On Using Blockchains for Safety-Critical Systems

Innovation in the world of today is mainly driven by software. Companies need to continuously rejuvenate their product portfolios with new features to stay ahead of their competitors. For example, recent trends explore the application of blockchains to domains other than finance. This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art for safety-critical systems as found in modern vehicles like self-driving cars, smart energy systems, and home automation focusing on specific challenges where key ideas behind blockchains might be applicable. Next, potential benefits unlocked by applying such ideas are presented and discussed for the respective usage scenario. Finally, a research agenda is outlined to summarize remaining challenges for successfully applying blockchains to safety-critical cyber-physical systems

Fog Computing: A Taxonomy, Survey and Future Directions

In recent years, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices/sensors has increased to a great extent. To support the computational demand of real-time latency-sensitive applications of largely geo-distributed IoT devices/sensors, a new computing paradigm named "Fog computing" has been introduced. Generally, Fog computing resides closer to the IoT devices/sensors and extends the Cloud-based computing, storage and networking facilities. In this chapter, we comprehensively analyse the challenges in Fogs acting as an intermediate layer between IoT devices/ sensors and Cloud datacentres and review the current developments in this field. We present a taxonomy of Fog computing according to the identified challenges and its key features.We also map the existing works to the taxonomy in order to identify current research gaps in the area of Fog computing. Moreover, based on the observations, we propose future directions for research

Large Scale In Silico Screening on Grid Infrastructures

Large-scale grid infrastructures for in silico drug discovery open opportunities of particular interest to neglected and emerging diseases. In 2005 and 2006, we have been able to deploy large scale in silico docking within the framework of the WISDOM initiative against Malaria and Avian Flu requiring about 105 years of CPU on the EGEE, Auvergrid and TWGrid infrastructures. These achievements demonstrated the relevance of large-scale grid infrastructures for the virtual screening by molecular docking. This also allowed evaluating the performances of the grid infrastructures and to identify specific issues raised by large-scale deployment.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, The Third International Life Science Grid Workshop, LSGrid 2006, Yokohama, Japan, 13-14 october 2006, to appear in the proceeding

Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)

Distributed simulation and the grid: Position statements

The Grid provides a new and unrivaled technology for large scale distributed simulation as it enables collaboration and the use of distributed computing resources. This panel paper presents the views of four researchers in the area of Distributed Simulation and the Grid. Together we try to identify the main research issues involved in applying Grid technology to distributed simulation and the key future challenges that need to be solved to achieve this goal. Such challenges include not only technical challenges, but also political ones such as management methodology for the Grid and the development of standards. The benefits of the Grid to end-user simulation modelers also are discussed

Semantic web service architecture for simulation model reuse

COTS simulation packages (CSPs) have proved popular in an industrial setting with a number of software vendors. In contrast, options for re-using existing models seem more limited. Re-use of simulation component models by collaborating organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues however that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture in order to understand how such ontology are created, maintained and subsequently used for simulation model reuse. The ontology is extracted from health service simulation - comprising hospitals and the National Blood Service. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter- organization simulation, uncovering domain semantics and adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community