A Distributed Economics-based Infrastructure for Utility Computing

Existing attempts at utility computing revolve around two approaches. The first consists of proprietary solutions involving renting time on dedicated utility computing machines. The second requires the use of heavy, monolithic applications that are difficult to deploy, maintain, and use. We propose a distributed, community-oriented approach to utility computing. Our approach provides an infrastructure built on Web Services in which modular components are combined to create a seemingly simple, yet powerful system. The community-oriented nature generates an economic environment which results in fair transactions between consumers and providers of computing cycles while simultaneously encouraging improvements in the infrastructure of the computational grid itself.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figur

Why Computation?

This paper reviews my personal inclinations and fascination with the area of unconventional computing. Computing can be perceived as an inscription in a "Rosetta Stone," one category akin to physics, and therefore as a form of comprehension of nature: at least from a purely syntactic perspective, to understand means to be able to algorithmically (re)produce. I also address the question of why there is computation, and sketch a research program based on primordial chaos, out of which order and even self-referential perception emerges by way of evolution.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, invited contribution to "Paths to Unconventional Computing" for a special issue on "Integral Biomathics

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

An Improved GPU Simulator For Spiking Neural P Systems

Spiking Neural P (SNP) systems, variants of Psystems (under Membrane and Natural computing), are computing models that acquire abstraction and inspiration from the way neurons 'compute' or process information. Similar to other P system variants, SNP systems are Turing complete models that by nature compute non-deterministically and in a maximally parallel manner. P systems usually trade (often exponential) space for (polynomial to constant) time. Due to this nature, P system variants are currently limited to parallel simulations, and several variants have already been simulated in parallel devices. In this paper we present an improved SNP system simulator based on graphics processing units (GPUs). Among other reasons, current GPUs are architectured for massively parallel computations, thus making GPUs very suitable for SNP system simulation. The computing model, hardware/software considerations, and simulation algorithm are presented, as well as the comparisons of the CPU only and CPU-GPU based simulators.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009–13192Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-0420