Bogdan Solomon

A real-time adaptive control of autonomic computing environments

Autonomic computing has received a great deal of attention from the research community in recent years. Many techniques have been proposed to monitor, analyze, and change the system under observation, but less attention has been paid to adapting the autonomic computing loop itself. Based on previous results on the design and implementation of a reference real-time architecture for autonomic computing, a self-adapting loop based on system-specific adaptation knowledge, which includes the types and properties of autonomic computing components, behavioural constraints, and strategies for adaptation is proposed in this paper. The proposed system is an integral part of the real-time system that controls the behaviour of the computing environment, evaluating its global behaviour using criteria that take into account the mathematical description of the time variation of the number of users in the system. Based on this evaluation, the adaptive system changes the control structure of the autonomic computing environment by replacing its controller with one matching the user time variation law. Elements of the self-adapting loop and the tradeoff of introducing additional overhead to the autonomic computing processes are discussed. A case study illustrates the self-adapting technique proposed.

Towards a Real-Time Reference Architecture for Autonomic Systems

Autonomic computing aims to embed automation in IT management software such that it can adapt to changes in the configuration, provisioning, protection, and resource utilization variations of the IT infrastructure at run time. It is, therefore, almost natural to consider this control software framework as being designed with control principles in mind. One of the research trends considers autonomic computing as a control system that resolves constraints related to the optimal usage of resources based on external requests made by users or processes in a reactive way. In this paper, a real-time reference architecture is introduced in which components implementing functions of realtime system elements or blocks such as transducers, controllers, and actuators are designed. The architecture of the autonomic computing software also contains components that implement functionalities specific to real-time systems. The transducers, controllers, and actuators are thus connected via realtime pattern components such as concurrency, priority, and reliability patterns.

A Collaborative Cloud-Based Multimedia Sharing Platform for Social Networking Environments

The amount of multimedia content on the internet has been growing at a remarkable rate, and users are increasingly looking to share online media with colleagues and friends on social networks. Several commercial and academic solutions have attempted to make it easier to share this large variety of online content with others, but they are generally limited to sending links. Existing products have not been able to provide a scalable cloud-based system that synchronizes disparate web content among many users in real-time. Additionally, they have lacked a platform with a modular architecture that can be extended by developers to support new sources of online media. In this paper, a cloud-based software architecture for a multimedia collaboration platform is introduced. The platform is accessible from a typical web browser and allows users to collaborate over webcam chat while viewing videos, photos, maps, documents, and listening to music, all in real-time. As examples, it is shown how a distributed system called Watch Together was deployed to real users within Facebook and an e-learning environment. Usage data is provided from both deployments and observations are made on how users share and consume real-time multimedia content.

PECOLE: P2P multimedia collaborative environment

PECOLE (Peer-to-pEer COLlaborative Environment) is a fully decentralized multimedia collaborative environment that supports a wide range of collaborative multimedia applications, including chat, shared browsing, shared telepointer, multipoint-to-multipoint audio/video conferencing and multilingual collaboration. PECOLE can intelligently run on very constrained resources, is highly resilient, scalable and does not rely on dedicated servers. Instead, PECOLE is built upon a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay network, using SUN’s JXTA framework and SWT technology. In this paper, we present the architecture and implementation of PECOLE with the performance results of the tests we conducted.

Scalable adaptive web services

Software as a service creates the possibility of composing software applications from web services spread across different application domains. To guarantee certain quality of services of the composite service, one can think of two paths ahead: quality of service negotiation and guarantee prior to service deployment and bindings; or a more speculative and adaptive behavior at runtime. In this position paper we propose a hybrid approach, combining development and runtime information to make the web services adapt to workload variations. The approach combines control theory with performance modeling and is built around a model of the web service. A control loop theory approach is taken to model discovery. The control loop allows for keeping the web services performance even when the model is not completely known and failure of components of the control loop are likely to happen. The approach is related to robust state estimation. The robustness makes the model insensitive to parameter variations and to uncertainties in the model. With appropriate conditions, the above concept can be extended to the external environments in which the web service has to perform.

Designing autonomic management systems for cloud computing

Autonomic Computing Systems are systems which are capable of adapting themselves to changes in their working environment in order to maintain required service level agreements, protect the execution of the system from external attacks or prevent and recover from failures. Within the field of autonomic computing, autonomic systems are developed as control loops which monitor and analyze the execution of the system and then plan and execute changes if needed in order to adapt the system to its environment. This paper will present an approach for designing and building autonomic systems for cloud computing, based on an architecture previously developed which was rooted in real-time software patters. Furthermore, the paper presents an application of the autonomic management architecture to a cluster of application servers running on top of a cloud. It is thus demonstrated how the development approach can be easily reconfigured for the control and supervision of different types of autonomic computing strategies such as self-management for Web Services or self-provisioning and self-optimization for server virtualization.

Observability and controllability of autonomic computing systems for composed Web services

Autonomic Computing is a research area whose aim is to embed “intelligent algorithms” in the IT infrastructure management software such that it can adapt to changes in regards to the configuration, provisioning, external attacks, and resource utilization variations at run time. It is therefore, almost natural to consider this IT infrastructure control software framework as being designed upon methods and technologies used for the design of control systems. In this paper the control system design methodology is extended to the analysis of the intrinsic properties of the autonomic system itself. Thus the controllability and observability properties of the computing process itself are defined and examined in more details. These properties are also investigated for the case of cloud services where the serial and parallel composition of these services is considered. These cloud based services are connected through cooperation protocols that define a global process dynamic. Web services are modeled as scheduled computational processes waiting in a queue to cooperate in delivering the service. This paper proposes an input-state-output mathematical model for the autonomic computing model of cloud based services and the observability and controllability are further analyzed on the above models. As an example a Kalman based control is applied to such processes and the general architecture and some simulation results are given.

Finger-based gesture control of a collaborative online workspace

A gesture-based human computer interface can make computers and devices easier to use, such as by allowing people to share photos by moving their hands through the air. Existing solutions have relied on exotic hardware, often involving elaborate setups limited to the research lab. Gesture recognition algorithms used so far are not practical or responsive enough for real-world use, partially due to the inadequate data on which the image processing is applied. Most importantly, existing solutions have lacked a workspace that allows users to perform common collaborative tasks by using their hands and fingers. In this paper, a new paradigm for next-generation computer interfaces is introduced. The method presented is based on a custom 3D camera that is easy to set up and has a flexible detection range. This method accurately detects hand gestures from depth data, allowing them to be used to control any application or device. The paper proposes the control of application windows and their content in collaborative online workspaces on which many teams cooperate to complete useful tasks, as shown with examples.

Using a NIR Camera for Car Gesture Control

As digital components are increasingly present in the control of automotive engines, direction systems and other in-car devices, Human-Vehicle Interaction (HVI) becomes more and more complex, requiring new user interfaces. Gesture control is proposed in the literature as a techniques which deserves to be explored as it can tremendously simplify numerous interactions between the car and the driver and/or other passengers. Key characteristics of such HVI devices include reliability, robustness, and stability of the entire system, ranging from the acquisition of the gesture to its recognition and tracking in real-time. In this paper, a smart and real-time depth camera operating in the Near Infrared (NIR) Spectrum is introduced. The camera is based on a new depth generation principle of sampling the space of the Field-of-View (FOV) with IR pulses of variable frequency and duty cycle. The depth images are calculated using reconfigurable hardware architecture and a series of eight IR images obtained via a sensitive image sensor. The final depth map is then processed by the gesture detection, recognition and tracking algorithms. A series of gestures are explored to qualify them for the special case of car control.

Distributed clouds for collaborative applications

With the advent of social networking and the appearance of Web 2.0, collaborative applications which allow users to share data online, often in real-time, have gained increasing prominence. Whether for sharing images, sharing videos, or even sharing live gaming sessions, such applications must deal with session sizes from tens to tens of thousands of people. However, existing products have not been able to provide a scalable cloud-based system that synchronizes disparate web content among many users. Such a goal is desired in order to provide the benefits of cloud deployments to collaborative applications. Many such applications cannot predict the number of connections which they may need to handle. As such, applications must either provision a higher number of servers in anticipation of more traffic, or be faced with a degradation of the user experience when a large number of clients connect to the application. Cloud-based deployments can alleviate these issues by allowing the applications server base to scale automatically with user demand. A cloud deployment can also distribute servers throughout different geographic locations in order to offer improved latency and response times to its clients. This paper will present an architecture for a distributed, collaborative, and server-based application. The application is deployed inside a distributed cloud environment, which consists of multiple clouds in various geographic locations.