Detecting Software Aging in a Cloud Computing Framework by Comparing Development Versions

Abstract-Software aging, i.e. degradation of software performance or functionality caused by resource depletion is usually discovered only in the production scenario. This incurs large costs and delays of defect removal and requires provisional solutions such as rejuvenation (controlled restarts). We propose a method for detecting aging problems shortly after their introduction by runtime comparisons of different development versions of the same software. Possible aging issues are discovered by analyzing the differences in runtime traces of selected metrics. The required comparisons are workload-independent which minimizes the additional effort of dedicated stress tests. Consequently, the method requires only minimal changes to the traditional development and testing process. This paves the way to detecting such problems before public releases, greatly reducing the cost of defect fixing. Our study focuses on the memory leaks of Eucalyptus, a popular open source framework for managing cloud computing environments

A survey on elasticity management in PaaS systems

[EN] Elasticity is a goal of cloud computing. An elastic system should manage in an autonomic way its resources, being adaptive to dynamic workloads, allocating additional resources when workload is increased and deallocating resources when workload decreases. PaaS providers should manage resources of customer applications with the aim of converting those applications into elastic services. This survey identifies the requirements that such management imposes on a PaaS provider: autonomy, scalability, adaptivity, SLA awareness, composability and upgradeability. This document delves into the variety of mechanisms that have been proposed to deal with all those requirements. Although there are multiple approaches to address those concerns, providers main goal is maximisation of profits. This compels providers to look for balancing two opposed goals: maximising quality of service and minimising costs. 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Process of designing robust, dependable, safe and secure software for medical devices: Point of care testing device as a case study

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Copyright © 2013 Sivanesan Tulasidas et al. This paper presents a holistic methodology for the design of medical device software, which encompasses of a new way of eliciting requirements, system design process, security design guideline, cloud architecture design, combinatorial testing process and agile project management. The paper uses point of care diagnostics as a case study where the software and hardware must be robust, reliable to provide accurate diagnosis of diseases. As software and software intensive systems are becoming increasingly complex, the impact of failures can lead to significant property damage, or damage to the environment. Within the medical diagnostic device software domain such failures can result in misdiagnosis leading to clinical complications and in some cases death. Software faults can arise due to the interaction among the software, the hardware, third party software and the operating environment. Unanticipated environmental changes and latent coding errors lead to operation faults despite of the fact that usually a significant effort has been expended in the design, verification and validation of the software system. It is becoming increasingly more apparent that one needs to adopt different approaches, which will guarantee that a complex software system meets all safety, security, and reliability requirements, in addition to complying with standards such as IEC 62304. There are many initiatives taken to develop safety and security critical systems, at different development phases and in different contexts, ranging from infrastructure design to device design. Different approaches are implemented to design error free software for safety critical systems. By adopting the strategies and processes presented in this paper one can overcome the challenges in developing error free software for medical devices (or safety critical systems).Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability

The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints

Multimodal estimation of distribution algorithms

Taking the advantage of estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) in preserving high diversity, this paper proposes a multimodal EDA. Integrated with clustering strategies for crowding and speciation, two versions of this algorithm are developed, which operate at the niche level. Then these two algorithms are equipped with three distinctive techniques: 1) a dynamic cluster sizing strategy; 2) an alternative utilization of Gaussian and Cauchy distributions to generate offspring; and 3) an adaptive local search. The dynamic cluster sizing affords a potential balance between exploration and exploitation and reduces the sensitivity to the cluster size in the niching methods. Taking advantages of Gaussian and Cauchy distributions, we generate the offspring at the niche level through alternatively using these two distributions. Such utilization can also potentially offer a balance between exploration and exploitation. Further, solution accuracy is enhanced through a new local search scheme probabilistically conducted around seeds of niches with probabilities determined self-adaptively according to fitness values of these seeds. Extensive experiments conducted on 20 benchmark multimodal problems confirm that both algorithms can achieve competitive performance compared with several state-of-the-art multimodal algorithms, which is supported by nonparametric tests. Especially, the proposed algorithms are very promising for complex problems with many local optima

V2C: A Trust-Based Vehicle to Cloud Anomaly Detection Framework for Automotive Systems

Vehicles have become connected in many ways. They communicate with the cloud and will use Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to exchange warning messages and perform cooperative actions such as platooning. Vehicles have already been attacked and will become even more attractive targets due to their increasing connectivity, the amount of data they produce and their importance to our society. It is therefore crucial to provide cyber security measures to prevent and limit the impact of attacks.As it is problematic for a vehicle to reliably assess its own state when it is compromised, we investigate how vehicle trust can be used to identify compromised vehicles and how fleet-wide attacks can be detected at an early stage using cloud data. In our proposed V2C Anomaly Detection framework, peer vehicles assess each other based on their perceived behavior in traffic and V2X-enabled interactions, and upload these assessments to the cloud for analysis. This framework consists of four modules. For each module we define functional demands, interfaces and evaluate solutions proposed in literature allowing manufacturers and fleet owners to choose appropriate techniques. We detail attack scenarios where this type of framework is particularly useful in detecting and identifying potential attacks and failing software and hardware. Furthermore, we describe what basic vehicle data the cloud analysis can be based upon