Technical alignment

This essay discusses the importance of the areas of infrastructure and testing to help digital preservation services demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. It encourages practitioners to build a strong culture in which transparency and collaborations between technical frameworks are valued highly. It also argues for devising and applying agreed-upon metrics that will enable the systematic analysis of preservation infrastructure. The essay begins by defining technical infrastructure and testing in the digital preservation context, provides case studies that exemplify both progress and challenges for technical alignment in both areas, and concludes with suggestions for achieving greater degrees of technical alignment going forward

The OMII Software Distribution

This paper describes the work carried out at the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII) and the key elements of the OMII software distribution that have been developed in collaboration with members of the Managed Programme Initiative. The main objective of the OMII is to preserve and consolidate the achievements of the UK e-Science Programme by collecting, maintaining and improving the software modules that form the key components of a generic Grid middleware. Recently, the activity at Southampton has been extended beyond 2009 through a new project, OMII-UK, that forms a partnership that now includes the OGSA-DAI activities at Edinburgh and the myGrid project at Manchester

Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues

The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations