Ed Zaluska

Experiences with GRIA — Industrial Applications on a Web Services Grid

The GRIA project set out to make the grid usable by industry. The GRIA middleware is based on Web services, and designed to meet the needs of industry for security and business-to-business (B2B) service procurement and operation. It provides well-defined B2B models for accounting and QoS agreement, and proxy-free delegation to support account management and service federation. The GRIA v3 software is now being used by industry. By taking a business-oriented approach independent of the evolving Open Grid Services Architecture proposals from the Global Grid Forum, GRIA has demonstrated the need for a wider understanding of virtual organizations (VOs). Traditional academic VOs are persistent, resourceful and have logically centralized, membership-oriented management structures. In contrast, the GRIA experience has been that business VOs are likely to be project-focused and have distributed process-oriented management structures

A Grid Service Infrastructure for Mobile Devices

One of the visions of grid computing is to access computational resources automatically on demand to deliver the services required with appropriate quality. Because mobile devices are now increasingly common, an infrastructure is required to allow mobile devices to use grid services, and thus enable the execution of complex resource-intensive applications on the resource-constrained devices. We present a system infrastructure that allows local mobile devices to interact with the grid. Central to this infrastructure is a proxy with the ability of dual connectivity to transfer the request from the mobile device to the grid. This system infrastructure combines the mobility of mobile devices with the processing power of the grid.

The semantic smart laboratory: a system for supporting the chemical eScientist

One goal of eScience is to enable the end-to-end publication of experiments and results. In the Combechem project we have developed an innovative human-centred system which captures the process of a chemistry experiment from plan to execution. The system comprises an electronic lab book replacement, which has been successfully trialled in a synthetic organic chemistry laboratory, and a flexible back-end storage system. Working closely with the users, we found that a light touch and a high degree of flexibility was required in the user interface. In this paper, we concentrate on the representation and storage of human-scale experiment metadata, introducing an ontology to describe the record of an experiment, and a storage system for the data from our lab book software. Just as the interfaces need to be flexible to cope with whatever a chemist wishes to record, so the back end solutions need to be similarly flexible to store any metadata that may be created. The storage system is based on Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, and Web Services. It gives a much higher degree of flexibility to the type of metadata it can store, compared to the use of rigid relational databases.

A Service Identification Framework for Legacy System Migration into SOA

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables the re-engineering and migration of legacy software systems into loosely-coupled and interoperable sets of services. Existing approaches focus mainly on defining coarse-grained services corresponding to the key business requirements. An improved migration of legacy systems onto SOA-based systems requires identifying the ‘optimal’ services with an appropriate level of granularity. This paper proposes a novel framework which identifies the key services effectively. The framework approach focuses on defining these services based on a Model-Driven Architecture approach supported by a SOA meta-model. Effective guidelines are proposed for identifying the optimal service granularity over a wide range of possible service types.

Parallel load-balancing: an extension to the gradient model

Abstract This paper describes the design and the implementation of an effective and scalable dynamic load-balancing mechanism suitable for a loosely-coupled MIMD system with a interconnected topology. The proposed algorithm extends the well-known gradient model to improve the overall execution time. A prototype system has been implemented using a network of transputer processors. A load generator spawns tasks of predetermined processing demand at run time, producing asynchronous events. The objective is to improve maximum resource utilization and also to achieve a transparent placement of processes onto processors.

A Metrics Framework for Evaluating SOA Service Granularity

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is intended to improve software interoperability by exposing dynamic applications as services. To evaluate the design of services in service-based systems, quality measurements are essential to decide tradeoffs between SOA quality attributes. Current SOA quality metrics pay little attention to service granularity as an important key design feature that impacts other internal SOA quality attributes. In this paper we introduce the structural attribute of service granularity for the analysis of other internal structural software attributes: complexity, cohesion and coupling. Consequently, metrics are proposed for measuring SOA internal attributes using syntax code. These metrics will assist in development of optimal service design by considering appropriate trade-offs. An example case study is included to demonstrate proposed metrics.

The Evolution of myExperiment

The myExperiment social website for sharing scientific workflows, designed according to Web 2.0 principles, has grown to be the largest public repository of its kind. It is distinctive for its focus on sharing methods, its researcher-centric design and its facility to aggregate content into sharable ‘research objects’. This evolution of myExperiment has occurred hand in hand with its users. myExperiment now supports Linked Data as a step toward our vision of the future research environment, which we categorise here as 3rd generation e-Research.

Application of bagging, boosting and stacking to intrusion detection

This paper investigates the possibility of using ensemble algorithms to improve the performance of network intrusion detection systems. We use an ensemble of three different methods, bagging, boosting and stacking, in order to improve the accuracy and reduce the false positive rate. We use four different data mining algorithms, naive bayes, J48 (decision tree), JRip (rule induction) and iBK( nearest neighbour), as base classifiers for those ensemble methods. Our experiment shows that the prototype which implements four base classifiers and three ensemble algorithms achieves an accuracy of more than 99% in detecting known intrusions, but failed to detect novel intrusions with the accuracy rates of around just 60%. The use of bagging, boosting and stacking is unable to significantly improve the accuracy. Stacking is the only method that was able to reduce the false positive rate by a significantly high amount (46.84%); unfortunately, this method has the longest execution time and so is inefficient to implement in the intrusion detection field.

Modeling generalized cylinders via Fourier morphing

Generalized cylinders provide a compact representation for modeling many components of natural objects as well as a great variety of human-made industrial parts. This paper presents a new approach to modeling generalized cylinders based on cross-sectional curves defined using Fourier descriptors. This modeling is based on contour interpolation and is implemented using a subdivision technique. The definition of generalized cylinders uses a three-dimensional trajectory which provides an adequate control for the smoothness of bend with a small number of parameters and includes the orientation of each cross-section (i.e, the local coordinate system) in the interpolation framework. Fourier representations of cross-sectional curves are obtained from contours in digital images, and corresponding points are identified by considering angular and arc-length parametrizations. Changes in cross-section shape through the trajectory are performed using Fourier morphing. The technique proposed provides a comprehensive definition that allows the modeling of a wide variety of shapes, while maintaining a compact characterization to facilitate the description of shapes and displays.

Efficient scheduling of MPI applications on networks of workstations

Abstract The availability of a large number of workstations connected through a network can represent an attractive option for high-performance computing for many applications. The message-passing interface (MPI) software environment is an effort from many organisations to define a de facto message-passing standard. In other words, the original specification was not designed as a comprehensive parallel programming environment and some researchers agree that the standard should be preserved as simple and clean as possible. Nevertheless, a software environment such as MPI should have somehow a scheduling mechanism for the effective submission of parallel applications on network of workstations. This paper presents an alternative lightweight approach called Selective-MPI (S-MPI), which was designed to enhance the efficiency of the scheduling of applications on an MPI implementation environment.