Antonio Marotta

Restoration of body composition in celiac children after one year of gluten-free diet.

Restoring protein, fat, and bone compartments in celiac children on a gluten-free diet (GFD) is not yet well understood. Hence, anthropometric, biochemical, and bone densitometric assessment was performed in 23 celiac children, 8 boys and 15 girls, aged 1 to 12 years (mean 4.7), at diagnosis and 1 year after GFD. At diagnosis the patients had height, arm muscle area, triceps skinfolds, subscapular skinfolds, fat area index, and bone mineral content significantly lower than in an age- and sex-matched control group. After 1 year on GFD, no significant difference was found between patients and controls in all the parameters studied except in height and arm muscle area, which, however, were very near to the normal expected. Serum hemoglobin, iron, and zinc values were below the normal range in more than one half of patients at diagnosis and within the normal range in almost all of them after 1 year of GFD. Serum hemoglobin, iron, zinc, triglycerides, proteins, albumin, and calcium values significantly rose during the year of GFD. A year of GFD in celiac children allows a virtually complete return in body mass composition.

A Simulated Annealing Based Approach for Power Efficient Virtual Machines Consolidation

In the Cloud Computing paradigm there is an emerging Green Computing awareness, aimed at increasing the cost-efficiency of the underlying infrastructure. The pursued objective is to find the right compromise between the energy consumption and the perceived quality of service of the applications running in the cloud. Big data centers, along with the adoption of the virtualization technology, are increasingly experiencing the need to reduce consumption, because of both the environmental pollution and the economic concern. Among the novel techniques used to minimize the energy consumption wastefulness there is the Virtual Machines Consolidation, which leverages the VM live migration. The goal is to increase the overall cost-efficiency by reducing the number of active nodes. The main contributions of this paper are the proposal of a novel model for the consolidation problem and a Simulated Annealing based algorithm which solves it by evaluating the attractiveness of the possible VM migrations.

Unchanged iron and copper and increased zinc in the blood of obese children after two hypocaloric diets

Serum iron (sFe), and ferritin (sFert), transferrin saturation index (TSI), plasma zinc and copper (pZn, pCu), and erythrocyte zinc content (eZn) were measured in 55 obese children and adolescents (28 males and 27 females) before and after a 13-wk treatment with a hypocaloric balanced diet (HCBD, 22 subjects) or a 10-wk treatment with a protein sparing modified fast diet (PSMF, 33 subjects). The energy intake provided by the HCBD and PSMF diet was calculated to be 60 and 25%, respectively, of the recommended dietary allowances (RDAs) for age and sex. Neither diet was supplemented with trace elements or calcium.Using a visual memory system, all subjects had a 24-h dietary intake recall before starting the weight-loss program. Iron, zinc, and copper intakes from the 24-h recall were compared with those from prescribed diets.Both diets produced a significant (p<0.001) weight reduction with a significant reduction in the arm muscle area of the PSMF group.After treatment, no significant change was observed in sFe, sFert, and TSI of either group, whereas eZn increased significantly in the HCBD and the PSMF groups (p=0.001 andp<0.006, respectively), with an improvement of the erythrocyte index (E.I.). A significant increase in pZn was also observed in the PSMF group (p=0.007).When compared with the usual intakes, HCBD supplied less iron (p=0.04) and more copper (p=0.001), whereas PSMF provided more zinc (p=0.026).

On the energy cost of robustness for green virtual network function placement in 5G virtualized infrastructures

Abstract Next generation 5G networks will rely on virtualized Data Centers (vDC) to host virtualized network functions on commodity servers. Such Network Function Virtualization (NFV) will lead to significant savings in terms of infrastructure cost and reduced management complexity. However, green strategies for networking and computing inside data centers, such as server consolidation or energy aware routing, should not negatively impact the quality and service level agreements expected from network operators. In this paper, we study how robust strategies that place virtual network functions (VNF) inside vDC impact the energy savings and the protection level against resource demand uncertainty. We propose novel optimization models that allow the minimization of the energy of the computing and network infrastructure which is hosting a set of service chains that implement the VNFs. The model explicitly provides for robustness to unknown or imprecisely formulated resource demand variations, powers down unused routers, switch ports and servers, and calculates the energy optimal VNF placement and network embedding also considering latency constraints on the service chains. We propose both exact and heuristic methods. Our experiments were carried out using the virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), which allows us to quantitatively assess the trade-off between energy cost, robustness and the protection level of the solutions against demand uncertainty. Our heuristic is able to converge to a good solution in a very short time, in comparison to the exact solver, which is not able to output better results in a longer run as demonstrated by our numerical evaluation. We also study the degree of robustness of a solution for a given protection level and the cost of additional energy needed because of the usage of more computing and network elements.

Zinc content of lymphomonocytes in obese children

Abstract Thirty-three obese children (5 – 15 years of age) and 15 lean controls (5 – 8 years of age) were included in the study. Zinc content in cell subsets of lymphomonocytes (LMs) and polymorphonuclear cells (PMNc), in plasma and erythrocytes was evaluated. Cell populations were separated by density gradient technique. In obese children the mean level of LMs zinc content was significantly lower than in controls (1.59±0.53 vs 2.18±0.61 nmol/mg of proteins respectively). No significant difference in the zinc content of PMNc, plasma and erythrocytes was found between groups. A significant inverse correlation between LMs zinc content and degree of obesity (percent of overweight and arm-fat area) was observed. The low zinc content in lymphomonocytes may be of relevance as an index of zinc deficiency in obese children. However, the relationship between the zinc content in lymphomonocytes and the immune response still requires further investigation.

Exploiting SDN Approach to Tackle Cloud Computing Security Issues in the ATC Scenario

Cloud Computing has been receiving great attention in the last few years due to the benefits it provides in terms of flexibility, scalability, virtualization and service provision. Nevertheless, many companies remain reluctant to such a cutting-edge technology due to the serious security issues affecting virtualized environments, especially in critical application scenarios where high safety and dependability levels are required. This work is aimed at discussing and presenting the main security threats for cloud computing infrastructures, as well as proposing a novel architecture in charge of reacting to security attacks in Infrastructure as a Service platforms. The basic idea is to migrate the attacked virtual appliance and to reconfigure the network by means of Software Defined Networking approach. The paper presents the architecture we have in mind and that will be deployed and validated against a real world distributed Air Traffic Control system, for which missing dependability and security targets would result in huge business and human losses.

A fast robust optimization-based heuristic for the deployment of green virtual network functions

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has attracted a lot of attention in the telecommunication field because it allows to virtualize core-business network functions on top of a NFV Infrastructure. Typically, virtual network functions (VNFs) can be represented as chains of Virtual Machines (VMs) or containers that exchange network traffic which are deployed inside datacenters on commodity hardware. In order to achieve cost efficiency, network operators aim at minimizing the power consumption of their NFV infrastructure. This can be achieved by using the minimum set of physical servers and networking equipment that are able to provide the quality of service required by the virtual functions in terms of computing, memory, disk and network related parameters. However, it is very difficult to predict precisely the resource demands required by the VNFs to execute their tasks. In this work, we apply the theory of robust optimization to deal with such parameter uncertainty. We model the problem of robust VNF placement and network embedding under resource demand uncertainty and network latency constraints using robust mixed integer optimization techniques. For online optimization, we develop fast solution heuristics. By using the virtualized Evolved Packet Core as use case, we perform a comprehensive evaluation in terms of performance, solution time and complexity and show that our heuristic can calculate robust solutions for large instances under one second.

A Power Efficient and Robust Virtual Network Functions Placement Problem

Reducing the CAPEX and OPEX is a major concern for Telecom Operators (TOs): to this extent, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been considered a key aspect to virtualize network functions and push them to the NFV Infrastructure. Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) can be deployed as a set of components running on several cooperating Virtual Machines (VMs) inside modern data centers. As a consequence, it becomes crucial for network operators to minimize the power consumption of their NFV infrastructure, by using the minimum set of physical servers and networking equipment subject to the constraints that VNFs impose on the infrastructure in terms of compute, memory, disk and network resources requirements. In this work, we present a joint resources and flow routing assignment problem for VNFs placement, with the objective of minimizing both the power consumption of the servers and switches needed to deploy the overall virtualized infrastructure and the routing graph. In contrast to many existing works assuming perfect knowledge on input parameters, such as VNFs CPU demands, which is difficult to predict, we propose a novel mathematical model based on the Robust Optimization (RO) theory to deal with data uncertainty. Our numerical evaluation focuses on a specific use-case, that is the deployment of a virtualized Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), namely the core for next generation mobile networks. We demonstrate that with our model, a vEPC operator can trade-off between two important aspects: the power consumption minimization on one side, and the protection from severe deviations of the input parameters on the other (e.g. the resources requirements).

On the Evaluation of VM Provisioning Time in Cloud Platforms for Mission-Critical Infrastructures

Cloud Computing has risen a great interest over the last years as it represents an enabling technology for flexible and ubiquitous access over the network to a set of shared computing resources. This work comes from an industrial experience aiming at exploiting the cloud potential for virtualizing complex infrastructures such as an entire Air Traffic Center (ATC), a clear example of complex SoS (System of Systems). The use of virtualization is convenient because industry can leverage in-house test-beds to perform distributed testing campaigns in pre-operational phases or to design new automatic fail-over mechanisms for fully distributed systems. In order to realize such mitigation and recovery techniques in the ATC field, indeed, a cloud platform is required to guarantee a low VM provisioning time with the objective of minimizing the service disruption. In this perspective, after having introduced the principal concepts and factors of the provisioning time, we propose a deep analysis and comparison for two different Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms, namely Open Stack and Open Nebula (using KVM as hypervisor), that were selected through a preliminary scouting phase.

Leptin level and structure in Italian obese children

Abstract Serum leptin levels and the relationship between leptin, gender, and anthropometric measurements were assessed in a group of 40 obese and 33 lean Italian children. The coding region of OB gene was screened by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and single strand conformational polymorphism (SSCP) for mutations in 30 unrelated obese subjects. Mean fasting leptin level was significantly higher in the obese than in the control group (18.2 ±2.1 vs 7.1 ± 1.0 ng/ml; p