Moath Jarrah

CloudExp: A comprehensive cloud computing experimental framework

Abstract Cloud computing is an emerging and fast-growing computing paradigm that has gained great interest from both industry and academia. Consequently, many researchers are actively involved in cloud computing research projects. One major challenge facing cloud computing researchers is the lack of a comprehensive cloud computing experimental tool to use in their studies. This paper introduces CloudExp , a modeling and simulation environment for cloud computing. CloudExp can be used to evaluate a wide spectrum of cloud components such as processing elements, data centers, storage, networking, Service Level Agreement (SLA) constraints, web-based applications, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), virtualization, management and automation, and Business Process Management (BPM). Moreover, CloudExp introduces the Rain workload generator which emulates real workloads in cloud environments. Also, MapReduce processing model is integrated in CloudExp in order to handle the processing of big data problems.

TeachCloud: a cloud computing educational toolkit

Cloud computing is an evolving and fast-growing computing paradigm that has gained great interest from both industry and academia. Consequently, universities are actively integrating cloud computing into their IT curricula. One major challenge facing cloud computing instructors is the lack of a teaching tool to experiment with. This paper introduces TeachCloud, a modelling and simulation environment for cloud computing. TeachCloud can be used to experiment with different cloud components such as: processing elements, data centres, storage, networking, service level agreement (SLA) constraints, web-based applications, service oriented architecture (SOA), virtualisation, management and automation, and business process management (BPM). Also, TeachCloud introduces MapReduce processing model in order to handle embarrassingly parallel data processing problems. TeachCloud is an extension of CloudSim, a research-oriented simulator used for the development and validation in cloud computing.

A GPU-based implementations of the fuzzy C-means algorithms for medical image segmentation

Fuzzy clustering is one of the most popular techniques in medical image segmentation. The fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm has been widely used as it provides better performance and more information than other algorithms. As the data set becomes large, the serial implementation of the FCM algorithm becomes too slow to accomplish the clustering task within acceptable time. Hence, a parallel implementation [for example, using today’s fast graphics processing unit (GPU)] is needed. In this paper, we implement brFCM algorithm, a faster variant of the FCM algorithm, on two different GPU cards, Tesla M2070 and Tesla K20m. We compare our brFCM GPU-based implementation with its CPU-based sequential implementation. Moreover, we compare brFCM with the traditional version of the FCM algorithm. The experiments used lung CT and knee MRI images for clustering. The results show that our implementation has a significant improvement over the traditional CPU sequential implementation. GPU parallel brFCM is 2.24 times faster than its CPU implementation, and 23.43 times faster than a GPU parallel implementation of the traditional FCM.

A hierarchical optimization model for energy data flow in smart grid power systems

Environmental concerns and high prices of fossil fuels increase the feasibility of using renewable energy sources in smart grid. Smart grid technologies are currently being developed to provide efficient and clean power systems. Communication in smart grid allows different components to collaborate and exchange information. Traditionally, the utility company uses a central management unit to schedule energy generation, distribution, and consumption. Using centralized management in a very large scale smart grid forms a single point of failure and leads to serious scalability issues in terms of information delivery and processing. In this paper, a three-level hierarchical optimization approach is proposed to solve scalability, computational overhead, and minimize daily electricity cost through maximizing the used percentage of renewable energy. At level one, a single home or a group of homes are combined to form an optimized power entity (OPE) that satisfies its load demand from its own renewable energy sources (RESs). At level two, a group of OPEs satisfies energy requirements of all OPEs within the group. At level three, excess in renewable energy from different groups along with the energy from the grid is used to fulfill unsatisfied demands and the remaining energy are sent to storage devices. HighlightsWe examine the three scopes of smart grid systems.We write mathematical models to cover the different aspects in SG.We use linear optimization to solve the equations and yield optimal solutions.Hierarchical method achieves better distribution and cooperative scenario.

Accelerating compute-intensive image segmentation algorithms using GPUs

Image segmentation is an important process that facilitates image analysis such as in object detection. Because of its importance, many different algorithms were proposed in the last decade to enhance image segmentation techniques. Clustering algorithms are among the most popular in image segmentation. The proposed algorithms differ in their accuracy and computational efficiency. This paper studies the most famous and new clustering algorithms and provides an analysis on their feasibility for parallel implementation. We have studied four algorithms which are: fuzzy C-mean, type-2 fuzzy C-mean, interval type-2 fuzzy C-mean, and modified interval type-2 fuzzy C-mean. We have implemented them in a sequential (CPU only) and a parallel hybrid CPU–GPU version. Speedup gains of 6

Exploiting GPUs for compute-intensive medical applications

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SCIP: Selective cache insertion and bypassing to improve the performance of last-level caches

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