Design and Performance Guarantees in Cloud Computing: Challenges and Opportunities

In the last years, cloud computing received an increasing attention both from academia and industry. Most of the solutions proposed in the literature strive to limit the effect of uncertain and unpredictable behaviors that may occur in cloud environments, like for example flash crowds or hardware failures. However, managing uncertainty in a cloud environment is still an open problem. In such a panorama, the service provider is not able to define suitable Service Level Objectives (SLO) that are easy to measure, and control. In this work we analyze two of the critical problems that are encountered in cloud environments, but seldom discussed or addressed in the literature: (1) how to reduce the uncertainty providing suitable control interfaces at different levels of the computing infrastructure; (2) how to assess performance evaluation in order to get probabilistic guarantees for the SLOs. We here briefly describe the two problems and envision some possible control-theoretical solutions

On the Convolution Efficiency for Probabilistic Analysis of Real-Time Systems (Artifact)

This artifact describes the process for validation and reproduction of the experiments given in the associated paper "On the Convolution Efficiency for Probabilistic Analysis of Real-Time Systems". This document contains the information on the scope of the presented artifact, i.e. what are the considered experiments, instructions for obtaining the source code of the experiments, tested platforms, and other relevant information

Model reduction of switched affine systems

This paper addresses model reduction and extends balanced truncation to the class of switched affine systems with endogenous switching. The switched affine system is rewritten as a switched linear one with state resets that account for the affine terms. Balanced truncation can then be applied to each mode dynamics, independently. As a result, different reduced state vectors are associated with the different modes, and reset maps are here appropriately redefined so as to account and compensate for this mismatch, possibly preserving the continuity of the output. The overall behavior of the reduced switched system is determined by both the selected reduction per mode and the adopted reset maps. In this paper, we consider a stochastic setting and propose a randomized method for the selection of the reduced order. The performance of the proposed approach is illustrated through a multi-room temperature control example

AdaptMC: A Control-Theoretic Approach for Achieving Resilience in Mixed-Criticality Systems (Artifact)

A system is said to be resilient if slight deviations from expected behavior during run-time does not lead to catastrophic degradation of performance: minor deviations should result in no more than minor performance degradation. In mixed-criticality systems, such degradation should additionally be criticality-cognizant. The applicability of control theory is explored for the design of resilient run-time scheduling algorithms for mixed-criticality systems. Recent results in control theory have shown how appropriately designed controllers can provide guaranteed service to hard-real-time servers; this prior work is extended to allow for such guarantees to be made concurrently to multiple criticality-cognizant servers. The applicability of this approach is explored via several experimental simulations in a dual-criticality setting. These experiments demonstrate that our control-based run-time schedulers can be synthesized in such a manner that bounded deviations from expected behavior result in the high-criticality server suffering no performance degradation and the lower-criticality one, bounded performance degradation

Distributed Approach to the Holistic Resource Management of a Mobile Cloud Network

The Mobile Cloud Network is an emerging cost and capacity heterogeneous distributed cloud topological paradigm that aims to remedy the application performance constraints imposed by centralised cloud infrastructures. A centralised cloud infrastructure and the adjoining Telecom network will struggle to accommodate the exploding amount of traffic generated by forthcoming highly interactive applications. Cost effectively managing a Mobile Cloud Network computing infrastructure while meeting individual application’s performance goals is non- trivial and is at the core of our contribution. Due to the scale of a Mobile Cloud Network, a centralised approach is infeasible. Therefore, in this paper a distributed algorithm that addresses these challenges is presented. The presented approach works towards meeting individual application’s performance objectives, constricting system-wide operational cost, and mitigating re- source usage skewness. The presented distributed algorithm does so by iteratively and independently acting on the objectives of each component with a common heuristic objective function. Sys- tematic evaluations reveal that the presented algorithm quickly converges and performs near optimal in terms of system-wide operational cost and application performance, and significantly outperforms similar na ̈ıve and random methods

Control-theoretical load-balancing for cloud applications with brownout

Cloud applications are often subject to unexpected events like flash crowds and hardware failures. Without a predictable behaviour, users may abandon an unresponsive application. This problem has been partially solved on two separate fronts: first, by adding a self-adaptive feature called brownout inside cloud applications to bound response times by modulating user experience, and, second, by introducing replicas -- copies of the applications having the same functionalities -- for redundancy and adding a load-balancer to direct incoming traffic. However, existing load-balancing strategies interfere with brownout self-adaptivity. Load-balancers are often based on response times, that are already controlled by the self-adaptive features of the application, hence they are not a good indicator of how well a replica is performing. In this paper, we present novel load-balancing strategies, specifically designed to support brownout applications. They base their decision not on response time, but on user experience degradation. We implemented our strategies in a self-adaptive application simulator, together with some state-of-the-art solutions. Results obtained in multiple scenarios show that the proposed strategies bring significant improvements when compared to the state-of-the-art ones

Infected pancreatic necrosis: outcomes and clinical predictors of mortality. A post hoc analysis of the MANCTRA-1 international study

: The identification of high-risk patients in the early stages of infected pancreatic necrosis (IPN) is critical, because it could help the clinicians to adopt more effective management strategies. We conducted a post hoc analysis of the MANCTRA-1 international study to assess the association between clinical risk factors and mortality among adult patients with IPN. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression models were used to identify prognostic factors of mortality. We identified 247 consecutive patients with IPN hospitalised between January 2019 and December 2020. History of uncontrolled arterial hypertension (p = 0.032; 95% CI 1.135-15.882; aOR 4.245), qSOFA (p = 0.005; 95% CI 1.359-5.879; aOR 2.828), renal failure (p = 0.022; 95% CI 1.138-5.442; aOR 2.489), and haemodynamic failure (p = 0.018; 95% CI 1.184-5.978; aOR 2.661), were identified as independent predictors of mortality in IPN patients. Cholangitis (p = 0.003; 95% CI 1.598-9.930; aOR 3.983), abdominal compartment syndrome (p = 0.032; 95% CI 1.090-6.967; aOR 2.735), and gastrointestinal/intra-abdominal bleeding (p = 0.009; 95% CI 1.286-5.712; aOR 2.710) were independently associated with the risk of mortality. Upfront open surgical necrosectomy was strongly associated with the risk of mortality (p < 0.001; 95% CI 1.912-7.442; aOR 3.772), whereas endoscopic drainage of pancreatic necrosis (p = 0.018; 95% CI 0.138-0.834; aOR 0.339) and enteral nutrition (p = 0.003; 95% CI 0.143-0.716; aOR 0.320) were found as protective factors. Organ failure, acute cholangitis, and upfront open surgical necrosectomy were the most significant predictors of mortality. Our study confirmed that, even in a subgroup of particularly ill patients such as those with IPN, upfront open surgery should be avoided as much as possible. Study protocol registered in ClinicalTrials.Gov (I.D. Number NCT04747990)

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis