The Neuroscience Information Framework: A Data and Knowledge Environment for Neuroscience

With support from the Institutes and Centers forming the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, we have designed and implemented a new initiative for integrating access to and use of Web-based neuroscience resources: the Neuroscience Information Framework. The Framework arises from the expressed need of the neuroscience community for neuroinformatic tools and resources to aid scientific inquiry, builds upon prior development of neuroinformatics by the Human Brain Project and others, and directly derives from the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroscience Database Gateway. Partnered with the Society, its Neuroinformatics Committee, and volunteer consultant-collaborators, our multi-site consortium has developed: (1) a comprehensive, dynamic, inventory of Web-accessible neuroscience resources, (2) an extended and integrated terminology describing resources and contents, and (3) a framework accepting and aiding concept-based queries. Evolving instantiations of the Framework may be viewed at http://nif.nih.gov, http://neurogateway.org, and other sites as they come on line

A Survey on Virtualization of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining tremendous importance thanks to their broad range of commercial applications such as in smart home automation, health-care and industrial automation. In these applications multi-vendor and heterogeneous sensor nodes are deployed. Due to strict administrative control over the specific WSN domains, communication barriers, conflicting goals and the economic interests of different WSN sensor node vendors, it is difficult to introduce a large scale federated WSN. By allowing heterogeneous sensor nodes in WSNs to coexist on a shared physical sensor substrate, virtualization in sensor network may provide flexibility, cost effective solutions, promote diversity, ensure security and increase manageability. This paper surveys the novel approach of using the large scale federated WSN resources in a sensor virtualization environment. Our focus in this paper is to introduce a few design goals, the challenges and opportunities of research in the field of sensor network virtualization as well as to illustrate a current status of research in this field. This paper also presents a wide array of state-of-the art projects related to sensor network virtualization

VINEA: a policy-based virtual network embedding architecture

Network virtualization has enabled new business models by allowing infrastructure providers to lease or share their physical network. To concurrently run multiple customized virtual network services, such infrastructure providers need to run a virtual network embedding protocol. The virtual network embedding is the (NP-hard) problem of matching constrained virtual networks onto the physical network. We present the design and implementation of a policy-based architecture for the virtual network embedding problem. By policy, we mean a variant aspect of any of the (invariant) embedding mechanisms: resource discovery, virtual network mapping, and allocation on the physical infrastructure. Our architecture adapts to different scenarios by instantiating appropriate policies, and has bounds on embedding efficiency and on convergence embedding time, over a single provider, or across multiple federated providers. The performance of representative novel policy configurations are compared over a prototype implementation. We also present an object model as a foundation for a protocol specification, and we release a testbed to enable users to test their own embedding policies, and to run applications within their virtual networks. The testbed uses a Linux system architecture to reserve virtual node and link capacities.National Science Foundation (CNS-0963974

Imaging Informatics and the Human Brain Project: the Role of Structure, Review

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A service oriented broker-based approach for dynamic resource discovery in virtual networks

© 2015, Rabah et al.; licensee Springer. In the past few years, the concept of network virtualization has received significant attention from industry and research fora. This concept applies virtualization to networking infrastructures by enabling the dynamic creation of several co-existing logical network instances (or virtual networks) over a shared physical network infrastructure (or substrate network). Due to the potential it offers in terms of diversifying existing networks and ensuring the co-existence of heterogeneous network architectures on top of shared substrates, network virtualization is often considered as an enabler of a polymorphic Internet and a cornerstone of the future Internet architecture. One of the challenges associated with the network virtualization concept is the description, publication, and discovery of virtual resources that can be composed to form virtual networks. To achieve those tasks, there is a need for an expressive information model facilitating information representation and sharing, as well as an efficient resource publication and discovery framework. In this paper, we propose a service oriented, broker-based framework for virtual resource description, publication, and discovery. This framework relies on a novel service-oriented hierarchical business model and an expressive information model for resources/services description. The detailed framework’s architecture is presented, and its operation is illustrated using a REST-based content distribution scenario. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept prototype implementation realized using various technologies/tools (e.g. Jersey, JAXB, PostgreSQL, and Xen cloud platform) is presented along with a detailed performance analysis of the system. When compared to existing virtual resource discovery frameworks, our broker-based virtual resource discovery framework offers signification performance improvements of the virtual resources’ discovery operation, in terms of response time (92.8% improvement) and incurred network load (77.3% improvement), when dealing with multiple resource providers. Furthermore, relying on a broker as intermediary role simplifies the resources’ discovery and selection operations, and improves the overall efficiency of the virtual network embedding process