Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201

Two research contributions in 64-bit computing: Testing and Applications

Following the release of Windows 64-bit and Redhat Linux 64-bit operating systems (OS) in late April 2005, this is the one of the first 64-bit OS research project completed in a British university. The objective is to investigate (1) the increase/decrease in performance compared to 32-bit computing; (2) the techniques used to develop 64-bit applications; and (3) how 64-bit computing should be used in IT and research organizations to improve their work. This paper summarizes research discoveries for this investigation, including two major research contributions in (1) testing and (2) application development. The first contribution includes performance, stress, application, multiplatform, JDK and compatibility testing for AMD and Intel models. Comprehensive testing results reveal that 64-bit computing has a better performance in application performance, system performance and stress testing, but a worse performance in compatibility testing than the traditional 32-bit computing. A 64-bit dual-core processor has been tested and the results show that it performs better than a 64-bit single-core processor, but only in application that requires very high demands of CPU and memory consumption. The second contribution is .NET 1.1 64-bit implementations. Without additional troubleshooting, .NET 1.1 does not work on 64-bit Windows operating systems in stable ways. After stabilizing .NET environment, the next step is the application development, which is a dynamic repository with functions such as registration, download, login-logout, product submissions, database storage and statistical reports. The technology is based on Visual Studio .NET 2003, .NET 1.1 Framework with Service Pack 1, SQL Server 2000 with Service Pack 4 and IIS Server 6.0 on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 platform with Service Pack 1

Storage Solutions for Big Data Systems: A Qualitative Study and Comparison

Big data systems development is full of challenges in view of the variety of application areas and domains that this technology promises to serve. Typically, fundamental design decisions involved in big data systems design include choosing appropriate storage and computing infrastructures. In this age of heterogeneous systems that integrate different technologies for optimized solution to a specific real world problem, big data system are not an exception to any such rule. As far as the storage aspect of any big data system is concerned, the primary facet in this regard is a storage infrastructure and NoSQL seems to be the right technology that fulfills its requirements. However, every big data application has variable data characteristics and thus, the corresponding data fits into a different data model. This paper presents feature and use case analysis and comparison of the four main data models namely document oriented, key value, graph and wide column. Moreover, a feature analysis of 80 NoSQL solutions has been provided, elaborating on the criteria and points that a developer must consider while making a possible choice. Typically, big data storage needs to communicate with the execution engine and other processing and visualization technologies to create a comprehensive solution. This brings forth second facet of big data storage, big data file formats, into picture. The second half of the research paper compares the advantages, shortcomings and possible use cases of available big data file formats for Hadoop, which is the foundation for most big data computing technologies. Decentralized storage and blockchain are seen as the next generation of big data storage and its challenges and future prospects have also been discussed

A general framework for positioning, evaluating and selecting the new generation of development tools.

This paper focuses on the evaluation and positioning of a new generation of development tools containing subtools (report generators, browsers, debuggers, GUI-builders, ...) and programming languages that are designed to work together and have a common graphical user interface and are therefore called environments. Several trends in IT have led to a pluriform range of developments tools that can be classified in numerous categories. Examples are: object-oriented tools, GUI-tools, upper- and lower CASE-tools, client/server tools and 4GL environments. This classification does not sufficiently cover the tools subject in this paper for the simple reason that only one criterion is used to distinguish them. Modern visual development environments often fit in several categories because to a certain extent, several criteria can be applied to evaluate them. In this study, we will offer a broad classification scheme with which tools can be positioned and which can be refined through further research.