed/mobile Internet access. To this end, we propose to exploit the TV white space (TVWS) spectrum for its attractive properties: low cost, abundance in under-served regions and favorable propagation characteristics. Specifically, we propose a system called WhiteHaul for the efficient aggregation of the TVWS spectrum tailored for the backhaul use case. At the core of WhiteHaul are two key innovations: (i) a TVWS conversion substrate that can efficiently handle multiple non-contiguous chunks of TVWS spectrum using multiple low cost 802.11n/ac cards but with a single antenna; (ii) novel use of MPTCP as a link-level tunnel abstraction and its use for efficiently aggregating multiple chunks of the TVWS spectrum via a novel uncoupled, cross-layer congestion control algorithm. Through extensive evaluations using a prototype implementation of WhiteHaul, we show that: (a) WhiteHaul can aggregate almost the whole of TV band with 3 interfaces and achieve nearly 600Mbps TCP throughput; (b) the WhiteHaul MPTCP congestion control algorithm provides an order of magnitude improvement over state of the art algorithms for typical TVWS backhaul links. We also present additional measurement and simulation based results to evaluate other aspects of the WhiteHaul design

WhiteHaul: an efficient spectrum aggregation system for low-cost and high capacity backhaul over white spaces

We address the challenge of backhaul connectivity for rural and developing regions, which is essential for universal fixed/mobile Internet access. To this end, we propose to exploit the TV white space (TVWS) spectrum for its attractive properties: low cost, abundance in under-served regions and favorable propagation characteristics. Specifically, we propose a system called WhiteHaul for the efficient aggregation of the TVWS spectrum tailored for the backhaul use case. At the core of WhiteHaul are two key innovations: (i) a TVWS conversion substrate that can efficiently handle multiple non-contiguous chunks of TVWS spectrum using multiple low cost 802.11n/ac cards but with a single antenna; (ii) novel use of MPTCP as a link-level tunnel abstraction and its use for efficiently aggregating multiple chunks of the TVWS spectrum via a novel uncoupled, cross-layer congestion control algorithm. Through extensive evaluations using a prototype implementation of WhiteHaul, we show that: (a) WhiteHaul can aggregate almost the whole of TV band with 3 interfaces and achieve nearly 600Mbps TCP throughput; (b) the WhiteHaul MPTCP congestion control algorithm provides an order of magnitude improvement over state of the art algorithms for typical TVWS backhaul links. We also present additional measurement and simulation based results to evaluate other aspects of the WhiteHaul design

Assessing the Flexibility of a Service Oriented Architecture to that of the Classic Data Warehouse

The flexibility of a service oriented architecture (SOA) is compared to that of the classic data warehouse across three categories: (1) source system access, (2) integration and transformation, and (3) end user access. The findings suggest that an SOA allows better upgrade and migration flexibility if back-end systems expose their source data via adapters. However, the providers of such adapters must deal with the complexity of maintaining consistent interfaces. An SOA also appears to provide more flexibility at the integration tier due to its ability to merge batch with real-time source system data. This has the potential to retain source system data semantics (e.g., code translations and business rules) without having to reproduce such logic in a transformation tier. Additionally, the tight coupling of operational metadata and source system data within XML in an SOA allows more flexibility in downstream analysis and auditing of output . SOA does lag behind the classic data warehouse at the end user level, mainly due to the latter\u27s use of mature SQL and relational database technology. Users of all technical levels can easily work with these technologies in the classic data warehouse environment to query data in a number of ways. The SOA end user likely requires developer support for such activities

NetGlance NMS - An integrated network monitoring system

Mestrado de dupla diplomação com a Kuban State Agrarian UniversityThis work is about IT infrastructure and, in particular, computer networks in KubSAU and IPB. Also, it is about a network monitoring system “NetGlance NMS” developed for KubSAU System Administration Department. Work objective is to optimize the information structure for KubSAU and IPB. During the work, following tasks were completed: Research the existing IPB information structure, Compare the information structure for KubSAU and IPB, Model the IPB computer network (topology, services), Research bottlenecks and potential pitfalls in the data-center and in the computer network of IPB, Research information security mechanisms in the computer network of IPB, Organize monitoring process for the computer network in KubSAU. The most important impact of the work is an increasing network productivity and user experience as a result of creation and deploy a monitoring software.O trabalho descrito no âmbito desta dissertação incide sobre a infraestrutura TI e, em particular, sobre as redes de computadores da KubSAU e do IPB. Além disso, descreve-se um sistema de gestão integrada de redes, designada “NetGlance NMS”, desenvolvido para o Departamento de Administração de Sistemas da KubSAU. O objetivo do trabalho é desenvolver uma ferramenta para otimizar a gestão da estrutura de comunicações das duas instituições. Durante o trabalho, as seguintes tarefas foram concluídas: levantamento da estrutura de comunicações do IPB, comparação da estrutura de comunicações entre a KubSAU e o IPB, modelação da rede de comunicações do IPB (topologia, serviços), estudo de possíveis estrangulamentos no datacenter e na rede de comunicações doIPB, estudo de mecanismos de segurança na rede de comunicações do IPB, organização do processo de monitorização da rede de comunicações da KubSAU. O contributo mais relevante deste trabalho é o desenvolvimento de uma aplicação de gestão integrada de redes, de forma a contribuir para o aumento da produtividade da rede e da experiência dos utilizadores