Organization based multiagent architecture for distributed environments

[EN]Distributed environments represent a complex field in which applied solutions should be flexible and include significant adaptation capabilities. These environments are related to problems where multiple users and devices may interact, and where simple and local solutions could possibly generate good results, but may not be effective with regards to use and interaction. There are many techniques that can be employed to face this kind of problems, from CORBA to multi-agent systems, passing by web-services and SOA, among others. All those methodologies have their advantages and disadvantages that are properly analyzed in this documents, to finally explain the new architecture presented as a solution for distributed environment problems. The new architecture for solving complex solutions in distributed environments presented here is called OBaMADE: Organization Based Multiagent Architecture for Distributed Environments. It is a multiagent architecture based on the organizations of agents paradigm, where the agents in the architecture are structured into organizations to improve their organizational capabilities. The reasoning power of the architecture is based on the Case-Based Reasoning methology, being implemented in a internal organization that uses agents to create services to solve the external request made by the users. The OBaMADE architecture has been successfully applied to two different case studies where its prediction capabilities have been properly checked. Those case studies have showed optimistic results and, being complex systems, have demonstrated the abstraction and generalizations capabilities of the architecture. Nevertheless OBaMADE is intended to be able to solve much other kind of problems in distributed environments scenarios. It should be applied to other varieties of situations and to other knowledge fields to fully develop its potencial.[ES]Los entornos distribuidos representan un campo de conocimiento complejo en el que las soluciones a aplicar deben ser flexibles y deben contar con gran capacidad de adaptación. Este tipo de entornos está normalmente relacionado con problemas donde varios usuarios y dispositivos entran en juego. Para solucionar dichos problemas, pueden utilizarse sistemas locales que, aunque ofrezcan buenos resultados en términos de calidad de los mismos, no son tan efectivos en cuanto a la interacción y posibilidades de uso. Existen múltiples técnicas que pueden ser empleadas para resolver este tipo de problemas, desde CORBA a sistemas multiagente, pasando por servicios web y SOA, entre otros. Todas estas mitologías tienen sus ventajas e inconvenientes, que se analizan en este documento, para explicar, finalmente, la nueva arquitectura presentada como una solución para los problemas generados en entornos distribuidos. La nueva arquitectura aquí se llama OBaMADE, que es el acrónimo del inglés Organization Based Multiagent Architecture for Distributed Environments (Arquitectura Multiagente Basada en Organizaciones para Entornos Distribuidos). Se trata de una arquitectura multiagente basasa en el paradigma de las organizaciones de agente, donde los agentes que forman parte de la arquitectura se estructuran en organizaciones para mejorar sus capacidades organizativas. La capacidad de razonamiento de la arquitectura está basada en la metodología de razonamiento basado en casos, que se ha implementado en una de las organizaciones internas de la arquitectura por medio de agentes que crean servicios que responden a las solicitudes externas de los usuarios. La arquitectura OBaMADE se ha aplicado de forma exitosa a dos casos de estudio diferentes, en los que se han demostrado sus capacidades predictivas. Aplicando OBaMADE a estos casos de estudio se han obtenido resultados esperanzadores y, al ser sistemas complejos, se han demostrado las capacidades tanto de abstracción como de generalización de la arquitectura presentada. Sin embargo, esta arquitectura está diseñada para poder ser aplicada a más tipo de problemas de entornos distribuidos. Debe ser aplicada a más variadas situaciones y a otros campos de conocimiento para desarrollar completamente el potencial de esta arquitectura

Adaptive monitoring and control framework in Application Service Management environment

The economics of data centres and cloud computing services have pushed hardware and software requirements to the limits, leaving only very small performance overhead before systems get into saturation. For Application Service Management–ASM, this carries the growing risk of impacting the execution times of various processes. In order to deliver a stable service at times of great demand for computational power, enterprise data centres and cloud providers must implement fast and robust control mechanisms that are capable of adapting to changing operating conditions while satisfying service–level agreements. In ASM practice, there are normally two methods for dealing with increased load, namely increasing computational power or releasing load. The first approach typically involves allocating additional machines, which must be available, waiting idle, to deal with high demand situations. The second approach is implemented by terminating incoming actions that are less important to new activity demand patterns, throttling, or rescheduling jobs. Although most modern cloud platforms, or operating systems, do not allow adaptive/automatic termination of processes, tasks or actions, it is administrators’ common practice to manually end, or stop, tasks or actions at any level of the system, such as at the level of a node, function, or process, or kill a long session that is executing on a database server. In this context, adaptive control of actions termination remains a significantly underutilised subject of Application Service Management and deserves further consideration. For example, this approach may be eminently suitable for systems with harsh execution time Service Level Agreements, such as real–time systems, or systems running under conditions of hard pressure on power supplies, systems running under variable priority, or constraints set up by the green computing paradigm. Along this line of work, the thesis investigates the potential of dimension relevance and metrics signals decomposition as methods that would enable more efficient action termination. These methods are integrated in adaptive control emulators and actuators powered by neural networks that are used to adjust the operation of the system to better conditions in environments with established goals seen from both system performance and economics perspectives. The behaviour of the proposed control framework is evaluated using complex load and service agreements scenarios of systems compatible with the requirements of on–premises, elastic compute cloud deployments, server–less computing, and micro–services architectures

GPU Computing for Cognitive Robotics

This thesis presents the first investigation of the impact of GPU computing on cognitive robotics by providing a series of novel experiments in the area of action and language acquisition in humanoid robots and computer vision. Cognitive robotics is concerned with endowing robots with high-level cognitive capabilities to enable the achievement of complex goals in complex environments. Reaching the ultimate goal of developing cognitive robots will require tremendous amounts of computational power, which was until recently provided mostly by standard CPU processors. CPU cores are optimised for serial code execution at the expense of parallel execution, which renders them relatively inefficient when it comes to high-performance computing applications. The ever-increasing market demand for high-performance, real-time 3D graphics has evolved the GPU into a highly parallel, multithreaded, many-core processor extraordinary computational power and very high memory bandwidth. These vast computational resources of modern GPUs can now be used by the most of the cognitive robotics models as they tend to be inherently parallel. Various interesting and insightful cognitive models were developed and addressed important scientific questions concerning action-language acquisition and computer vision. While they have provided us with important scientific insights, their complexity and application has not improved much over the last years. The experimental tasks as well as the scale of these models are often minimised to avoid excessive training times that grow exponentially with the number of neurons and the training data. This impedes further progress and development of complex neurocontrollers that would be able to take the cognitive robotics research a step closer to reaching the ultimate goal of creating intelligent machines. This thesis presents several cases where the application of the GPU computing on cognitive robotics algorithms resulted in the development of large-scale neurocontrollers of previously unseen complexity enabling the conducting of the novel experiments described herein.European Commission Seventh Framework Programm

SMEs Adoption of SaaS Cloud Services:A Novel Ontological Framework(Nigeria as a case Study).

The future of Information Technology lies in cloud computing, whose primary objective is to reduce the cost of IT services while increasing production output, availability, reliability, flexibility as well as a decrease in processing time. Owing to few exploratory studies that explain the adoption of cloud services, this research tends to understand the factors affecting cloud service adoption decision by SMEs in Nigeria. Also, it proposes a solution based framework to tackle the identified factors in view of promoting cloud service adoption by Nigerian SMEs. In view of the above, this thesis investigates the reason for slow adoption of cloud services with specific emphasis on Nigeria SMEs. Firstly, the existing literature in cloud service adoption by SME is examined based on Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method. This helps to inform the research gap in relation to cloud service adoption technique. Secondly, the thesis uses a mixed method approach integrating quantitative and qualitative methods to gather data through four stages of data gathering approach. The primary data gathering is based on quantitative (survey) stage 1 and qualitative (Focus Group) stage 2, which involves the studies identifying the cloud service adoption challenges specific to Nigeria SMEs. Furthermore, a solution framework CLOUDSME which includes an ontologically developed Decision Support System(DSS) is proposed to tackle the challenge identified in Primary data gathering stage 1and 2. The proposed framework consists of four phases: The first phase deals with gathering information on how various cloud services address dynamic SME user requirements identified in the primary data gathering stage, this phase forms the building block through which the framework is built upon. The second phase which is the prioritisation phase Adopts Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) approach to deal with the issue of complex comparison, also the third stage of data gathering (quantitative) is performed whereby a group interview is carried-out to compare and assign weights to service provider offering in addressing user requirements using pairwise comparison scale. The Third phase addressing the issue of cloud service ranking. In this phase, the major contribution of this research is introduced, whereby a new formalism is proposed using rational relationships to tackle the issue of rank reversal associated with the traditional AHP approach. The fourth phase of the framework is the development of the ontological proposed DSS which comprises of the information gathered in phase 1, 2 and 3. The proposed DSS promotes cloud service Knowledge management, service recommendation and service ranking toward cloud service adoption decision making by SME managers. The final stage of the research is the validation phase which comprises of construct validation. As well as user opinion and expert opinion and researcher opinion validation based on a survey (Quantitative) which makes up the fourth stage of the data gathering stages. The findings from the user opinion evaluation and validation prove the CLOUDSME has the capability to tackle the slow adoption of cloud services by Nigeria SMEs

Anti load-balancing for energy-aware distributed scheduling of virtual machines

La multiplication de l'informatique en nuage (Cloud) a abouti à la création de centres de données dans le monde entier. Le Cloud contient des milliers de nœuds de calcul. Cependant, les centres de données consomment d'énorme quantités d'énergie à travers le monde estimées à plus de 1,5 % de la consommation mondiale d'électricité et devrait continuer à croître. Une problématique habituellement étudiée dans les systèmes distribués est de répartir équitablement la charge. Mais lorsque l'objectif est de réduire la consommation électrique, ce type d'algorithmes peut mener à avoir des serveurs fortement sous chargés et donc à consommer de l'énergie inutilement. Cette thèse présente de nouvelles techniques, des algorithmes et des logiciels pour la consolidation dynamique et distribuée de machines virtuelles (VM) dans le Cloud. L'objectif principal de cette thèse est de proposer des stratégies d'ordonnancement tenant compte de l'énergie dans le Cloud pour les économies d'énergie. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous utilisons des approches centralisées et décentralisées. Les contributions à ce niveau méthodologique sont présentées sur ces deux axes. L'objectif de notre démarche est de réduire la consommation de l'énergie totale du centre de données en contrôlant la consommation globale d'énergie des applications tout en assurant les contrats de service pour l'exécution des applications. La consommation d'énergie est réduite en désactivant et réactivant dynamiquement les nœuds physiques pour répondre à la demande des ressources. Les principales contributions sont les suivantes: - Ici on s'intéressera à la problématique contraire de l'équilibrage de charge. Il s'agit d'une technique appelée Anti Load-Balancing pour concentrer la charge sur un nombre minimal de nœuds. Le but est de pouvoir éteindre les nœuds libérés et donc de minimiser la consommation énergétique du système. - Ensuite une approche centralisée a été proposée et fonctionne en associant une valeur de crédit à chaque nœud. Le crédit d'un nœud dépend de son affinité pour ses tâches, sa charge de travail actuelle et sa façon d'effectuer ses communications. Les économies d'énergie sont atteintes par la consolidation continue des machines virtuelles en fonction de l'utilisation actuelle des ressources, les topologies de réseaux virtuels établis entre les machines virtuelles et l'état thermique de nœuds de calcul. Les résultats de l'expérience sur une extension de CloudSim (EnerSim) montrent que l'énergie consommée par les applications du Cloud et l'efficacité énergétique ont été améliorées. - Le troisième axe est consacré à l'examen d'une approche appelée "Cooperative scheduling Anti load-balancing Algorithm for cloud". Il s'agit d'une approche décentralisée permettant la coopération entre les différents sites. Pour valider cet algorithme, nous avons étendu le simulateur MaGateSim. Avec une large évaluation expérimentale d'un ensemble de données réelles, nous sommes arrivés à la conclusion que l'approche à la fois en utilisant des algorithmes centralisés et décentralisés peut réduire l'énergie consommée des centres de données.The multiplication of Cloud computing has resulted in the establishment of largescale data centers around the world containing thousands of compute nodes. However, Cloud consume huge amounts of energy. Energy consumption of data centers worldwide is estimated at more than 1.5% of the global electricity use and is expected to grow further. A problem usually studied in distributed systems is to evenly distribute the load. But when the goal is to reduce energy consumption, this type of algorithms can lead to have machines largely under-loaded and therefore consuming energy unnecessarily. This thesis presents novel techniques, algorithms, and software for distributed dynamic consolidation of Virtual Machines (VMs) in Cloud. The main objective of this thesis is to provide energy-aware scheduling strategies in cloud computing for energy saving. To achieve this goal, we use centralized and decentralized approaches. Contributions in this method are presented these two axes. The objective of our approach is to reduce data center's total energy consumed by controlling cloud applications' overall energy consumption while ensuring cloud applications' service level agreement. Energy consumption is reduced by dynamically deactivating and reactivating physical nodes to meet the current resource demand. The key contributions are: - First, we present an energy aware clouds scheduling using anti-load balancing algorithm : concentrate the load on a minimum number of severs. The goal is to turn off the machines released and therefore minimize the energy consumption of the system. - The second axis proposed an algorithm which works by associating a credit value with each node. The credit of a node depends on its affinity to its jobs, its current workload and its communication behavior. Energy savings are achieved by continuous consolidation of VMs according to current utilization of resources, virtual network topologies established between VMs, and thermal state of computing nodes. The experiment results, obtained with a simulator which extends CloudSim (EnerSim), show that the cloud application energy consumption and energy efficiency are being improved. - The third axis is dedicated to the consideration of a decentralized dynamic scheduling approach entitled Cooperative scheduling Anti-load balancing Algorithm for cloud. It is a decentralized approach that allows cooperation between different sites. To validate this algorithm, we have extended the simulator MaGateSim. With an extensive experimental evaluation with a real workload dataset, we got the conclusion that both the approach using centralized and decentralized algorithms can reduce energy consumed by data centers