A service-oriented Grid environment with on-demand QoS support

Grid Computing entstand aus der Vision für eine neuartige Recheninfrastruktur, welche darauf abzielt, Rechenkapazität so einfach wie Elektrizität im Stromnetz (power grid) verfügbar zu machen. Der entsprechende Zugriff auf global verteilte Rechenressourcen versetzt Forscher rund um den Globus in die Lage, neuartige Herausforderungen aus Wissenschaft und Technik in beispiellosem Ausmaß in Angriff zu nehmen. Die rasanten Entwicklungen im Grid Computing begünstigten auch Standardisierungsprozesse in Richtung Harmonisierung durch Service-orientierte Architekturen und die Anwendung kommerzieller Web Services Technologien. In diesem Kontext ist auch die Sicherung von Qualität bzw. entsprechende Vereinbarungen über die Qualität eines Services (QoS) wichtig, da diese vor allem für komplexe Anwendungen aus sensitiven Bereichen, wie der Medizin, unumgänglich sind. Diese Dissertation versucht zur Entwicklung im Grid Computing beizutragen, indem eine Grid Umgebung mit Unterstützung für QoS vorgestellt wird. Die vorgeschlagene Grid Umgebung beinhaltet eine sichere Service-orientierte Infrastruktur, welche auf Web Services Technologien basiert, sowie bedarfsorientiert und automatisiert HPC Anwendungen als Grid Services bereitstellen kann. Die Grid Umgebung zielt auf eine kommerzielle Nutzung ab und unterstützt ein durch den Benutzer initiiertes, fallweises und dynamisches Verhandeln von Serviceverträgen (SLAs). Das Design der QoS Unterstützung ist generisch, jedoch berücksichtigt die Implementierung besonders die Anforderungen von rechenintensiven und zeitkritischen parallelen Anwendungen, bzw. Garantien f¨ur deren Ausführungszeit und Preis. Daher ist die QoS Unterstützung auf Reservierung, anwendungsspezifische Abschätzung und Preisfestsetzung von Ressourcen angewiesen. Eine entsprechende Evaluation demonstriert die Möglichkeiten und das rationale Verhalten der QoS Infrastruktur. Die Grid Infrastruktur und insbesondere die QoS Unterstützung wurde in Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprojekten der EU eingesetzt, welche verschiedene Anwendungen aus dem medizinischen und bio-medizinischen Bereich als Services zur Verfügung stellen. Die EU Projekte GEMSS und Aneurist befassen sich mit fortschrittlichen HPC Anwendungen und global verteilten Daten aus dem Gesundheitsbereich, welche durch Virtualisierungstechniken als Services angeboten werden. Die Benutzung von Gridtechnologie als Basistechnologie im Gesundheitswesen ermöglicht Forschern und Ärzten die Nutzung von Grid Services in deren Arbeitsumfeld, welche letzten Endes zu einer Verbesserung der medizinischen Versorgung führt.Grid computing emerged as a vision for a new computing infrastructure that aims to make computing resources available as easily as electric power through the power grid. Enabling seamless access to globally distributed IT resources allows dispersed users to tackle large-scale problems in science and engineering in unprecedented ways. The rapid development of Grid computing also encouraged standardization, which led to the adoption of a service-oriented paradigm and an increasing use of commercial Web services technologies. Along these lines, service-level agreements and Quality of Service are essential characteristics of the Grid and specifically mandatory for Grid-enabling complex applications from certain domains such as the health sector. This PhD thesis aims to contribute to the development of Grid technologies by proposing a Grid environment with support for Quality of Service. The proposed environment comprises a secure service-oriented Grid infrastructure based on standard Web services technologies which enables the on-demand provision of native HPC applications as Grid services in an automated way and subject to user-defined QoS constraints. The Grid environment adopts a business-oriented approach and supports a client-driven dynamic negotiation of service-level agreements on a case-by-case basis. Although the design of the QoS support is generic, the implementation emphasizes the specific requirements of compute-intensive and time-critical parallel applications, which necessitate on-demand QoS guarantees such as execution time limits and price constraints. Therefore, the QoS infrastructure relies on advance resource reservation, application-specific resource capacity estimation, and resource pricing. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the capabilities and rational behavior of the QoS infrastructure. The presented Grid infrastructure and in particular the QoS support has been successfully applied and demonstrated in EU projects for various applications from the medical and bio-medical domains. The EU projects GEMSS and Aneurist are concerned with advanced e-health applications and globally distributed data sources, which are virtualized by Grid services. Using Grid technology as enabling technology in the health domain allows medical practitioners and researchers to utilize Grid services in their clinical environment which ultimately results in improved healthcare

A Brokering Framework for Assessing Legal Risks in Big Data and the Cloud

“Cloud computing” and “Big Data” are amongst the most hyped-up terms and buzzwords of the moment. After decades in which individuals and companies used to host their data and applications using their own IT infrastructure, the world has seen the stunning transformation of the Internet. Major shifts occurred when these infrastructures began to be outsourced to public Cloud providers to match commercial expectations. Storing, sharing and transferring data and databases over the Internet is convenient, yet legal risks cannot be eliminated. Legal risk is a fast-growing area of research and covers various aspects of law. Current studies and research on Cloud computing legal risk assessment have been, however, limited in scope and focused mainly on security and privacy aspects. There is little systematic research on the risks, threats and impact of the legal issues inherent to database rights and “ownership” rights of data. Database rights seem to be outdated and there is a significant gap in the scientific literature when it comes to the understanding of how to apply its provisions in the Big Data era. This means that we need a whole new framework for understanding, protecting and sharing data in the Cloud. The scheme we propose in this chapter is based on a risk assessment-brokering framework that works side by side with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This proposed framework will provide better control for Cloud users and will go a long way to increase confidence and reinforce trust in Cloud computing transactions

A Framework for Grid-Enabling Scientific Workflow Systems. Architecture and application case studies on interoperability and heterogeneity in support for Grid workflow automation.

Since the early 2000s, Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have played a key role in the development of complex applications within a virtual organization (VO) context. Grids and workflows have emerged as vital technologies for addressing the (SOA) paradigm. Given the variety of Grid middleware, scientific workflow systems and Grid workflows available, bringing the two technologies together in a flexible, reusable and generalized way has been largely overlooked, particularly from a scientific end user perspective. The lack of domain focus in this area has led to a slow uptake of Grid technologies. This thesis aims to design a framework for Grid-enabling workflows, which identifies the essential technological components, how these components fit together in layered architecture and the interactions between them. To produce such a framework, this thesis first investigates the definition of a Grid-workflow architecture and mapping Grid functionality to workflow nodes, focusing on striking a balance between performance, usability and the Grid functionality supported. Next, it presents an examination of framework extensions for supporting various forms of Grid heterogeneity, essential for ii VO based collaboration. Given the complex nature of Grid technologies, the work presented here investigates abstracting Grid based workflows through high-level definitions and resolution using semantic technologies. Finally, this thesis presents a way to resolves abstract Grid workflows using semantic technologies and intelligent, autonomous agents. The frameworks presented in this thesis are tested and evaluated within the context of domain-based case studies defined in the SIMDAT, BRIDGE and ARGUGRID EU funded research projects

Approche comportementale pour la validation et le test système des systèmes embarqués : Application aux dispositifs médicaux embarqués

A Biomedical research seeks good reasoning for solving medical problems, based on intensive work and great debate. It often deals with beliefs or theories that can be proven, disproven or often refined after observations or experiments. The problem is how to make tests without risks for patients, including variability and uncertainty on a number of parameters (patients, evolution of disease, treatments …). Nowadays, medical treatment uses more and more embedded devices such as sensors, actuators, and controllers. Treatment depends on the availability and well-functioning of complex electronic systems, comprising thousands of lines of codes. A mathematical representation of patient or device is presented by a number of variables which are defined to represent the inputs, the outputs and a set of equations describing the interaction of these variables. The objective of this research is to develop tools and methodologies for the development of embedded systems for medical fields. The goal is to be able to model and jointly simulate the medical device as well the human body, at least the part of the body involved in the medical device, to analyze the performance and quality of service (QoS) of the interaction of the device with the human body. To achieve this goal our study focused on several points described below. After starting by defining a prototype of a new global and flexible architecture of mathematical model of human body, which is able to contain required data, we begin by proposing a new global methodology for modeling and simulation human body and medical systems, in order to better understand the best way to model and simulate these systems and for detecting performance and the quality of services of all system components. We use two techniques that help to evaluate the calculated QoS value. The first one calculates an index of severity which indicates the severity of the case studied. The second one using a normalization function that represents the simulation as a point in order to construct a new error grid and use it to evaluate the accuracy of value measured by patients. Using Keil development tools designed for ARM processors, we have declared a new framework in the objective to create a new tester model for the glucose-insulin system, and to define the basic rules for the tester which has the ability to satisfy well-established medical decision criteria. The framework begins by simulating a mathematical model of the human body, and this model was developed to operate in the closed loop of the glucose insulin. Then, the model of artificial pancreas has been implemented to control the mathematical model of human body. Finally a new tester model was created in order to analyze the performance of all the components of the glucose-insulin system.. We have used the suitability of partially observable Markov decision processes to formalize the planning of clinical management.Les progrès des technologies de l'information et de la communication, des MEMS, des capteurs, actionneurs, etc. ont permis l’émergence de différents dispositifs biomédicaux. Ces nouveaux dispositifs, souvent embarqués, contribuent considérablement à l'amélioration du diagnostic et du traitement de certaines maladies, comme le diabète par exemple. Des dispositifs embarqués encore plus complexes sont en cours d’élaboration, leur mise en œuvre nécessite des années de recherche et beaucoup d’expérimentation. Le cœur artificiel, encore en phase de réalisation, est un exemple concret de ces systèmes complexes. La question de la fiabilité, du test de fonctionnement et de sureté de ces dispositifs reste problématique et difficile à résoudre. Plusieurs paramètres (patient, évolution de la maladie, alimentation, activité, traitement, etc.) sont en effet à prendre en compte et la conséquence d’une erreur de fonctionnement peut être catastrophique pour le patient. L'objectif de cette thèse est de développer des outils et des approches méthodologiques permettant la validation et le test au niveau système de ce type de dispositifs. Il s’agit précisément d’étudier la possibilité de modéliser et simuler d’une manière conjointe un dispositif médical ainsi que son interaction avec le corps humain, du moins la partie du corps humain concernée par le dispositif médical, afin de mesurer les performances et la qualité de services (QoS) du dispositif considéré. Pour atteindre cet objectif notre étude a porté sur plusieurs points. Nous avons d’abord mis en évidence une architecture simplifiée d’un modèle de corps humain permettant de représenter et de mieux comprendre les différents mécanismes du corps humain. Nous avons ensuite exploré un ensemble de métriques et une approche méthodologique générique permettant de qualifier la qualité de service d’un dispositif médical donné en interaction avec le corps humain. Afin de valider notre approche, nous l’avons appliquée à un dispositif destiné à la régulation du taux de sucre pour des patients atteints du diabète. La partie du corps humain concernée par cette pathologie à savoir le pancréas a été simulé par un modèle simplifié que nous avons implémenté sur un microcontrôleur. Le dispositif de régulation de l’insuline quant à lui a été simulé par un modèle informatique écrit en C. Afin de rendre les mesures de performances observées indépendantes d’un patient donné, nous avons étudiés différentes stratégies de tests sur différentes catégories de patients. Nous avons pour cette partie mis en œuvre un générateur de modèles capable de reproduire différents états physiologiques de patients diabétiques. L’analyse et l’exploitation des résultats observés peut aider les médecins à considérablement limités les essais cliniques sur des vrai patients et les focaliser uniquement sur les cas les plus pertinent

Agent-Based Mediated Service Negotiation

Brazier, F.M.T. [Promotor]Overeinder, B.J. [Copromotor

On the Development and Management of Adaptive Business Collaborations.

Today’s business climate demands a high rate of change with which Information Technology (IT)-minded organizations are required to cope. Organizations face rapidly changing market conditions, new competitive pressures, new regulatory fiats that demand compliance, and new competitive threats. All of these situations and more drive the need for the IT infrastructure of an organization to respond quickly in support of new business models and requirements. This dissertation studies the adaptive development and management of such dynamic business models and requirements. A rule based environment is developed in which the people who develop and manage business collaborations in organizations can do so in a way that is as independent of specific implementation technologies as possible; and where they can take business requirements into consideration, and in which they can respond to changes as effectively as possible.