9,537 research outputs found
CloudHealth: A Model-Driven Approach to Watch the Health of Cloud Services
Cloud systems are complex and large systems where services provided by
different operators must coexist and eventually cooperate. In such a complex
environment, controlling the health of both the whole environment and the
individual services is extremely important to timely and effectively react to
misbehaviours, unexpected events, and failures. Although there are solutions to
monitor cloud systems at different granularity levels, how to relate the many
KPIs that can be collected about the health of the system and how health
information can be properly reported to operators are open questions. This
paper reports the early results we achieved in the challenge of monitoring the
health of cloud systems. In particular we present CloudHealth, a model-based
health monitoring approach that can be used by operators to watch specific
quality attributes. The CloudHealth Monitoring Model describes how to
operationalize high level monitoring goals by dividing them into subgoals,
deriving metrics for the subgoals, and using probes to collect the metrics. We
use the CloudHealth Monitoring Model to control the probes that must be
deployed on the target system, the KPIs that are dynamically collected, and the
visualization of the data in dashboards.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl
HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges
High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to
on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business
analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the
cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise
environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid
environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud
resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources
and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which
range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying
platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the
discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large
users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a
survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is
ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can
help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly
relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from
big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR
A review of mechanoluminescence in inorganic solids : compounds, mechanisms, models and applications
Mechanoluminescence (ML) is the non-thermal emission of light as a response to mechanical stimuli on a solid material. While this phenomenon has been observed for a long time when breaking certain materials, it is now being extensively explored, especially since the discovery of non-destructive ML upon elastic deformation. A great number of materials have already been identified as mechanoluminescent, but novel ones with colour tunability and improved sensitivity are still urgently needed. The physical origin of the phenomenon, which mainly involves the release of trapped carriers at defects with the help of stress, still remains unclear. This in turn hinders a deeper research, either theoretically or application oriented. In this review paper, we have tabulated the known ML compounds according to their structure prototypes based on the connectivity of anion polyhedra, highlighting structural features, such as framework distortion, layered structure, elastic anisotropy and microstructures, which are very relevant to the ML process. We then review the various proposed mechanisms and corresponding mathematical models. We comment on their contribution to a clearer understanding of the ML phenomenon and on the derived guidelines for improving properties of ML phosphors. Proven and potential applications of ML in various fields, such as stress field sensing, light sources, and sensing electric (magnetic) fields, are summarized. Finally, we point out the challenges and future directions in this active and emerging field of luminescence research
Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring
This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Transient Propagation and Scattering of Quasi-Rayleigh Waves in Plates: Quantitative comparison between Pulsed TV-Holography Measurements and FC(Gram) elastodynamic simulations
We study the scattering of transient, high-frequency, narrow-band
quasi-Rayleigh elastic waves by through-thickness holes in aluminum plates, in
the framework of ultrasonic nondestructive testing (NDT) based on full-field
optical detection. Sequences of the instantaneous two-dimensional (2-D)
out-of-plane displacement scattering maps are measured with a self-developed
PTVH system. The corresponding simulated sequences are obtained by means of an
FC(Gram) elastodynamic solver introduced recently, which implements a full
three-dimensional (3D) vector formulation of the direct linear-elasticity
scattering problem. A detailed quantitative comparison between these
experimental and numerical sequences, which is presented here for the first
time, shows very good agreement both in the amplitude and the phase of the
acoustic field in the forward, lateral and backscattering areas. It is thus
suggested that the combination of the PTVH system and the FC(Gram)
elastodynamic solver provides an effective ultrasonic inspection tool for
plate-like structures, with a significant potential for ultrasonic NDT
applications.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, corresponding author Jos\'e Carlos
L\'opez-V\'azquez, [email protected]. Changes: 1st, 4th, 5th paragraphs
(intro), 3rd, 4th paragraphs (sec. 4); [59-60] cited only in appendixes; old
ref. [52] removed; misprints corrected in the uncertainty of c_L (subsec.
3.1), citation to fig. 10 (sec. 4), size of images (caption fig.15);
reference to Lam\'e constants removed in subsec. 3.
Applications of AFM in pharmaceutical sciences
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a high-resolution imaging technique that uses a small probe (tip and cantilever) to provide topographical information on surfaces in air or in liquid media. By pushing the tip into the surface or by pulling it away, nanomechanical data such as compliance (stiffness, Young’s Modulus) or adhesion, respectively, may be obtained and can also be presented visually in the form of maps displayed alongside topography images. This chapter outlines the principles of operation of AFM, describing some of the important imaging modes and then focuses on the use of the technique for pharmaceutical research. Areas include tablet coating and dissolution, crystal growth and polymorphism, particles and fibres, nanomedicine, nanotoxicology, drug-protein and protein-protein interactions, live cells, bacterial biofilms and viruses. Specific examples include mapping of ligand-receptor binding on cell surfaces, studies of protein-protein interactions to provide kinetic information and the potential of AFM to be used as an early diagnostic tool for cancer and other diseases. Many of these reported investigations are from 2011-2014, both from the literature and a few selected studies from the authors’ laboratories
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