4,837 research outputs found
Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements
As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems,
management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and
integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer
services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective
management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that
constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper
identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents
innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on
Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the
benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape
Models of everywhere revisited: a technological perspective
The concept ‘models of everywhere’ was first introduced in the mid 2000s as a means of reasoning about the
environmental science of a place, changing the nature of the underlying modelling process, from one in which
general model structures are used to one in which modelling becomes a learning process about specific places, in
particular capturing the idiosyncrasies of that place. At one level, this is a straightforward concept, but at another
it is a rich multi-dimensional conceptual framework involving the following key dimensions: models of everywhere,
models of everything and models at all times, being constantly re-evaluated against the most current
evidence. This is a compelling approach with the potential to deal with epistemic uncertainties and nonlinearities.
However, the approach has, as yet, not been fully utilised or explored. This paper examines the
concept of models of everywhere in the light of recent advances in technology. The paper argues that, when first
proposed, technology was a limiting factor but now, with advances in areas such as Internet of Things, cloud
computing and data analytics, many of the barriers have been alleviated. Consequently, it is timely to look again
at the concept of models of everywhere in practical conditions as part of a trans-disciplinary effort to tackle the
remaining research questions. The paper concludes by identifying the key elements of a research agenda that
should underpin such experimentation and deployment
Autonomic computing architecture for SCADA cyber security
Cognitive computing relates to intelligent computing platforms that are based on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies. These technologies can be used to design systems that mimic the human brain to learn about their environment and can autonomously predict an impending anomalous situation. IBM first used the term ‘Autonomic Computing’ in 2001 to combat the looming complexity crisis (Ganek and Corbi, 2003). The concept has been inspired by the human biological autonomic system. An autonomic system is self-healing, self-regulating, self-optimising and self-protecting (Ganek and Corbi, 2003). Therefore, the system should be able to protect itself against both malicious attacks and unintended mistakes by the operator
A Self-adaptive Agent-based System for Cloud Platforms
Cloud computing is a model for enabling on-demand network access to a shared
pool of computing resources, that can be dynamically allocated and released
with minimal effort. However, this task can be complex in highly dynamic
environments with various resources to allocate for an increasing number of
different users requirements. In this work, we propose a Cloud architecture
based on a multi-agent system exhibiting a self-adaptive behavior to address
the dynamic resource allocation. This self-adaptive system follows a MAPE-K
approach to reason and act, according to QoS, Cloud service information, and
propagated run-time information, to detect QoS degradation and make better
resource allocation decisions. We validate our proposed Cloud architecture by
simulation. Results show that it can properly allocate resources to reduce
energy consumption, while satisfying the users demanded QoS
Autonomic care platform for optimizing query performance
Background: As the amount of information in electronic health care systems increases, data operations get more complicated and time-consuming. Intensive Care platforms require a timely processing of data retrievals to guarantee the continuous display of recent data of patients. Physicians and nurses rely on this data for their decision making. Manual optimization of query executions has become difficult to handle due to the increased amount of queries across multiple sources. Hence, a more automated management is necessary to increase the performance of database queries. The autonomic computing paradigm promises an approach in which the system adapts itself and acts as self-managing entity, thereby limiting human interventions and taking actions. Despite the usage of autonomic control loops in network and software systems, this approach has not been applied so far for health information systems.
Methods: We extend the COSARA architecture, an infection surveillance and antibiotic management service platform for the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), with self-managed components to increase the performance of data retrievals. We used real-life ICU COSARA queries to analyse slow performance and measure the impact of optimizations. Each day more than 2 million COSARA queries are executed. Three control loops, which monitor the executions and take action, have been proposed: reactive, deliberative and reflective control loops. We focus on improvements of the execution time of microbiology queries directly related to the visual displays of patients' data on the bedside screens.
Results: The results show that autonomic control loops are beneficial for the optimizations in the data executions in the ICU. The application of reactive control loop results in a reduction of 8.61% of the average execution time of microbiology results. The combined application of the reactive and deliberative control loop results in an average query time reduction of 10.92% and the combination of reactive, deliberative and reflective control loops provides a reduction of 13.04%.
Conclusions: We found that by controlled reduction of queries' executions the performance for the end-user can be improved. The implementation of autonomic control loops in an existing health platform, COSARA, has a positive effect on the timely data visualization for the physician and nurse
Energy-Efficient Management of Data Center Resources for Cloud Computing: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Open Challenges
Cloud computing is offering utility-oriented IT services to users worldwide.
Based on a pay-as-you-go model, it enables hosting of pervasive applications
from consumer, scientific, and business domains. However, data centers hosting
Cloud applications consume huge amounts of energy, contributing to high
operational costs and carbon footprints to the environment. Therefore, we need
Green Cloud computing solutions that can not only save energy for the
environment but also reduce operational costs. This paper presents vision,
challenges, and architectural elements for energy-efficient management of Cloud
computing environments. We focus on the development of dynamic resource
provisioning and allocation algorithms that consider the synergy between
various data center infrastructures (i.e., the hardware, power units, cooling
and software), and holistically work to boost data center energy efficiency and
performance. In particular, this paper proposes (a) architectural principles
for energy-efficient management of Clouds; (b) energy-efficient resource
allocation policies and scheduling algorithms considering quality-of-service
expectations, and devices power usage characteristics; and (c) a novel software
technology for energy-efficient management of Clouds. We have validated our
approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the
CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that Cloud computing model has
immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to
response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures,Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference
on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA
2010), Las Vegas, USA, July 12-15, 201
Autonomic computing meets SCADA security
© 2017 IEEE. National assets such as transportation networks, large manufacturing, business and health facilities, power generation, and distribution networks are critical infrastructures. The cyber threats to these infrastructures have increasingly become more sophisticated, extensive and numerous. Cyber security conventional measures have proved useful in the past but increasing sophistication of attacks dictates the need for newer measures. The autonomic computing paradigm mimics the autonomic nervous system and is promising to meet the latest challenges in the cyber threat landscape. This paper provides a brief review of autonomic computing applications for SCADA systems and proposes architecture for cyber security
An SLA-driven framework for dynamic multimedia content delivery federations
Recently, the Internet has become a popular platform for the delivery of multimedia content. However, its best effort delivery approach is ill-suited to guarantee the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of many existing multimedia services, which results in a significant reduction of the Quality of Experience. This paper presents a solution to these problems, in the form of a framework for dynamically setting up federations between the stakeholders involved in the content delivery chain. More specifically, the framework provides an automated mechanism to set up end-to-end delivery paths from the content provider to the access Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which act as its direct customers and represent a group of end-users. Driven by Service Level Agreements (SLAs), QoS contracts are automatically negotiated between the content provider, the access ISPs, and the intermediary network domains along the delivery paths. These contracts capture the delivered QoS and resource reservation costs, which are subsequently used in the price negotiations between content provider and access ISPs. Additionally, it supports the inclusion of cloud providers within the federations, supporting on-the-fly allocation of computational and storage resources. This allows the automatic deployment and configuration of proxy caches along the delivery paths, which potentially reduce delivery costs and increase delivered quality
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