Isabelle M. Demeure

A 4G generic ANWIRE system and service integration architecture

This paper proposes a 4G Generic ANWIRE system and service Integration Architecture (GAIA). The relationship between the different GAIA domains is explained and interaction between their functional entities is shown in order to explore various GAIA properties. An overview of the relevant topics related to the GAIA architecture and its respective elements is given. A well-based summary on system integration efforts of previous projects is provided as a basis for deriving of various requirements for GAIA. New two-phase business model to accommodate the 4G development is proposed and justified. Finally, a new reference communication model of a future 4G wireless system is proposed and GAIA interdomain signalling issues are discussed.

Mobile computing to facilitate interaction in lectures and meetings

The Campus Mobile project explored how PDAs and innovative interfaces can improve interaction during lectures and in small meetings. These mobile computers (small PCs or PDAs) are nomad mediators that provide the link between the public space and the users private space. A lecturer uses an augmented whiteboard to annotate her presentation, while the slides and annotations are broadcast in real time to the students PDAs. The students can also annotate the presentation. They can then replay the lecture at their leisure. We developed and tested the user interfaces for the interactions on the whiteboard and on the PDAS, the data formats to store the annotations and temporal data, and the network protocol for reliable wireless broadcast transmission. Small meetings have a very different interaction pattern. Instead of a lecturer that transmits knowledge, the participants collaborate in modifying documents. We developed groupware services that encourage these interactions and show how the different interaction patterns imply different network usages.

A Context-Sware Data Sharing Service over MANet to Enable Spontaneous Collaboration

In this paper we present a context-aware data sharing service over MANet to enable spontaneous collaboration between mobile workers. Context information is used to adapt services and applications to user situation as well as working groups situation. The paper first presents the data sharing system. It then describes the context awareness service. We explain how data sharing uses context information to adapt to changing conditions and how the context service relies on data sharing to store context information afterwards. Context aware and data sharing services maintain a mutually beneficial interaction. Both services are part of a software framework for spontaneous collaboration over MANets that is developed within the Popeye European IST research project.

Augmentation de cours et de réunions dans un campus

This paper presents two prototypes for augmenting lectures and small group meetings that have been developped in the context of a digital campus. The various aspects that have been developped (augmented whiteboard interaction, annotation management, multimedia, wireless communication strategies, single display groupware, user centred conception...) are described and analyzed relatively to the considered scenarios. Some preliminary observations are presented and compared to other studies.

Prototyping and simulating parallel, distributed computations

Abstract Designing parallel, distributed computations is a significant barrier to the effective use of contemporary equipment. One aspect of the barrier is the difficulty of partitioning a serial solution into a set of communicating computational subsets (e.g., processes) that can be distributed over heterogeneous processors in a distributed hardware environment. The Parallel Distributed computation Graph Model (ParaDiGM) and the VISual Assistant (VISA) have been designed to assist with the partitioning problem. The formal model is composed of two components: a micro model focuses on the functionality of the computation, while a consistent macro model explicitly represents the partition and the communication mechanisms. ParaDiGM encourages the designer to address functionality and partitioning in different submodels, maintaining a mapping between elements in the two submodels. ParaDiGM is formal, but has an intuitive visual presentation; its use is supported by the VISusal Assistant (VISA), a tool for designing, animating, simulating, and prototyping distributed computations. This note informally describes ParaDiGM and VISA, then illustrates how they can be used to assist with the design of parallel, distributed computations.

Xen Management with SmartFrog

Applications to be executed onmultipurpose Grids frequently have very specific resource requirements (platform, kernel, operating systems, libraries, memory, CPU, etc.) and need to be delegated part of the resource control. Typical Grid sites offer a limited range of resource types, inhibiting the range of applications that can be supported; and Grid node managers are bound to maintain their servers according to users requirements. To address these problems, we introduce Smart-Domains, which combines the high performance virtual machine technology provided by Xen, with automatic deployment of Xen virtual machines using the Smart Frog configuration and deployment framework. SmartDomains automatically deploys distributed, synchronized pools of custom-configured Xen virtual machines and manages them through their lifecycle as a single coherent distributed execution environment. SmartDomains uses a representation of the complete distributed resources specifications, including information about how to sequence their creation and removal. We discuss SmartDomains test cases at CERN for distributed testbeds and Grid execution nodes.

Automatic scheduling of applications with temporal QoS constraints: a case study

We have proposed a scheduling framework for the development and support of applications that must meet temporal Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. This paper develops a case study: a geostationary satellite application. We describe how the application threads are partitioned into finer grain (or elementary) threads to which QoS constraints are applied; how they are organized into dependency graphs; and how this decomposition as well as, the dependency information and QoS constraints required on the application are exploited by a cooperative scheduling system. We demonstrate this by presenting illustrative scheduling scenarios of the chosen application.