Integrated Resource Planning for a Chinese Urban Development

Urban areas manage vast quantities of energy, water and waste resources. In order to minimise the cost and environmental impact, optimisation modelling is often used in the design and operation of these systems. However, traditional modelling approaches only consider the energy, water and waste sectors in isolation. This approach neglects the synergies possible between these systems whereby outputs from one system form an input to another, and hence sets an upper bound on economic and environmental impact minimisation. We formulate a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model which takes a ‘systems-of-infrastructure systems’ approach to show how resource consumption can be reduced. The model takes as inputs possible resource conversion and transportation infrastructure and resources, and resource demands, and returns the optimal infrastructure choice and layout. The model is called PRaQ because it models ‘processes, resources and qualities.’ We apply the model to the design of a new urban development in China for three scenarios of various levels of resource integration. Results are still to be obtained

myTrustedCloud: Trusted cloud infrastructure for security-critical computation and data managment

Copyright @ 2012 IEEECloud Computing provides an optimal infrastructure to utilise and share both computational and data resources whilst allowing a pay-per-use model, useful to cost-effectively manage hardware investment or to maximise its utilisation. Cloud Computing also offers transitory access to scalable amounts of computational resources, something that is particularly important due to the time and financial constraints of many user communities. The growing number of communities that are adopting large public cloud resources such as Amazon Web Services [1] or Microsoft Azure [2] proves the success and hence usefulness of the Cloud Computing paradigm. Nonetheless, the typical use cases for public clouds involve non-business critical applications, particularly where issues around security of utilization of applications or deposited data within shared public services are binding requisites. In this paper, a use case is presented illustrating how the integration of Trusted Computing technologies into an available cloud infrastructure - Eucalyptus - allows the security-critical energy industry to exploit the flexibility and potential economical benefits of the Cloud Computing paradigm for their business-critical applications

Software-Defined Cloud Computing: Architectural Elements and Open Challenges

The variety of existing cloud services creates a challenge for service providers to enforce reasonable Software Level Agreements (SLA) stating the Quality of Service (QoS) and penalties in case QoS is not achieved. To avoid such penalties at the same time that the infrastructure operates with minimum energy and resource wastage, constant monitoring and adaptation of the infrastructure is needed. We refer to Software-Defined Cloud Computing, or simply Software-Defined Clouds (SDC), as an approach for automating the process of optimal cloud configuration by extending virtualization concept to all resources in a data center. An SDC enables easy reconfiguration and adaptation of physical resources in a cloud infrastructure, to better accommodate the demand on QoS through a software that can describe and manage various aspects comprising the cloud environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for SDCs on data centers with emphasis on mobile cloud applications. We present an evaluation, showcasing the potential of SDC in two use cases-QoS-aware bandwidth allocation and bandwidth-aware, energy-efficient VM placement-and discuss the research challenges and opportunities in this emerging area.Comment: Keynote Paper, 3rd International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI 2014), September 24-27, 2014, Delhi, Indi

Volunteering Reinvented: Human Capital Solutions for the Nonprofit Sector

To grow and adapt in today's continuously changing society, a nonprofit organization must recognize the value and contribution of both its paid staff and volunteers. Simply recruiting large numbers of volunteers, however, does not necessarily translate into success for the nonprofit sector or the community at large. Successful results are achieved when an organization is able to support, mobilize, and manage its volunteer resources for the greatest possible impact on a problem or need.In a competitive environment where resources are often scarce, nonprofit executives and boards of directors have become more strategic about how they leverage the various resources at their disposal:money, space, inkind donations, equipment, technology, and employees. Unfortunately, however, one of the most powerful and plentiful resources of all -- volunteers -- continues to receive short shrift from nonprofit leadership. This paper is intended to educate nonprofit executives about volunteering as a key human resource strategy, illustrate that volunteering is not just nice but necessary, and demonstrate the value volunteers bring to an organization that strategically plans for how to use them both to support infrastructure and to deliver programs and services

THE SMART CITY INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT & MONITORING

The smart city infrastructure is the introductory step for establishing the overall smart city framework and architecture. Very few smart cities are recently established across the world. Some examples are: Dubai, Malta, Kochi (India), Singapore. The scope of these cities is mainly limited to construct a technology park converting the industrial real estate to state of the art information technology using the evolution in the telecom and IP networks including insignificant asset management automation system. The development background is to create an operational platform that would manage the power consumption and operational resources in order to reduce the overall running operational cost. This paper will debate the smart infrastructure development framework and the surveying positional accuracy of locating the assets as a base of the smart city development architecture integrated with all the facilities and systems related to the smart city framework. The paper will discuss also the main advantages of the proposed architecture including the quantifiable and non quantifiable benefits.Smart Infrastructure, GIS, Smart City, Geopsatial application, Infrastructure Development, Infrastructure Monitoring.

Detecting and Characterizing Propagation of Security Weaknesses in Puppet-based Infrastructure Management

Despite being beneficial for managing computing infrastructure automatically, Puppet manifests are susceptible to security weaknesses, e.g., hard-coded secrets and use of weak cryptography algorithms. Adequate mitigation of security weaknesses in Puppet manifests is thus necessary to secure computing infrastructure that are managed with Puppet manifests. A characterization of how security weaknesses propagate and affect Puppet-based infrastructure management, can inform practitioners on the relevance of the detected security weaknesses, as well as help them take necessary actions for mitigation. To that end, we conduct an empirical study with 17,629 Puppet manifests mined from 336 open source repositories. We construct Taint Tracker for Puppet Manifests (TaintPup), for which we observe 2.4 times more precision compared to that of a state-of-the-art security static analysis tool. TaintPup leverages Puppet-specific information flow analysis using which we characterize propagation of security weaknesses. From our empirical study, we observe security weaknesses to propagate into 4,457 resources, i.e, Puppet-specific code elements used to manage infrastructure. A single instance of a security weakness can propagate into as many as 35 distinct resources. We observe security weaknesses to propagate into 7 categories of resources, which include resources used to manage continuous integration servers and network controllers. According to our survey with 24 practitioners, propagation of security weaknesses into data storage-related resources is rated to have the most severe impact for Puppet-based infrastructure management.Comment: 14 pages, currently under revie