Highlights of 1976 activities

Highlights of NASA's 1976 activities are summarized. Sixteen successful launches were made. Two landings of Viking spacecraft on Mars and rollout of the space shuttle orbiter are reviewed. Applications of aerospace science to education, health care, and community services are also discussed

Big Data Pipelines on the Computing Continuum: Tapping the Dark Data

The computing continuum enables new opportunities for managing big data pipelines concerning efficient management of heterogeneous and untrustworthy resources. We discuss the big data pipelines lifecycle on the computing continuum and its associated challenges, and we outline a future research agenda in this area.acceptedVersio

DEPENDABILITY IN CLOUD COMPUTING

The technological advances and success of Service-Oriented Architectures and the Cloud computing paradigm have produced a revolution in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Today, a wide range of services are provisioned to the users in a flexible and cost-effective manner, thanks to the encapsulation of several technologies with modern business models. These services not only offer high-level software functionalities such as social networks or e-commerce but also middleware tools that simplify application development and low-level data storage, processing, and networking resources. Hence, with the advent of the Cloud computing paradigm, today's ICT allows users to completely outsource their IT infrastructure and benefit significantly from the economies of scale. At the same time, with the widespread use of ICT, the amount of data being generated, stored and processed by private companies, public organizations and individuals is rapidly increasing. The in-house management of data and applications is proving to be highly cost intensive and Cloud computing is becoming the destination of choice for increasing number of users. As a consequence, Cloud computing services are being used to realize a wide range of applications, each having unique dependability and Quality-of-Service (Qos) requirements. For example, a small enterprise may use a Cloud storage service as a simple backup solution, requiring high data availability, while a large government organization may execute a real-time mission-critical application using the Cloud compute service, requiring high levels of dependability (e.g., reliability, availability, security) and performance. Service providers are presently able to offer sufficient resource heterogeneity, but are failing to satisfy users' dependability requirements mainly because the failures and vulnerabilities in Cloud infrastructures are a norm rather than an exception. This thesis provides a comprehensive solution for improving the dependability of Cloud computing -- so that -- users can justifiably trust Cloud computing services for building, deploying and executing their applications. A number of approaches ranging from the use of trustworthy hardware to secure application design has been proposed in the literature. The proposed solution consists of three inter-operable yet independent modules, each designed to improve dependability under different system context and/or use-case. A user can selectively apply either a single module or combine them suitably to improve the dependability of her applications both during design time and runtime. Based on the modules applied, the overall proposed solution can increase dependability at three distinct levels. In the following, we provide a brief description of each module. The first module comprises a set of assurance techniques that validates whether a given service supports a specified dependability property with a given level of assurance, and accordingly, awards it a machine-readable certificate. To achieve this, we define a hierarchy of dependability properties where a property represents the dependability characteristics of the service and its specific configuration. A model of the service is also used to verify the validity of the certificate using runtime monitoring, thus complementing the dynamic nature of the Cloud computing infrastructure and making the certificate usable both at discovery and runtime. This module also extends the service registry to allow users to select services with a set of certified dependability properties, hence offering the basic support required to implement dependable applications. We note that this module directly considers services implemented by service providers and provides awareness tools that allow users to be aware of the QoS offered by potential partner services. We denote this passive technique as the solution that offers first level of dependability in this thesis. Service providers typically implement a standard set of dependability mechanisms that satisfy the basic needs of most users. Since each application has unique dependability requirements, assurance techniques are not always effective, and a pro-active approach to dependability management is also required. The second module of our solution advocates the innovative approach of offering dependability as a service to users' applications and realizes a framework containing all the mechanisms required to achieve this. We note that this approach relieves users from implementing low-level dependability mechanisms and system management procedures during application development and satisfies specific dependability goals of each application. We denote the module offering dependability as a service as the solution that offers second level of dependability in this thesis. The third, and the last, module of our solution concerns secure application execution. This module considers complex applications and presents advanced resource management schemes that deploy applications with improved optimality when compared to the algorithms of the second module. This module improves dependability of a given application by minimizing its exposure to existing vulnerabilities, while being subject to the same dependability policies and resource allocation conditions as in the second module. Our approach to secure application deployment and execution denotes the third level of dependability offered in this thesis. The contributions of this thesis can be summarized as follows.The contributions of this thesis can be summarized as follows. \u2022 With respect to assurance techniques our contributions are: i) de finition of a hierarchy of dependability properties, an approach to service modeling, and a model transformation scheme; ii) de finition of a dependability certifi cation scheme for services; iii) an approach to service selection that considers users' dependability requirements; iv) de finition of a solution to dependability certifi cation of composite services, where the dependability properties of a composite service are calculated on the basis of the dependability certi ficates of component services. \u2022 With respect to off ering dependability as a service our contributions are: i) de finition of a delivery scheme that transparently functions on users' applications and satisfi es their dependability requirements; ii) design of a framework that encapsulates all the components necessary to o er dependability as a service to the users; iii) an approach to translate high level users' requirements to low level dependability mechanisms; iv) formulation of constraints that allow enforcement of deployment conditions inherent to dependability mechanisms and an approach to satisfy such constraints during resource allocation; v) a resource management scheme that masks the a ffect of system changes by adapting the current allocation of the application. \u2022 With respect to security management our contributions are: i) an approach that deploys users' applications in the Cloud infrastructure such that their exposure to vulnerabilities is minimized; ii) an approach to build interruptible elastic algorithms whose optimality improves as the processing time increases, eventually converging to an optimal solution

Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Workshop on Meteorological and Environmental Inputs to Aviation Systems

The proceedings of a workshop held at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, Tullahoma, Tennessee, March 28-30, 1978, are reported. The workshop was jointly sponsored by NASA, NOAA, FAA, and brought together many disciplines of the aviation communities in round table discussions. The major objectives of the workshop are to satisfy such needs of the sponsoring agencies as the expansion of our understanding and knowledge of the interactions of the atmosphere with aviation systems, as the better definition and implementation of services to operators, and as the collection and interpretation of data for establishing operational criteria, relating the total meteorological inputs from the atmospheric sciences to the needs of aviation communities

Monitoring-Based Certification of Cloud Service Security

In this paper, we present a novel approach to cloud service security certification. This approach could be used to: (a) define and execute automatically certification models, which can continuously and incrementally acquire and analyse evidence regarding the provision of services on cloud infrastructures through continuous monitoring; (b) use this evidence to assess whether the provision is compliant with required security properties; and (c) generate and manage digital certificates confirming the compliance of services if the acquired evidence supports this. We also present the results of an initial experimental evaluation of our approach based on the MySQL server and RUBiS benchmark

Highlights of 1981 activities

The highlights of NASA's 1981 activities are presented, including the results of the two flights of the space shuttle Columbia and the Voyager 2 encounter with Saturn. Accomplishments in the areas of space transportation operations; space science; aeronautical, energy, and space research and development; as well as space tracking, international activities, and 1981 launch activities are discussed

An Integrated Framework for the Methodological Assurance of Security and Privacy in the Development and Operation of MultiCloud Applications

x, 169 p.This Thesis studies research questions about how to design multiCloud applications taking into account security and privacy requirements to protect the system from potential risks and about how to decide which security and privacy protections to include in the system. In addition, solutions are needed to overcome the difficulties in assuring security and privacy properties defined at design time still hold all along the system life-cycle, from development to operation.In this Thesis an innovative DevOps integrated methodology and framework are presented, which help to rationalise and systematise security and privacy analyses in multiCloud to enable an informed decision-process for risk-cost balanced selection of the protections of the system components and the protections to request from Cloud Service Providers used. The focus of the work is on the Development phase of the analysis and creation of multiCloud applications.The main contributions of this Thesis for multiCloud applications are four: i) The integrated DevOps methodology for security and privacy assurance; and its integrating parts: ii) a security and privacy requirements modelling language, iii) a continuous risk assessment methodology and its complementary risk-based optimisation of defences, and iv) a Security and Privacy Service Level AgreementComposition method.The integrated DevOps methodology and its integrating Development methods have been validated in the case study of a real multiCloud application in the eHealth domain. The validation confirmed the feasibility and benefits of the solution with regards to the rationalisation and systematisation of security and privacy assurance in multiCloud systems

Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security

Computer scienc

TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2009

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month