Real-Time Virtualization and Cloud Computing

In recent years, we have observed three major trends in the development of complex real-time embedded systems. First, to reduce cost and enhance flexibility, multiple systems are sharing common computing platforms via virtualization technology, instead of being deployed separately on physically isolated hosts. Second, multi-core processors are increasingly being used in real-time systems. Third, developers are exploring the possibilities of deploying real-time applications as virtual machines in a public cloud. The integration of real-time systems as virtual machines (VMs) atop common multi-core platforms in a public cloud raises significant new research challenges in meeting the real-time latency requirements of applications. In order to address the challenges of running real-time VMs in the cloud, we first present RT-Xen, a novel real-time scheduling framework within the popular Xen hypervisor. We start with single-core scheduling in RT-Xen, and present the first work that empirically studies and compares different real-time scheduling schemes on a same platform. We then introduce RT-Xen 2.0, which focuses on multi-core scheduling and spanning multiple design spaces, including priority schemes, server schemes, and scheduling policies. Experimental results demonstrate that when combined with compositional scheduling theory, RT-Xen can deliver real-time performance to an application running in a VM, while the default credit scheduler cannot. After that, we present RT-OpenStack, a cloud management system designed to support co-hosting real-time and non-real-time VMs in a cloud. RT-OpenStack studies the problem of running real-time VMs together with non-real-time VMs in a public cloud. Leveraging the resource interface and real-time scheduling provided by RT-Xen, RT-OpenStack provides real-time performance guarantees to real-time VMs, while achieving high resource utilization by allowing non-real-time VMs to share the remaining CPU resources through a novel VM-to-host mapping scheme. Finally, we present RTCA, a real-time communication architecture for VMs sharing a same host, which maintains low latency for high priority inter-domain communication (IDC) traffic in the face of low priority IDC traffic

Presidential election in Turkey: a wide range of intricate challenges ahead of the next president

On 10 August 2014, Turkey will hold the first round of presidential election which are of specific importance, as its results will shape the country’s both domestic politics and external relations. This paper discusses the key challenges which Turkey’s next president must undertake. The domestic challenges range from revision of Constitution, Kurdish peace process and economic growth to polarization of society, freedom of judiciary, separation of powers and civil liberties. In the external relations area, the principal challenges are the worsening of country’s relations with its neighbours, security threats and the stalemate of the EU integration. Several domestic and external challenges are inter-related: for instance, the freedom of judiciary, separation of powers and civil liberties affect the EU integration process; the political uncertainty relates to economic growth and foreign investments; the Kurdish peace process impacts on the external security issues; the economic factors influence the relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government and Iraq’s central government; the Syrian crisis raises new challenges with regard to the Syrian refugees in Turkey. Therefore, addressing Turkey’s current domestic and external challenges will be a long, puzzling and often conflicting-results process

Pan-Cancer Analysis Identifies MNX1 and Associated Antisense Transcripts as Biomarkers for Cancer

The identification of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers is a major objective in improving clinical outcomes in cancer, which has been facilitated by the availability of high-throughput gene expression data. A growing interest in non-coding genomic regions has identified dysregulation of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in several malignancies, suggesting a potential use as biomarkers. In this study, we leveraged data from large-scale sequencing projects to uncover the expression patterns of the MNX1 gene and its associated lncRNAs MNX1-AS1 and MNX1-AS2 in solid tumours. Despite many reports describing MNX1 overexpression in several cancers, limited studies exist on MNX1-AS1 and MNX1-AS2 and their potential as biomarkers. By employing clustering methods to visualise multi-gene relationships, we identified a discriminative power of the three genes in distinguishing tumour vs. normal samples in several cancers of the gastrointestinal tract and reproductive systems, as well as in discerning oesophageal and testicular cancer histological subtypes. Notably, the expressions of MNX1 and its antisenses also correlated with clinical features and endpoints, uncovering previously unreported associations. This work highlights the advantages of using combinatory expression patterns of non-coding transcripts of differentially expressed genes as clinical evaluators and identifies MNX1, MNX1-AS1, and MNX1-AS2 expressions as robust candidate biomarkers for clinical applicationsD.R. is the recipient of a Kidscan funded PhD studentship and partly supported by Brunel University Londo

L’Ukraine, la pomme de discorde entre les États-Unis, l’Union européenne et la Russie

L’Union douanière eurasiatique est une initiative lancée par Moscou pour préserver et renforcer l’influence de la Russie dans son voisinage. Les années 2007-2008 ont été pour l’Ukraine une période au cours de laquelle ce pays a connu des fortes tensions politiques internes, des élections législatives anticipées, une situation économique difficile et l’échec de son adhésion à l’OTAN, mais aussi un rapprochement avec l’Union européenne. Néanmoins, à partir de 2008, la Russie profite des tension..

Limitations and Solutions for Real-Time Local Inter-Domain Communication in Xen

As computer hardware becomes increasingly powerful, there is an ongoing trend towards integrating complex, legacy real-time systems using fewer hosts through virtualization. Especially in embedded systems domains such as avionics and automotive engineering, this kind of system integration can greatly reduce system weight, cost, and power requirements. When systems are integrated in this manner, network communication may become local inter-domain communication (IDC) within the same host. This paper examines the limitations of inter-domain communication in Xen, a widely used open-source virtual machine monitor (VMM) that recently has been extended to support real-time domain scheduling. We find that both the VMM scheduler and the manager domain can significantly impact real-time IDC performance under different conditions, and show that improving the VMM scheduler alone cannot deliver real-time performance for local IDC. To address those limitations, we present the RTCA, a Real-Time Communication Architecture within the manager domain in Xen, along with empirical evaluations whose results demonstrate that the latency of communication tasks can be improved dramatically from ms to μs by a combination of the RTCA and a real-time VMM scheduler