Building scalable digital library ingestion pipelines using microservices

CORE, a harvesting service offering access to millions of open access research papers from around the world, has shifted its harvesting process from following a monolithic approach to the adoption of a microservices infrastructure. In this paper, we explain how we rearranged and re-scheduled our old ingestion pipeline, present CORE's move to managing microservices and outline the tools we use in a new and optimised ingestion system. In addition, we discuss the ineffciencies of our old harvesting process, the advantages, and challenges of our new ingestion system and our future plans. We conclude that via the adoption of microservices architecture we managed to achieve a scalable and distributed system that would assist with CORE's future performance and evolution

L’organisation et la gestion de l’espace dans la langue et la culture igbo du Nigeria

This study based on Igbo language and literature – especially proverbs and folktales – focuses on the use of space, the way it is distributed, organised and managed. It reveals a highly structured use of a communal space organised around the person, considered as member of the group. Traditions, which protect the communal space and ensure its being handed down from one generation to the next, equally give everyone an individual share in it. This space is both versatile and highly partitioned, closely managed and distributed according to age, gender and the sons’ rank in the family. Folktales describe the human world, represented by the village where life revolves around the house and the market, as close to that of the spirits, with the forest and the stream acting as boundaries. Humans and spirits share this space on the understanding that men are only managing it for a while as representatives of their family

On the Design of Clean-Slate Network Control and Management Plane

We provide a design of clean-slate control and management plane for data networks using the abstraction of 4D architecture, utilizing and extending 4D’s concept of a logically centralized Decision plane that is responsible for managing network-wide resources. In this paper, a scalable protocol and a dynamically adaptable algorithm for assigning Data plane devices to a physically distributed Decision plane are investigated, that enable a network to operate with minimal configuration and human intervention while providing optimal convergence and robustness against failures. Our work is especially relevant in the context of ISPs and large geographically dispersed enterprise networks. We also provide an extensive evaluation of our algorithm using real-world and artificially generated ISP topologies along with an experimental evaluation using ns-2 simulator

Distributed Reference Service

Walden University enrolls students all over the world in many time zones. To meet this support challenge, the university library has instituted a distributed reference service that includes librarians living and working throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Sue Davidsen, Director of the Walden University Library will describe how the distributed reference network works, the software utilized, and the successes and challenges of managing from a distance

DIMENSIONS OF POST-CRISIS COMPETITIVE MONETARY POLICY

This communication wants to highlight, synthetically, the need to reconsider the monetary policy pursued in post-crisis period, driven by the imperatives of necessity, the requirements increase its competitiveness in a global economy, integrated, computerized, subject, becoming more global governance multiform. In this respect, communication and defining attributes are revealed circumscribed managing corporate governance dimensions of competitive monetary policy, promoted by the central bank in post-crisis period, finally giving it a summary schedule determined relations between attributes and dimensions of size co-determinative scheme could offer possible opening for formalization and modeling. Dimensions listed in the paper confined field improvement and adaptation potential of monetary policy in a period of rebuilding and restructuring the global economy, world of regionalism and integration, the polarization of the world economy, the assertion of national economies in a new perspective, that of network economies networked and distributed market.monetary policy; competitiveness; attribute; coordinated dimensional size; decision; tool

Distributed and Centralized Task Allocation: When and Where to Use Them

Self-organisation is frequently advocated as the solution for managing large, dynamic systems. Distributed algorithms are implicitly designed for infinitely large problems, while small systems are regarded as being controllable using traditional, centralised approaches. Many real-world systems, however, do not fit conveniently into these "small" or "large" categories, resulting in a range of cases where the optimal solution is ambiguous. This difficulty is exacerbated by enthusiasts of either approach constructing problems that suit their preferred control architecture. We address this ambiguity by building an abstract model of task allocation in a community of specialised agents. We are inspired by the problem of work distribution in distributed satellite systems, but the model is also relevant to the resource allocation problems in distributed robotics, autonomic computing and wireless sensor networks. We compare the behaviour of a self-organising, market-based task allocation strategy to a classical approach that uses a central controller with global knowledge. The objective is not to prove one mechanism inherently superior to the other; instead we are interested in the regions of problem space where each of them dominates. Simulation is used to explore the trade-off between energy consumption and robustness in a system of intermediate size, with fixed communication costs and varying rates of component failure. We identify boundaries between regions in the parameter space where one or the other architecture will be favoured. This allows us to derive guidelines for system designers, thus contributing to the development of a disciplined approach to controlling distributed systems using self-organising mechanisms

Managing a Fleet of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) using Cloud Robotics Platform

In this paper, we provide details of implementing a system for managing a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) operating in a factory or a warehouse premise. While the robots are themselves autonomous in its motion and obstacle avoidance capability, the target destination for each robot is provided by a global planner. The global planner and the ground vehicles (robots) constitute a multi agent system (MAS) which communicate with each other over a wireless network. Three different approaches are explored for implementation. The first two approaches make use of the distributed computing based Networked Robotics architecture and communication framework of Robot Operating System (ROS) itself while the third approach uses Rapyuta Cloud Robotics framework for this implementation. The comparative performance of these approaches are analyzed through simulation as well as real world experiment with actual robots. These analyses provide an in-depth understanding of the inner working of the Cloud Robotics Platform in contrast to the usual ROS framework. The insight gained through this exercise will be valuable for students as well as practicing engineers interested in implementing similar systems else where. In the process, we also identify few critical limitations of the current Rapyuta platform and provide suggestions to overcome them.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, journal pape