Fethi A. Rabhi

Patterns and skeletons for parallel and distributed computing

1 Foundations of Data-parallel Skeletons.- 2 SAT: A Programming Methodology with Skeletons and Collective Operations.- 3 Transforming Rapid Prototypes to Efficient Parallel Programs.- 4 Parallelism Abstractions in Eden.- 5 Skeleton Realisations from Functional Prototypes.- 6 Task and Data Parallelism in P3L.- 7 Skeleton-based Programming Environments.- 8 Applying the Quality Connector Pattern.- 9 Service Design Patterns for Computational Grids.- 10 Towards Patterns of Web Services Composition.- 11 Multi-paradigm and Design Pattern Approaches for HW/SW Design and Reuse.

Towards patterns of web services composition

The growth of the Internet has unleashed a wave of innovations that are reshaping the way organisations interact with their partners and customers. In particular, the concept of electronically-accessible service (also known as e-service or Web service) has gained a considerable momentum as a paradigm for supporting both Business-to-Consumer (B2C) interaction and Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration.

An overview of the commercial cloud monitoring tools: research dimensions, design issues, and state-of-the-art

Cloud monitoring activity involves dynamically tracking the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to virtualized resources (e.g., VM, storage, network, appliances, etc.), the physical resources they share, the applications running on them and data hosted on them. Applications and resources configuration in cloud computing environment is quite challenging considering a large number of heterogeneous cloud resources. Further, considering the fact that at given point of time, there may be need to change cloud resource configuration (number of VMs, types of VMs, number of appliance instances, etc.) for meet application QoS requirements under uncertainties (resource failure, resource overload, workload spike, etc.). Hence, cloud monitoring tools can assist a cloud providers or application developers in: (i) keeping their resources and applications operating at peak efficiency, (ii) detecting variations in resource and application performance, (iii) accounting the service level agreement violations of certain QoS parameters, and (iv) tracking the leave and join operations of cloud resources due to failures and other dynamic configuration changes. In this paper, we identify and discuss the major research dimensions and design issues related to engineering cloud monitoring tools. We further discuss how the aforementioned research dimensions and design issues are handled by current academic research as well as by commercial monitoring tools.

Overview of some patterns for architecting and managing composite web services

The composition of Web services has gained a considerable momentum as a paradigm for enabling Business-to-Business (B2B) Collaborations. Numerous technologies supporting this new paradigm are rapidly emerging, thereby creating a need for methodologies that bring these technologies together. The identification and documentation of relevant patterns, both at the analysis and design levels, is an important step in this direction.

Service oriented computing in practice: an agenda for research into the factors influencing the organizational adoption of service oriented architectures

The paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as an approach to provide flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. This modular approach to defining business flows as technology independent services has gained unanimous popularity among end-users and technology vendors alike. Although there is a significant amount of ongoing research on the potential of service oriented architectures (SOAs), there is a paucity of research literature on the factors affecting the adoption of service-oriented computing in practice. This paper reviews the current state of the technology, identifies the factors influencing the decision to adopt service-oriented computing as an enterprise strategy and discusses the associated research literature, and concludes with a suggested research agenda and conceptual framework for investigating the use of service-oriented computing in practice.

A service-oriented architecture for financial business processes

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth in information and communication technologies that facilitate the design and implementation of complex inter-enterprise business processes. One of the major innovations is the concept of service-oriented architectures which considers software systems as being made up with autonomous, dynamic, loosely coupled and service-based components. This paper describes an attempt to automate financial business processes by utilizing a number of basic and composite services. As a case study, the paper describes the implementation of a realistic business process that is related to simulating a trading strategy in capital markets. An evaluation of the appropriateness of service-oriented architectures is conducted taking into account a number of factors such as flexibility, performance and development costs.

Cloud monitoring for optimizing the QoS of hosted applications

Cloud monitoring involves dynamically tracking the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters related to virtualized services (e.g., CPU, storage, network, appliances, etc.), the physical resources they share, and the applications running on them or data hosted on them. Monitoring techniques and services can help a cloud provider or application developer in regards to: (i) keeping the cloud services and hosted applications operating at peak efficiency; (ii) detecting variations in service and application performance; (iii) accounting the SLA violations of certain QoS parameters; and (iv) tracking the leave and join operations of cloud services due to failures and other dynamic configuration changes. In this paper, we describe the PhD research motivation, question, and approach and methodology related to developing novel cloud monitoring techniques and services enabling automated application QoS management under uncertainties.

An integrated service architecture for managing capital market systems

This article studies current developments and trends in the area of capital market systems. In particular, it defines the trading lifecycle and the activities associated with it. The article then investigates opportunities for the integration of legacy systems and existing communication protocols through distributed integrated services that correspond to established business processes. These integrated services link to basic services such as an exchange, a settlement, or a registry service. Examples of such integrated services include pre-trade services (e.g., analytics) or post-trade services (e.g., surveillance). The article then presents the various levels of integration in capital market systems and discusses the standards in place. It establishes that most interactions occur at a low level of abstraction such as the network (e.g., TCP/IP), data format (e.g., FIX, XML), and middleware levels (e.g., CORBA). Finally, the article discusses a software development methodology based on the use of design patterns. These design patterns address the essential aspects of managing integrated services in a technology-independent fashion. These aspects are service wrapping, service composition, service contracting, service discovery, and service execution. The objective of the methodology is to facilitate the rapid development of new integrated services that correspond to emerging business opportunities.

Neural Network Approaches to Grade Adult Depression

Depression is a common but worrying psychological disorder that adversely affects one’s quality of life. It is more ominous to note that its incidence is increasing. On the other hand, screening and grading of depression is still a manual and time consuming process that might be biased. In addition, grades of depression are often determined in continuous ranges, e.g., ‘mild to moderate’ and ‘moderate to severe’ instead of making them more discrete as ‘mild’, ‘moderate’, and ‘severe’. Grading as a continuous range is confusing to the doctors and thus affecting the management plan at large. Given this practical issue, the present paper attempts to differentiate depression grades more accurately using two neural net learning approaches—‘supervised’, i.e., classification with Back propagation neural network (BPNN) and Adaptive Network-based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) classifiers, and ‘unsupervised’, i.e., ‘clustering’ technique with Self-organizing map (SOM), built in MATLAB 7. The reason for using the supervised and unsupervised learning approaches is that, supervised learning depends exclusively on domain knowledge. Supervision may induce biasness and subjectivities related to the decision-making. Finally, the performance of BPNN and ANFIS are compared and discussed. It was observed that ANFIS, being a hybrid system, performed much better compared to the BPNN classifier. On the other hand, SOM-based clustering technique is also found useful in constructing three distinct clusters. It also assists visualizing the multidimensional data clusters into 2-D.

The ToxicFarm Integrated Cooperation Framework for Virtual Teams

Developing a collaboration solution, that scales to an entire organization, that offers an integrated collection of cooperation tools, that is general enough to address a large range of applications, and that is easy to deploy for most people, is still an open challenge. This paper presents ToxicFarm services that are an integral part of a framework for hosting Internet virtual teams. The originality of this work is in providing a synthesis between contributions from different domains, including version management in software engineering, process management in data engineering, and awareness in groupware tools. The paper describes the overall services offered, discusses design choices for their integration and implementation, presents relations with existing work and describes their use in several emerging e-business application domains, such as e-finance, e-learning and e-telecom.