Supporting Knowledge Management Instruments with Composable Micro-Services

Despite the fact that knowledge management (KM) challenges cannot be solved by installing a technical system alone, technical support for KM initiatives is still an important issue and nowadays requires handling of context, intelligent content analysis and extended collaboration support. Since information systems have significantly improved in the last ten years with regards to implementing Web 2.0 features and semantic content analysis, knowledge workers can expect better support from IT than ever. After the human-oriented, technology-oriented (documents), process-riented and social KM phases, KM support now needs integration of those beneficial technologies instead of hyping one and neglecting the other. The true nature and potential of social media does only manifest when people incorporate them into their day-to-day work routines or even "live" the social media idea. The same is true for business process management (BPM). If BPM tools are not integrated into the existing, well-known information systems, acceptance will be low. Practice shows, that employees often do not even know in which process they are currently working

ClouNS - A Cloud-native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects

The capability to operate cloud-native applications can generate enormous business growth and value. But enterprise architects should be aware that cloud-native applications are vulnerable to vendor lock-in. We investigated cloud-native application design principles, public cloud service providers, and industrial cloud standards. All results indicate that most cloud service categories seem to foster vendor lock-in situations which might be especially problematic for enterprise architectures. This might sound disillusioning at first. However, we present a reference model for cloud-native applications that relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise architecture engineering methodologies

Pando: Personal Volunteer Computing in Browsers

The large penetration and continued growth in ownership of personal electronic devices represents a freely available and largely untapped source of computing power. To leverage those, we present Pando, a new volunteer computing tool based on a declarative concurrent programming model and implemented using JavaScript, WebRTC, and WebSockets. This tool enables a dynamically varying number of failure-prone personal devices contributed by volunteers to parallelize the application of a function on a stream of values, by using the devices' browsers. We show that Pando can provide throughput improvements compared to a single personal device, on a variety of compute-bound applications including animation rendering and image processing. We also show the flexibility of our approach by deploying Pando on personal devices connected over a local network, on Grid5000, a French-wide computing grid in a virtual private network, and seven PlanetLab nodes distributed in a wide area network over Europe.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 2 table

Work for Stake: Reimagining Ownership & Work in the Emerging Internet

The modern labour economy is fraught with challenges, such as economic inequality, job insecurity, digital intensification and shifting labour market composition along the lines of skills, employer consolidation, and the profile of the average employee. Ownership has emerged as a powerful, growing, and increasingly accessible solution to these challenges, as it enables workers to reap the full material benefits of their labour and generate wealth and security in a digital-first world. However, despite a positive perception towards ownership, few workers participate in ownership models, such as co-operatives and entrepreneurship. This research investigates barriers to ownership optimizing behaviours among workers, the costs, risks, and benefits of transitioning to ownership, and the differences between employees and independent workers. The hypothesis is that experimenting with interoperable digital ownership tools can lead to disruptive worker-centred innovations that increase worker stake, such as capital ownership, capital income, and voice in decision-making. This research employs strategic foresight and design research methodologies to provide a structured approach to understanding complex systems and framing future scenarios and experimentation. Ultimately, this research aims to decrease precarity and increase agency for workers by laying the groundwork for practical innovations that enable ownership-driven security

Energy Efficient Placement of Workloads in Composable Data Center Networks

This paper studies the energy efficiency of composable datacentre (DC) infrastructures over network topologies. Using a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model, we compare the performance of disaggregation at rack-scale and pod-scale over selected electrical, optical and hybrid network topologies relative to a traditional DC. Relative to a pod-scale DC, the results show that physical disaggregation at rack-scale is sufficient for optimal efficiency when the optical network topology is adopted, and resource components are allocated in a suitable manner. The optical network topology also enables optimal energy efficiency in composable DCs. The paper also studies logical disaggregation of traditional DC servers over an optical network topology. Relative to physical disaggregation at rack-scale, logical disaggregation of server resources within each rack enables marginal fall in the total DC power consumption (TDPC) due to improved resource demands placement. Hence, an adaptable composable infrastructure that can support both in memory (access) latency sensitive and insensitive workloads is enabled. We also conduct a study of the adoption of micro-service architecture in both traditional and composable DCs. Our results show that increasing the modularity of workloads improves the energy efficiency in traditional DCs, but disproportionate utilization of DC resources persists. A combination of disaggregation and micro-services achieved up to 23% reduction in the TDPC of the traditional DC by enabling optimal resources utilization and energy efficiencies. Finally, we propose a heuristic for energy efficient placement of workloads in composable DCs which replicates the trends produced by the MILP model formulated in this paper

Building Programmable Wireless Networks: An Architectural Survey

In recent times, there have been a lot of efforts for improving the ossified Internet architecture in a bid to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through co-located data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. The emergence of "programmable wireless networks", that allow greater flexibility, ease of management and configurability, is a step in the right direction to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the architectures proposed in literature for building programmable wireless networks focusing primarily on three popular techniques, i.e., software defined networks, cognitive radio networks, and virtualized networks. This survey is a self-contained tutorial on these techniques and its applications. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges in building next-generation programmable wireless networks and identify open research issues and future research directions.Comment: 19 page

Multi-core devices for safety-critical systems: a survey

Multi-core devices are envisioned to support the development of next-generation safety-critical systems, enabling the on-chip integration of functions of different criticality. This integration provides multiple system-level potential benefits such as cost, size, power, and weight reduction. However, safety certification becomes a challenge and several fundamental safety technical requirements must be addressed, such as temporal and spatial independence, reliability, and diagnostic coverage. This survey provides a categorization and overview at different device abstraction levels (nanoscale, component, and device) of selected key research contributions that support the compliance with these fundamental safety requirements.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant TIN2015-65316-P, Basque Government under grant KK-2019-00035 and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness has also partially supported Jaume Abella under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship (RYC-2013-14717).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

How to Create an Innovation Accelerator

Too many policy failures are fundamentally failures of knowledge. This has become particularly apparent during the recent financial and economic crisis, which is questioning the validity of mainstream scholarly paradigms. We propose to pursue a multi-disciplinary approach and to establish new institutional settings which remove or reduce obstacles impeding efficient knowledge creation. We provided suggestions on (i) how to modernize and improve the academic publication system, and (ii) how to support scientific coordination, communication, and co-creation in large-scale multi-disciplinary projects. Both constitute important elements of what we envision to be a novel ICT infrastructure called "Innovation Accelerator" or "Knowledge Accelerator".Comment: 32 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 code samples, 72 reference