Meeting the design challenges of nano-CMOS electronics: an introduction to an upcoming EPSRC pilot project

The years of ‘happy scaling’ are over and the fundamental challenges that the semiconductor industry faces, at both technology and device level, will impinge deeply upon the design of future integrated circuits and systems. This paper provides an introduction to these challenges and gives an overview of the Grid infrastructure that will be developed as part of a recently funded EPSRC pilot project to address them, and we hope, which will revolutionise the electronics design industry

GRIDCC: Real-time workflow system

The Grid is a concept which allows the sharing of resources between distributed communities, allowing each to progress towards potentially different goals. As adoption of the Grid increases so are the activities that people wish to conduct through it. The GRIDCC project is a European Union funded project addressing the issues of integrating instruments into the Grid. This increases the requirement of workflows and Quality of Service upon these workflows as many of these instruments have real-time requirements. In this paper we present the workflow management service within the GRIDCC project which is tasked with optimising the workflows and ensuring that they meet the pre-defined QoS requirements specified upon them

Hybrid clouds for data-Intensive, 5G-Enabled IoT applications: an overview, key issues and relevant architecture

Hybrid cloud multi-access edge computing (MEC) deployments have been proposed as efficient means to support Internet of Things (IoT) applications, relying on a plethora of nodes and data. In this paper, an overview on the area of hybrid clouds considering relevant research areas is given, providing technologies and mechanisms for the formation of such MEC deployments, as well as emphasizing several key issues that should be tackled by novel approaches, especially under the 5G paradigm. Furthermore, a decentralized hybrid cloud MEC architecture, resulting in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is proposed and its main building blocks and layers are thoroughly described. Aiming to offer a broad perspective on the business potential of such a platform, the stakeholder ecosystem is also analyzed. Finally, two use cases in the context of smart cities and mobile health are presented, aimed at showing how the proposed PaaS enables the development of respective IoT applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Distributed Handler Architecture

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Computer Sciences, 2007Over the last couple of decades, distributed systems have been demonstrated an architectural evolvement based on models including client/server, multi-tier, distributed objects, messaging and peer-to-peer. One recent evolutionary step is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), whose goal is to achieve loose-coupling among the interacting software applications for scalability and interoperability. The SOA model is engendered in Web Services, which provide software platforms to build applications as services and to create seamless and loosely-coupled interactions. Web Services utilize supportive functionalities such as security, reliability, monitoring, logging and so forth. These functionalities are typically provisioned as handlers, which incrementally add new capabilities to the services by building an execution chain. Even though handlers are very important to the service, the way of utilization is very crucial to attain the potential benefits. Every attempt to support a service with an additive functionality increases the chance of having an overwhelmingly crowded chain: this makes Web Service fat. Moreover, a handler may become a bottleneck because of having a comparably higher processing time. In this dissertation, we present Distributed Handler Architecture (DHArch) to provide an efficient, scalable and modular architecture to manage the execution of the handlers. The system distributes the handlers by utilizing a Message Oriented Middleware and orchestrates their execution in an efficient fashion. We also present an empirical evaluation of the system to demonstrate the suitability of this architecture to cope with the issues that exist in the conventional Web Service handler structures

Improving the Scalability of DPWS-Based Networked Infrastructures

The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) specification enables seamless discovery, configuration, and interoperability of networked devices in various settings, ranging from home automation and multimedia to manufacturing equipment and data centers. Unfortunately, the sheer simplicity of event notification mechanisms that makes it fit for resource-constrained devices, makes it hard to scale to large infrastructures with more stringent dependability requirements, ironically, where self-configuration would be most useful. In this report, we address this challenge with a proposal to integrate gossip-based dissemination in DPWS, thus maintaining compatibility with original assumptions of the specification, and avoiding a centralized configuration server or custom black-box middleware components. In detail, we show how our approach provides an evolutionary and non-intrusive solution to the scalability limitations of DPWS and experimentally evaluate it with an implementation based on the the Web Services for Devices (WS4D) Java Multi Edition DPWS Stack (JMEDS).Comment: 28 pages, Technical Repor