QoS-aware Service Composition in Dynamic Service Oriented Environments

International audienceQoS-aware service composition is a key requirement in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) since it enables fullling complex user tasks while meeting Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. A challenging issue towards this purpose is the selection of the best set of services to compose, meeting global QoS constraints imposed by the user, which is known to be a NP-hard problem. This challenge becomes even more relevant when it is considered in the context of dynamic service environments. Indeed, two specic issues arise. First, required tasks are fulfilled on the fly, thus the time available for services' selection and composition is limited. Second, service compositions have to be adaptive so that they can cope with changing conditions of the environment. In this paper, we present an efficient service selection algorithm that provides the appropriate ground for QoS-aware composition in dynamic service environments. Our algorithm is formed as a guided heuristic. The paper also presents a set of experiments conducted to evaluate the efficiency of our algorithm, which shows its timeliness and optimality

Heavy quarkonium: progress, puzzles, and opportunities

A golden age for heavy quarkonium physics dawned a decade ago, initiated by the confluence of exciting advances in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and an explosion of related experimental activity. The early years of this period were chronicled in the Quarkonium Working Group (QWG) CERN Yellow Report (YR) in 2004, which presented a comprehensive review of the status of the field at that time and provided specific recommendations for further progress. However, the broad spectrum of subsequent breakthroughs, surprises, and continuing puzzles could only be partially anticipated. Since the release of the YR, the BESII program concluded only to give birth to BESIII; the $B$-factories and CLEO-c flourished; quarkonium production and polarization measurements at HERA and the Tevatron matured; and heavy-ion collisions at RHIC have opened a window on the deconfinement regime. All these experiments leave legacies of quality, precision, and unsolved mysteries for quarkonium physics, and therefore beg for continuing investigations. The plethora of newly-found quarkonium-like states unleashed a flood of theoretical investigations into new forms of matter such as quark-gluon hybrids, mesonic molecules, and tetraquarks. Measurements of the spectroscopy, decays, production, and in-medium behavior of c\bar{c}, b\bar{b}, and b\bar{c} bound states have been shown to validate some theoretical approaches to QCD and highlight lack of quantitative success for others. The intriguing details of quarkonium suppression in heavy-ion collisions that have emerged from RHIC have elevated the importance of separating hot- and cold-nuclear-matter effects in quark-gluon plasma studies. This review systematically addresses all these matters and concludes by prioritizing directions for ongoing and future efforts.Comment: 182 pages, 112 figures. Editors: N. Brambilla, S. Eidelman, B. K. Heltsley, R. Vogt. Section Coordinators: G. T. Bodwin, E. Eichten, A. D. Frawley, A. B. Meyer, R. E. Mitchell, V. Papadimitriou, P. Petreczky, A. A. Petrov, P. Robbe, A. Vair

Chisel: Reshaping Queries to Trim Latency in Key-Value Stores

"It is challenging for key-value data stores to trim user (tail) latency of requests as the workloads are observed to have skewed number of key-value pairs and commonly retrieved via multiget operation, i.e., all keys at the same time. In this paper we present Chisel, a novel client side solution to efficiently reshape the query size at the data store by adaptively splitting big requests into chunks to reap the benefits of parallelism and merge small requests into a single query to amortize latency overheads per request. We derive a novel layered queueing model that can quickly and approximately steer the decisions of Chisel. We extensively evaluate Chisel on memcached clusters hosted on a testbed, across a large number of scenarios with different workloads and system configurations. Our evaluation results show that Chisel can overturn the inherent high variability of requests into a judicious operational region, showcasing significant gains for the mean and 95th percentile of user perceived latency, compared to the state-of-art query processing policy. © 2019 IEEE.

Automated Discovery of Compositions of Services Described with Separate Ontologies

Abstract. We present a matchmaking system that exploits ontologybased (OWL-S) service descriptions to discover service compositions capable of satisfying a client request. Efficiency is achieved by pre-computing off-line a (hyper)graph that represents the functional dependencies among different (sub)services. The notion of Semantic Field [1] is employed to cross different ontologies.

Increased pathogenicity of European porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus is associated with enhanced adaptive responses and viral clearance

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is one of the most economically important diseases of swine worldwide. Since its first emergence in 1987 the PRRS virus (PRRSV) has become particularly divergent with highly pathogenic strains appearing in both Europe and Asia. However, the underlying mechanisms of PRRSV pathogenesis are still unclear. This study sets out to determine the differences in pathogenesis between subtype 1 and 3 strains of European PRRSV (PRRSV-I), and compare the immune responses mounted against these strains. Piglets were infected with 3 strains of PRRSV-I: Lelystad virus, 215-06 a British field strain and SU1-bel from Belarus. Post-mortem examinations were performed at 3 and 7 days post-infection (dpi), and half of the remaining animals in each group were inoculated with an Aujeszky's disease (ADV) vaccine to investigate possible immune suppression resulting from PRRSV infection. The subtype 3 SU1-bel strain displayed greater clinical signs and lung gross pathology scores compared with the subtype 1 strains. This difference did not appear to be caused by higher virus replication, as viraemia and viral load in broncho-alveolar lavage fluid (BALF) were lower in the SU1-bel group. Infection with SU1-bel induced an enhanced adaptive immune response with greater interferon (IFN)-¿ responses and an earlier PRRSV-specific antibody response. Infection with PRRSV did not affect the response to vaccination against ADV. Our results indicate that the increased clinical and pathological effect of the SU1-bel strain is more likely to be caused by an enhanced inflammatory immune response rather than higher levels of virus replication