Vittoria Gianuzzi

Mobile computing in a hospital: the WARD-IN-HAND project

We present file guidelines of a new project whose main task is to exploit mobile computers, comlected via a Wireless Networks, in Personal Health systems, computerizing patient clinical records with sophisticated solutions for taking clinical infommtion at the point of care.

A system architecture for fault tolerance in concurrent software

A system architecture called the recovery metaprogram (RMP) is proposed. It separates the application from the recovery software, giving programmers a single environment that lets them use the most appropriate fault-tolerance scheme. To simplify the presentation of the RMP approach, it is assumed that the fault model is limited to faults originating in the application software, and that the hardware and kernel layers can mask their own faults from the RMP. Also, relationships between backward and forward error recovery are not considered. Some RMP examples are given, and a particular RMP implementation is described.<<ETX>>

A mobile e-health system based on workflow automation tools

This paper describes the patient record manager and the workflow toolset of the wireless-based e-health system Ward-In-Hand, developed in a European IST (Information Society Technologies) project and currently in use within three hospital wards, in Italy, Spain and Germany. The lack of homogeneity in the healthcare organisations required a suitable implementation of workflow automation tools to create and manage the execution of the care-giving processes, customising them to local ward needs. Solutions for this problem, as well as the integration of the workflow organiser (to be used by individual health professionals during their daily activities) with the patient record manager are discussed.

Structuring conversation in operation/procedure oriented programming languages

Abstract The conversation scheme has been defined to design concurrent software which provides backward error recovery. Since presently no widespread programming language provides constructs for implementing conversations, we propose a methodology for structuring programs, following the conversation scheme. We analyze the use of conversation in languages which adopt the client-server model for processes interaction, pointing out solutions to problems arising from the use of operation and procedure oriented languages [1: Andrews and Schneider, ACM Comput. Surv. 15: 3–44; 1983], in which servers are implemented as remote procedures or monitors respectively. The features of a number of programming languages, which are the most suitable for structuring conversations are pointed out. The implementation of nested conversations is also discussed and finally, an industrial application in which our methodology has been profitably applied is presented.

RAMSES: A Mobile Computing System for Field Archaeology

RAMSES (Remote Archeological Mobile Support Enhanced System) is an outdoor application of mobile computing to field archaeology, whose prototype has already been field tested in Summer 1998 at the site of Poliochni in Greece. The requirements for both hardware and software are illustrated; the system is composed by a fixed station, acting as object repository, and a few mobile units which input archaeological evidence by means of electromagnetic pen. The software components on both fixed and mobile systems and their interaction are described as well.

Channel reification: a reflective model for distributed computation

The paper presents a new reflective model, called Channel Reification, which can be used in distributed computations to overcome difficulties experienced by other models in the literature when monitoring communication among objects. The channel is an extension of the message reification model. A channel is a communication manager incarnating successive messages exchanges by two objects: its application ranges between those of message reification and those of meta object model. After a brief review of existing reflective models and how reflections can be used in distributed systems, channel reification is presented and compared to the widely used meta object model. Applications of channel reification to protocol implementation, and to fault tolerant object systems are shown. Future extensions to this model are also summarized.

A System Architecture for Software Fault Tolerance

The paper describes a system architecture, based on virtual machine layers, which can be used in the implementation of software fault tolerant systems. The top layer of such hierarchy details recovery actions; various policies such as conversations, N-Modularity, Programmer Transparent Coordination, Resilient Procedures and Optimistic Recovery are shown to be implementable within this framework.

Resource selection and application execution in a grid: a migration experience from GT2 to GT4

The latest Globus Toolkit 4 (GT4) version, fully OGSA compliant and almost completely based on Grid Services, is expected to become the reference version of the Globus Toolkit Therefore, the necessity to migrate from previous versions, especially the widespread GT2, to GT4 is becoming a relevant issue for many Grid systems. We present a migration experience from GT2 to GT4 of a simple tool for resource discovery and selection, and execution of parallel applications in a computational Grid environment. The proposed tool provides a simple and intuitive user interface, a structured view of Grid resources, a simple mechanism for resource selection, and support for application staging and execution. We discuss some relevant differences between GT2 and GT4, particularly for the Monitoring and Discovering subsystem GT4 turns out to be more powerful and flexible. Just because we address the implementation of basic functionalities, the proposed discussion may be of general interest.

An Online Parallel Algorithm for Remote Visualization of Isosurfaces

In this paper we present a parallel algorithm, implemented using MPICH, for isosurface extraction from volumetric data sets. The main contribution of this paper is in the analysis and performance improvements of the different phases of the isosurface production process including computation and output generation. The resulting algorithm is particularly well suited for online applications and for remote results visualization.

Quality of Service on Grid: architectural and methodological issues

The rapid evolution of Grid Computing and the development of new middleware services make Grid platforms increasingly used not only for best effort scientific jobs but also in industrial and business applications. This has taken to the growing demand of Quality of Service (QoS) support. However, the QoS issue on Grid is quite difficult, as Grid has been originally designed without any QoS support, and it is a complex system. During the previous years some solutions have been proposed to supply QoS for specific classes of applications. This results in a focused and a heterogeneous approach, so that it is hard to evaluate its sufficiency and its robustness with respect to the large spectrum of possible Grid applications. In this context, our contribution concerns three points: first, we analyze the current approach to QoS on Grid as a relationship among QoS features, applications, and architectures; second, we evaluate the QoS requirements of two recent QoS‐demanding applications on Grid, namely Massive Multiplayer Online Games and Urgent Computing, comparing these requirements with the support provided by current QoS architectures; and third, we propose an alternative approach to QoS provision on Grid based on the definition of a dedicated QoS‐management layer to overcome the limitations of the current methodologies. Copyright