A survey of general-purpose experiment management tools for distributed systems

International audienceIn the field of large-scale distributed systems, experimentation is particularly difficult. The studied systems are complex, often nondeterministic and unreliable, software is plagued with bugs, whereas the experiment workflows are unclear and hard to reproduce. These obstacles led many independent researchers to design tools to control their experiments, boost productivity and improve quality of scientific results. Despite much research in the domain of distributed systems experiment management, the current fragmentation of efforts asks for a general analysis. We therefore propose to build a framework to uncover missing functionality of these tools, enable meaningful comparisons be-tween them and find recommendations for future improvements and research. The contribution in this paper is twofold. First, we provide an extensive list of features offered by general-purpose experiment management tools dedicated to distributed systems research on real platforms. We then use it to assess existing solutions and compare them, outlining possible future paths for improvements

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Reference models for network trace anonymization

Network security research can benefit greatly from testing environments that are capable of generating realistic, repeatable and configurable background traffic. In order to conduct network security experiments on systems such as Intrusion Detection Systems and Intrusion Prevention Systems, researchers require isolated testbeds capable of recreating actual network environments, complete with infrastructure and traffic details. Unfortunately, due to privacy and flexibility concerns, actual network traffic is rarely shared by organizations as sensitive information, such as IP addresses, device identity and behavioral information can be inferred from the traffic. Trace data anonymization is one solution to this problem. The research community has responded to this sanitization problem with anonymization tools that aim to remove sensitive information from network traces, and attacks on anonymized traces that aim to evaluate the efficacy of the anonymization schemes. However there is continued lack of a comprehensive model that distills all elements of the sanitization problem in to a functional reference model.;In this thesis we offer such a comprehensive functional reference model that identifies and binds together all the entities required to formulate the problem of network data anonymization. We build a new information flow model that illustrates the overly optimistic nature of inference attacks on anonymized traces. We also provide a probabilistic interpretation of the information model and develop a privacy metric for anonymized traces. Finally, we develop the architecture for a highly configurable, multi-layer network trace collection and sanitization tool. In addition to addressing privacy and flexibility concerns, our architecture allows for uniformity of anonymization and ease of data aggregation

A living laboratory approach in the design of the user requirements of a spatial information platform

The purpose of this article is to introduce the development of the Regional Spatial Profiler – a spatial information and modelling platform – for the Department of Science and Technology. Based on the steps set out in action research, this platform is aimed at strengthening spatial planning at a regional scale by providing accessible and comparable spatial information (of current and past trends) to planning practitioners in government. To ensure that the Profiler met the requirements and expectations of users, and would be used by practitioners, its user-interface and future content requirements were developed using four living laboratories (living labs): the Cape Winelands, Ugu and Amatole District Municipalities, and Mangaung Local (now Metro) Municipality. Municipal participants and project team members believed that a living-lab process was the appropriate way to develop the Profiler and experienced the living-lab Profiler as a positive initiative; however, due to time, budget and technical constraints, it was a temporally – specific and fragmented project initiative. What would be required in future project phases would be a longer time frame and continued user involvement in multiple project phases

Blockchain-based adoption framework for authentic land registry system in Malaysia

Land registration systems are very essential for property ownership management. The exited land registry systems are less efficient and time-consuming and expose to human errors. By using blockchain technology, most of the principles of good governance in land administration such as transparency and efficiency can be fulfilled. However, there is a lack of experience in developing blockchain-based land registry systems. This paper proposes a blockchain-based adoption framework for land registry management in Malaysia. It elaborates more on developing a prototype that fulfills the main functions of current land registration by using smart contract functionalities. Also, this paper illustrates the main challenges of adopting this technology such as expertise shortage of software developers, implementation difficulties due to scalability of the land transactions, data sharing with different types of blockchain and lack of security attacks resistance. Therefore, there is a need to form an agreed-upon blockchain development platform that meet such constraints