281,849 research outputs found
Self-* overload control for distributed web systems
Unexpected increases in demand and most of all flash crowds are considered
the bane of every web application as they may cause intolerable delays or even
service unavailability. Proper quality of service policies must guarantee rapid
reactivity and responsiveness even in such critical situations. Previous
solutions fail to meet common performance requirements when the system has to
face sudden and unpredictable surges of traffic. Indeed they often rely on a
proper setting of key parameters which requires laborious manual tuning,
preventing a fast adaptation of the control policies. We contribute an original
Self-* Overload Control (SOC) policy. This allows the system to self-configure
a dynamic constraint on the rate of admitted sessions in order to respect
service level agreements and maximize the resource utilization at the same
time. Our policy does not require any prior information on the incoming traffic
or manual configuration of key parameters. We ran extensive simulations under a
wide range of operating conditions, showing that SOC rapidly adapts to time
varying traffic and self-optimizes the resource utilization. It admits as many
new sessions as possible in observance of the agreements, even under intense
workload variations. We compared our algorithm to previously proposed
approaches highlighting a more stable behavior and a better performance.Comment: The full version of this paper, titled "Self-* through self-learning:
overload control for distributed web systems", has been published on Computer
Networks, Elsevier. The simulator used for the evaluation of the proposed
algorithm is available for download at the address:
http://www.dsi.uniroma1.it/~novella/qos_web
Evaluating Mission-Critical Self-Adaptive Software Systems: A Testing-Based Approach
Self-adaptive software is a closed-loop system that tries to manage, direct, or regulate its own behavior dynamically. Such a system aims at providing an automated and systematic approach to handling the increasing complexity of operation management. Mission-critical systems (e.g., e-business and telecommunication systems) are usually large, complex, and distributed. These systems must preserve their Quality of Service (QoS) at runtime under highly dynamic and non-deterministic conditions; therefore, they are suitable candidates for being equipped with self-adaptive capabilities. Although significant efforts have been devoted to modeling, designing, developing and deploying self-adaptive software since a decade ago, there is still a lack of well-established concrete processes for evaluating such systems.
This dissertation proposes a systematic evaluation process for mission-critical self-adaptive software systems. The process is a well-defined testing approach that needs a post-mortem analysis, takes the quantified QoS requirements as inputs, and comprises two main phases: i) conducting system-level testing, and ii) evaluating QoS requirements satisfaction. The process uses Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as quantified QoS requirements, and consequently as the adaptation requirements of mission-critical systems. Adaptation requirements are specific types of requirements used to engineer self-adaptive software. Moreover, for the first phase, the dissertation discusses the uniqueness and necessity of conducting system-level load and stress testing on a self-adaptive software system, for collecting runtime QoS data. In the second phase, the process makes use of utility functions to generate a single value indicating the QoS satisfaction of the evaluated system. The dissertation mainly focuses on evaluating the performance, availability and reliability characteristics of QoS.
An open source service-oriented Voice over IP (VoIP) application was selected as a case study. The VoIP application was transformed into a self-adaptive software system with various types of adaptation mechanisms. A set of empirical experiments was performed on the developed self-adaptive VoIP application, and the proposed process was adopted for evaluating the effectiveness of different adaptation mechanisms. To this end, the dissertation defines a sample SLA for the VoIP application, presents a report on the load and stress testing performed on the self-adaptive VoIP application, and presents a set of utility functions for evaluation. The experiments illustrate the validity, reliability, flexibility, and cost of the proposed evaluation process.
In sum, this dissertation introduces a novel evaluation process for mission-critical self-adaptive software systems, and shows that the proposed process can help researchers to systematically evaluate their self-adaptive systems
A deliberative model for self-adaptation middleware using architectural dependency
A crucial prerequisite to externalized adaptation is an understanding of how components are interconnected, or more particularly how and why they depend on one another. Such dependencies can be used to provide an architectural model, which provides a reference point for externalized adaptation. In this paper, it is described how dependencies are used as a basis to systems' self-understanding and subsequent architectural reconfigurations. The approach is based on the combination of: instrumentation services, a dependency meta-model and a system controller. In particular, the latter uses self-healing repair rules (or conflict resolution strategies), based on extensible beliefs, desires and intention (EBDI) model, to reflect reconfiguration changes back to a target application under examination
Developing Real-Time Emergency Management Applications: Methodology for a Novel Programming Model Approach
The last years have been characterized by the arising of highly distributed computing
platforms composed of a heterogeneity of computing and communication resources including
centralized high-performance computing architectures (e.g. clusters or large shared-memory
machines), as well as multi-/many-core components also integrated into mobile nodes
and network facilities. The emerging of computational paradigms such as Grid and Cloud
Computing, provides potential solutions to integrate such platforms with data systems, natural
phenomena simulations, knowledge discovery and decision support systems responding to a
dynamic demand of remote computing and communication resources and services.
In this context time-critical applications, notably emergency management systems, are
composed of complex sets of application components specialized for executing specific
computations, which are able to cooperate in such a way as to perform a global goal in a
distributed manner. Since the last years the scientific community has been involved in facing
with the programming issues of distributed systems, aimed at the definition of applications
featuring an increasing complexity in the number of distributed components, in the spatial
distribution and cooperation between interested parties and in their degree of heterogeneity.
Over the last decade the research trend in distributed computing has been focused on
a crucial objective. The wide-ranging composition of distributed platforms in terms of
different classes of computing nodes and network technologies, the strong diffusion of
applications that require real-time elaborations and online compute-intensive processing as
in the case of emergency management systems, lead to a pronounced tendency of systems
towards properties like self-managing, self-organization, self-controlling and strictly speaking
adaptivity.
Adaptivity implies the development, deployment, execution and management of applications
that, in general, are dynamic in nature. Dynamicity concerns the number and the specific
identification of cooperating components, the deployment and composition of the most
suitable versions of software components on processing and networking resources and
services, i.e., both the quantity and the quality of the application components to achieve
the needed Quality of Service (QoS). In time-critical applications the QoS specification
can dynamically vary during the execution, according to the user intentions and the
Developing Real-Time Emergency
Management Applications: Methodology for
a Novel Programming Model Approach
Gabriele Mencagli and Marco Vanneschi
Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, L. Bruno Pontecorvo, Pisa
Italy
2
2 Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH
information produced by sensors and services, as well as according to the monitored state
and performance of networks and nodes.
The general reference point for this kind of systems is the Grid paradigm which, by
definition, aims to enable the access, selection and aggregation of a variety of distributed and
heterogeneous resources and services. However, though notable advancements have been
achieved in recent years, current Grid technology is not yet able to supply the needed software
tools with the features of high adaptivity, ubiquity, proactivity, self-organization, scalability
and performance, interoperability, as well as fault tolerance and security, of the emerging
applications.
For this reason in this chapter we will study a methodology for designing high-performance
computations able to exploit the heterogeneity and dynamicity of distributed environments
by expressing adaptivity and QoS-awareness directly at the application level. An effective
approach needs to address issues like QoS predictability of different application configurations
as well as the predictability of reconfiguration costs. Moreover adaptation strategies need to
be developed assuring properties like the stability degree of a reconfiguration decision and the
execution optimality (i.e. select reconfigurations accounting proper trade-offs among different
QoS objectives). In this chapter we will present the basic points of a novel approach that lays
the foundations for future programming model environments for time-critical applications
such as emergency management systems.
The organization of this chapter is the following. In Section 2 we will compare the existing
research works for developing adaptive systems in critical environments, highlighting their
drawbacks and inefficiencies. In Section 3, in order to clarify the application scenarios that
we are considering, we will present an emergency management system in which the run-time
selection of proper application configuration parameters is of great importance for meeting the
desired QoS constraints. In Section 4we will describe the basic points of our approach in terms
of how compute-intensive operations can be programmed, how they can be dynamically
modified and how adaptation strategies can be expressed. In Section 5 our approach will
be contextualize to the definition of an adaptive parallel module, which is a building block
for composing complex and distributed adaptive computations. Finally in Section 6 we will
describe a set of experimental results that show the viability of our approach and in Section 7
we will give the concluding remarks of this chapter
A Framework for Evaluating Model-Driven Self-adaptive Software Systems
In the last few years, Model Driven Development (MDD), Component-based
Software Development (CBSD), and context-oriented software have become
interesting alternatives for the design and construction of self-adaptive
software systems. In general, the ultimate goal of these technologies is to be
able to reduce development costs and effort, while improving the modularity,
flexibility, adaptability, and reliability of software systems. An analysis of
these technologies shows them all to include the principle of the separation of
concerns, and their further integration is a key factor to obtaining
high-quality and self-adaptable software systems. Each technology identifies
different concerns and deals with them separately in order to specify the
design of the self-adaptive applications, and, at the same time, support
software with adaptability and context-awareness. This research studies the
development methodologies that employ the principles of model-driven
development in building self-adaptive software systems. To this aim, this
article proposes an evaluation framework for analysing and evaluating the
features of model-driven approaches and their ability to support software with
self-adaptability and dependability in highly dynamic contextual environment.
Such evaluation framework can facilitate the software developers on selecting a
development methodology that suits their software requirements and reduces the
development effort of building self-adaptive software systems. This study
highlights the major drawbacks of the propped model-driven approaches in the
related works, and emphasise on considering the volatile aspects of
self-adaptive software in the analysis, design and implementation phases of the
development methodologies. In addition, we argue that the development
methodologies should leave the selection of modelling languages and modelling
tools to the software developers.Comment: model-driven architecture, COP, AOP, component composition,
self-adaptive application, context oriented software developmen
Policy-based autonomic control service
Recently, there has been a considerable interest in policy-based, goal-oriented service management and autonomic computing. Much work is still required to investigate designs and policy models and associate meta-reasoning systems for policy-based autonomic systems. In this paper we outline a proposed autonomic middleware control service used to orchestrate selfhealing of distributed applications. Policies are used to adjust the systems autonomy and define self-healing strategies to stabilize/correct a given system in the event of failures
Context Aware Adaptable Applications - A global approach
Actual applications (mostly component based) requirements cannot be expressed without a ubiquitous and mobile part for end-users as well as for M2M applications (Machine to Machine). Such an evolution implies context management in order to evaluate the consequences of the mobility and corresponding mechanisms to adapt or to be adapted to the new environment. Applications are then qualified as context aware applications. This first part of this paper presents an overview of context and its management by application adaptation. This part starts by a definition and proposes a model for the context. It also presents various techniques to adapt applications to the context: from self-adaptation to supervised approached. The second part is an overview of architectures for adaptable applications. It focuses on platforms based solutions and shows information flows between application, platform and context. Finally it makes a synthesis proposition with a platform for adaptable context-aware applications called Kalimucho. Then we present implementations tools for software components and a dataflow models in order to implement the Kalimucho platform
Context-aware adaptation in DySCAS
DySCAS is a dynamically self-configuring middleware for automotive control systems. The addition of autonomic, context-aware dynamic configuration to automotive control systems brings a potential for a wide range of benefits in terms of robustness, flexibility, upgrading etc. However, the automotive systems represent a particularly challenging domain for the deployment of autonomics concepts, having a combination of real-time performance constraints, severe resource limitations, safety-critical aspects and cost pressures. For these reasons current systems are statically configured. This paper describes the dynamic run-time configuration aspects of DySCAS and focuses on the extent to which context-aware adaptation has been achieved in DySCAS, and the ways in which the various design and implementation challenges are met
Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation
Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The development of complex systems ensembles that operate in uncertain environments is a major challenge. The reason for this is that system designers are not able to fully specify the system during specification and development and before it is being deployed. Natural swarm systems enjoy similar characteristics, yet, being self-adaptive and being able to self-organize, these systems show beneficial emergent behaviour. Similar concepts can be extremely helpful for artificial systems, especially when it comes to multi-robot scenarios, which require such solution in order to be applicable to highly uncertain real world application. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview over state-of-the-art solutions in emergent systems, self-organization, self-adaptation, and robotics. We discuss these approaches in the light of a framework for multi-robot systems and identify similarities, differences missing links and open gaps that have to be addressed in order to make this framework possible
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