Autonomic Management of Maintenance Scheduling in Chord

This paper experimentally evaluates the effects of applying autonomic management to the scheduling of maintenance operations in a deployed Chord network, for various membership churn and workload patterns. Two versions of an autonomic management policy were compared with a static configuration. The autonomic policies varied with respect to the aggressiveness with which they responded to peer access error rates and to wasted maintenance operations. In most experiments, significant improvements due to autonomic management were observed in the performance of routing operations and the quantity of data transmitted between network members. Of the autonomic policies, the more aggressive version gave slightly better results

Acceleration-based fault-tolerant control design of offshore fixed wind turbines

Wind turbines (WTs) are basically controlled by varying the generator load torque (with the so-called torque control) and the blade pitch angles (with the so-called pitch control) based on measurement of the generator shaft speed. These two controllers unitedly work to satisfy the control objectives, and it is crucial that they are tolerant to possible faults in the WT system. Passive fault-tolerant control comprises the design of robust controllers against disturbances and uncertainties. This enables the controller to counteract the effect of a fault without requiring reconfiguration or fault detection. In this regard, the main contribution of this paper is to propose new control techniques that not only provide fault tolerance capabilities to the WT system but also improve the overall performance of the system in both fault-free and faulty conditions. Coupling nonlinear aero-hydro-servo-elastic simulations of an offshore WT with jacket platform is carried out for several pitch actuator faults. The jacket platform motions and structural loads caused by fault events with the proposed controllers are compared with loads encountered during normal operation and with respect to a well-known baseline controller in the literature. The proposed controllers are based in the super-twisting algorithm by using feedback of the generator shaft speed as well as the fore-aft and side-to-side acceleration signals of the WT tower.Preprin

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Mesmerizer: A Effective Tool for a Complete Peer-to-Peer Software Development Life-cycle

In this paper we present what are, in our experience, the best practices in Peer-To-Peer(P2P) application development and how we combined them in a middleware platform called Mesmerizer. We explain how simulation is an integral part of the development process and not just an assessment tool. We then present our component-based event-driven framework for P2P application development, which can be used to execute multiple instances of the same application in a strictly controlled manner over an emulated network layer for simulation/testing, or a single application in a concurrent environment for deployment purpose. We highlight modeling aspects that are of critical importance for designing and testing P2P applications, e.g. the emulation of Network Address Translation and bandwidth dynamics. We show how our simulator scales when emulating low-level bandwidth characteristics of thousands of concurrent peers while preserving a good degree of accuracy compared to a packet-level simulator