Giovanni Aloisio

The GSI plug-in for gSOAP: enhanced security, performance, and reliability

In this paper we report on the current status of the GSI plug-in for gSOAP, an open source solution to the problem of securing Web services in grid environments.

The grid relational catalog project

Today many DataGrid applications need to manage and process a very large amount of data distributed across multiple grid nodes and stored into heterogeneous databases. Grids encourage and promote the publication, sharing and integration of scientifica data (distributed across several Virtual Organizations) in a more open manner than is currently the case, and many e-Science pojects have an urgent need to interconnect legacy and independently operated databases through a set os data access and integration services. The complexity of data management within a Computational Grid comes from the distribution, scale and heterogeneity of data sources. A set of dynamic and adaptive services could address specific issues related to automatic data management providing high performance and transparency as well as fully exploiting a grid infrastructure. These services should involved data migration and integration, discovery of data sources and so on, providing a transparent and dynamic layer of data virtualization. In this pape we introduce the Grid-DBMS concept, a framework for dynamic data management in a grid enviroment, highlighting its requirements, architecture, components and services. We also present an overview about the Grid Relational Catalog Project (GRelC) developed at the CACT/ISUFI of the University of Lecce, which represents a partial implementation of a Grid-DBMS for the Globus Community.

Grid and Cloud Database Management

Since the 1990s Grid Computing has emerged as a paradigm for accessing and managing distributed, heterogeneous and geographically spread resources, promising that we will be able to access computer power as easily as we can access the electric power grid. Later on, Cloud Computing brought the promise of providing easy and inexpensive access to remote hardware and storage resources. Exploiting pay-per-use models and virtualization for resource provisioning, cloud computing has been rapidly accepted and used by researchers, scientists and industries. In this volume, contributions from internationally recognized experts describe the latest findings on challenging topics related to grid and cloud database management. By exploring current and future developments, they provide a thorough understanding of the principles and techniques involved in these fields. The presented topics are well balanced and complementary, and they range from well-known research projects and real case studies to standards and specifications, and non-functional aspects such as security, performance and scalability. Following an initial introduction by the editors, the contributions are organized into four sections: Open Standards and Specifications, Research Efforts in Grid Database Management, Cloud Data Management, and Scientific Case Studies.With this presentation, the book serves mostly researchers and graduate students, both as an introduction to and as a technical reference for grid and cloud database management. The detailed descriptions of research prototypes dealing with spatiotemporal or genomic data will also be useful for application engineers in these fields.

An Augmented Reality Application for Minimally Invasive Surgery

Augmented Reality (AR) technology can be used in minimally invasive surgery to provide direct visualisation, thus providing the advantage given by open surgery. It can be used to increase the physician’s view by using and showing information gathered from patient medical images. The developed AR system can improve the performances of a surgeon involved in a minimally invasive surgery procedure and provide visual information, located in the correct position of the patient’s body, not visible by means of normal senses. The virtual environment is built using the real patient’s CT images of the abdominal area; information about shapes and dimensions of the human organs is obtained by means of segmentation and classification algorithms. The developed application is based on the AR Toolkit and it is possible to visualize all the organs in a given abdominal area or, using specific markers, only some of them. The system can be used in pre-operative planning of a laparoscopic surgical procedure in order to find both the right points to introduce the surgical instruments and the best path to reach the organ concerned in the surgical operation.

The Simulation of a Billiard Game Using a Haptic Interface

Recently the computer entertainment technology has generated a deal of interest among researchers and developers as it is recognized as showing high promise in creating exciting new forms of human computer interaction. Performance improvements in graphics hardware and the diffusion of the low cost haptic interfaces have made it possible to visualize complex virtual environments and provided opportunities to interact with these in a more realistic way. In this paper a virtual reality application of a game of billiard game is presented; to allow to the user an interactive and realistic interaction is provided a force feedback by means of a commercial haptic interface. To build an immersive virtual environment has been used the development environment XIR and to simulate the rigid body dynamics has been utilized the ODE library.

Parallel space saving on multi- and many-core processors

Given an array A of n elements and a value 2≤k≤n, a frequent item or k‐majority element is an element occurring in A more than n/k times. The k‐majority problem requires finding all of the k‐majority elements. In this paper, we deal with parallel shared‐memory algorithms for frequent items; we present a shared‐memory version of the Space Saving algorithm, and we study its behavior with regard to accuracy and performance on many and multi‐core processors, including the Intel Phi accelerator. We also investigate a hybrid MPI/OpenMP version against a pure MPI‐based version. Through extensive experimental results, we prove that the MPI/OpenMP parallel version of the algorithm significantly enhances the performance of the earlier pure MPI version of the same algorithm. Results also prove that for this algorithm the Intel Phi accelerator does not introduce any improvement with respect to the Xeon octa–core processor.

An Interactive and Immersive 3D Game Simulation Provided with Force Feedback

Performance improvements in graphics hardware and the diffusion of the low cost haptic interfaces have made it possible to visualize complex virtual environments and provided opportunities to interact with these in a more realistic way. In this paper a Virtual Reality application of a game of billiards is presented. By means of a commercial haptic interface a force feedback is provided, thus rendering the interaction realistic and exciting to the user. The introduction of the force feedback makes it possible to obtain a realistic simulation as it is possible to strike the billiard ball and to feel the contact between cue and ball. The virtual environment has been built using the development environment XVR and rigid body dynamics have been simulated utilizing the ODE library. Since in the real game it is possible to use the left hand when aiming and striking the ball, in the play modality it is possible to fix the cue movement in the desired direction in order to allow a more careful aim and a more stable interaction in the virtual environment. In addition it is possible to choose the force with which the ball is hit.

How advanced cloud technologies can impact and change HPC environments for simulation

In the last years, most enterprises and IT organizations have adopted virtualization and cloud computing solutions to achieve features such as flexibility, elasticity, fault tolerance, high availability and reliability for their computational, storage and networking resource infrastructures. Moreover, recent advances in Linux containers [1] and the emergence of technologies as Docker [2] are revolutionizing the way of developing and deploying web and large scale distributed applications.

A Force Feedback Virtual Simulator for Education and Training

The essential requirements of a virtual reality based simulator are a realistic virtual environment and a reproduction of haptic sensation due to the interactions in the virtual environment. The interactions need to be performed in real-time, since a delay between the user action and the system reaction reduces the user experience. Accuracy and efficiency are two opposite requirements; in fact, increased accuracy implies higher computational time and vice versa. So, it is necessary to find a trade-off according to the application and, sometimes, to reduce the realism in favour of the real-time interaction. In this paper is presented a virtual simulator provided of a haptic interface and a virtual environment reconstructed from real patients medical images in order to have haptic sensations in addition to a very realist virtual environment.

A spatial data analysis infrastructure for environmental health research

In spatial health research, it is necessary to consider not only the spatial-temporal patterns of diseases, but also external environmental factors, such as the effects of climate change on air quality, that may influence the insurgence or progression of diseases (e.g. respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, cancer, male human infertility, etc.). In this paper, we propose a Spatial Data analysis Infrastructure (SDI) for the analysis of health pathologies related to environmental factors and, more specifically, to climate change. The main goal is the development of a new methodology to predict and manage health risks, finding correlations between diseases and air pollution due to climatic factors. The presented SDI consists of different modules. A gynecological-obstetrical clinical folder application has been developed to collect and manage clinical data. Anonymous and geo-referenced patients data are extracted from the clinical folder application and data mining techniques, such as a hot spot analysis based on the Getis-Ord Gi* statistics, have been applied to the gathered data by exploiting the Hadoop framework. The results of the analysis are displayed in a Web application that provides data visualization through geographical maps, using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology. This prototype, combining big data, data mining techniques, and GIS technology, represents an innovative approach to find correlations between spatial environmental factors and the insurgence of health diseases.