Toward the parallelization of GSL

In this paper, we present our joint efforts to design and develop parallel implementations of the GNU Scientific Library for a wide variety of parallel platforms. The multilevel software architecture proposed provides several interfaces: a sequential interface that hides the parallel nature of the library to sequential users, a parallel interface for parallel programmers, and a web services based interface to provide remote access to the routines of the library. The physical level of the architecture includes platforms ranging from distributed and shared-memory multiprocessors to hybrid systems and heterogeneous clusters. Several well-known operations arising in discrete mathematics and sparse linear algebra are used to illustrate the challenges, benefits, and performance of different parallelization approaches.

Prototypical implementation of location-aware services based on a middleware architecture for super-distributed RFID tag infrastructures

We provide evidence of the feasibility and effectiveness of a middleware architecture for mobile devices (MoDs), which employs dense distributions of small computerized entities for providing fault-tolerant location-aware services. We do so by describing exemplary implementations based on radio frequency identification as an enabling technology. Firstly, we present prototypical implementations of the hardware abstraction layer and of selected core middleware services. The latter enable a MoD to store and retrieve data and position information in physical places in a fault-tolerant manner, and to identify places based on a location abstraction which is robust against failure of individual tags. Secondly, we investigate the feasibility of some higher-level services and applications by developing and evaluating prototypical systems for tracing and tracking, self-positioning, and collaborative map-making.

Reverse engineering relational databases to identify and specify basic Web services with respect to service oriented computing

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is the computing paradigm that utilizes services as a fundamental building block. Services are self-describing, open components intended to support composition of distributed applications. Currently, Web services provide a standard-based realization of SOC due to: (1) the machine-readable format (XML) of their functional and nonfunctional specifications, and (2) their messaging protocols built on top of the Internet. However, how to methodologically identify, specify, design, deploy and manage a sound and complete set of Web services to move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is still an issue. This paper describes a process for reverse engineering relational database applications architecture into SOA architecture, where SQL statements are insulated from the applications, factored, implemented, and registered as Web services to be discovered, selected, and reused in composing e-business solutions. The process is based on two types of design patterns: schema transformation pattern and CRUD operations pattern. First, the schema transformation pattern allows an identification of the services. Then the CRUD operations pattern allows a specification of the abstract part of the identified services, namely their port types. This process is implemented as a CASE tool, which assists analysts specifying services that implement common, reusable, basic business logic and data manipulation.

An adaptive and trustworthy software testing framework on the grid

Grid computing, which is characterized by large-scale sharing and collaboration of dynamic distributed resources has quickly become a mainstream technology in distributed computing and is changing the traditional way of software development. In this article, we present a grid-based software testing framework for unit and integration test, which takes advantage of the large-scale and cost-efficient computational grid resources to establish a testbed for supporting automated software test in complex software applications. Within this software testing framework, a dynamic bag-of-tasks model using swarm intelligence is developed to adaptively schedule unit test cases. Various high-confidence computing mechanisms, such as redundancy, intermediate value checks, verification code injection, and consistency checks are employed to verify the correctness of each test case execution on the grid. Grid workflow is used to coordinate various test units for integration test. Overall, we expect that the grid-based software testing framework can provide efficient and trustworthy services to significantly accelerate the testing process with large-scale software testing.

Understanding and measuring the urban pervasive infrastructure

The increasing popularity of mobile computing devices has allowed for new research and application areas. Specifically, urban areas exhibit an elevated concentration of such devices enabling potential ad-hoc co-operation and sharing of resources among citizens. Here, we argue that people, architecture and technology together provide the infrastructure for these applications and an understanding of this infrastructure is important for effective design and development. We focus on describing the metrics for describing this infrastructure and elaborate on a set of observation, analysis and simulation methods for capturing, deriving and utilising those metrics.

A Service Oriented Architecture-based Approach for Interdomain Optical Network Services

This work presents a service-oriented architecture for interdomain service provisioning in optical networks. The architecture introduces a service layer that concentrates all the interactions among domains necessary for service provisioning. A service layer is an alternative to the GMPLS (Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching) architecture, but without a rigid control plane as found in GMPLS. We start by defining a set of basic services to provide single end-to-end (e2e) interdomain connections. Then, more sophisticated services are created through the composition of these basic services. The interdomain Optical VPN (Virtual Private Network) service is considered in order to illustrate the composition of services. A prototype of the architecture was designed and implemented using Web services as the main technology. The architecture was evaluated in terms of speed, scalability, and bandwidth consumption necessary to establish e2e interdomain connections and Optical VPNs.

Method of design and specification of web services based on quality system documentation

In this paper, we present a method for development and specification of web services based on the quality system documentation. The general assumption is that service oriented architecture is based on business services and these business services mostly correspond to exchanged documentation in a real business system. Documentation of a quality system is recognized in form of documents that describe business processes in a real business system and identify exchanged documentation with environment. Presented method uses documentation of quality system and documentation flow for web service specification. We developed the CASE tool for web service specification based on a new approach, and we compare it to other existing tools.

Interacting with mobile services: an evaluation of camera-phones and visual tags

We present a study of using camera-phones and visual-tags to access mobile services. Firstly, a user-experience study is described in which participants were both observed learning to interact with a prototype mobile service and interviewed about their experiences. Secondly, a pointing-device task is presented in which quantitative data was gathered regarding the speed and accuracy with which participants aimed and clicked on visual-tags using camera-phones. We found that participants’ attitudes to visual-tag-based applications were broadly positive, although they had several important reservations about camera-phone technology more generally. Data from our pointing-device task demonstrated that novice users were able to aim and click on visual-tags quickly (well under 3 s per pointing-device trial on average) and accurately (almost all meeting our defined speed/accuracy tradeoff of 6% error-rate). Based on our findings, design lessons for camera-phone and visual-tag applications are presented.

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The 2007 IEEE CEC simulated car racing competition

This paper describes the simulated car racing competition that was arranged as part of the 2007 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Both the game that was used as the domain for the competition, the controllers submitted as entries to the competition and its results are presented. With this paper, we hope to provide some insight into the efficacy of various computational intelligence methods on a well-defined game task, as well as an example of one way of running a competition. In the process, we provide a set of reference results for those who wish to use the simplerace game to benchmark their own algorithms. The paper is co-authored by the organizers and participants of the competition.

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Understanding component co-evolution with a study on Linux

After a software system has been delivered, it inevitably has to change to remain useful. Evolutionary coupling measures the change dependencies between software components. Reference coupling measures the architecture dependencies between software components. In this paper, we present a method to correlate evolutionary coupling and reference coupling. We study the evolution of 597 consecutive versions of Linux and measure the evolutionary coupling and reference coupling among 12 kernel modules. We compare 12 pairs of evolutionary coupling data and reference coupling data. The results show that linear correlation exists between evolutionary coupling and reference coupling. We conclude that in Linux, the dependencies between software components induced via the system architecture have noticeable effects on kernel module co-evolution.

Defining the grid: a snapshot on the current view

The term “Grid” was introduced in early 1998 with the launch of the book “The Grid. Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure”. Since that time many technological changes have occurred in both hardware and software. One of the most important ones seems to be the wide acceptance of Web services. Although the basic Grid idea has not changed much in the last decade, many people have different ideas about what a Grid really is. In the following article we report on a survey where we invited many people in the field of Grid computing to give us their current understanding.

FPGA-based minutia matching for biometric fingerprint image database retrieval

In this paper, a parallel-matching processor architecture with early jump-out (EJO) control is proposed to carry out high-speed biometric fingerprint database retrieval. The processor performs the fingerprint retrieval by using minutia point matching. An EJO method is applied to the proposed architecture to speed up the large database retrieval. The processor is implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-E, and occupies 6,825 slices and runs at up to 65 MHz. The software/hardware co-simulation benchmark with a database of 10,000 fingerprints verifies that the matching speed can achieve the rate of up to 1.22 million fingerprints per second. EJO results in about a 22% gain in computing efficiency.

On the universality of peptide computing

We present a simulation of Turing machines by peptide–antibody interactions. In contrast to an earlier simulation, this new technique simulates the computation steps automatically by the interaction between peptides and antibodies and does not rely on a “look-and-do” approach, in which the Turing machine program would be interpreted by an extraneous computing agent. We determine the resource requirements of the simulation. Towards a precise definition for peptide computing we construct a new theoretical model. We examine how the simulations presented in this paper fits this model. We also give conditions on the peptide computing model so that it can be simulated by a Turing machine.

Towards a general approach to mobile profile based distributed grouping

In this paper, we present a new kind of mobile ad hoc application, which we call mobile profile based distributed grouping (MoPiDiG), which is a combination of mobile clustering and data clustering. In MoPiDiG, each mobile host is endowed with a user profile and, while the users move around, hosts with similar profiles are found and a robust mobile group is formed. The members of a group are able to cooperate with each other or attain a goal together. In this article, MoPiDiG is defined and compared with related approaches. Furthermore, a modular architecture and algorithms are presented to build arbitrary MoPiDiG applications.

High performance motion detection: some trends toward new embedded architectures for vision systems

The goal of this article is to compare some optimised implementations on current high performance platforms in order to highlight architectural trends in the field of embedded architectures and to get an estimation of what should be the components of a next generation vision system. We present some implementations of robust motion detection algorithms on three architectures: a general purpose RISC processor—the PowerPC G4—a parallel artificial retina dedicated to low level image processing—Pvlsar34—and the Associative Mesh, a specialized architecture based on associative net. To handle the different aspects and constraints of embedded systems, execution time and power consumption of these architectures are compared.

Rapid prototyping of social group dynamics in multiagent systems

In this article we present an engineering approach for the integration of social group dynamics in the behavior modeling of multiagent systems. To this end, a toolbox was created that brings together several theories from the social sciences, each focusing on different aspects of group dynamics. Due to its modular approach, the toolbox can either be used as a central control component of an application or it can be employed temporarily to rapidly test the feasibility of the incorporated theories for a given application domain. This is exemplified by applying the toolbox to different applications.

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Inverse multi-objective robust evolutionary design

In this paper, we present an Inverse Multi-Objective Robust Evolutionary (IMORE) design methodology that handles the presence of uncertainty without making assumptions about the uncertainty structure. We model the clustering of uncertain events in families of nested sets using a multi-level optimization search. To reduce the high computational costs of the proposed methodology we proposed schemes for (1) adapting the step-size in estimating the uncertainty, and (2) trimming down the number of calls to the objective function in the nested search. Both offline and online adaptation strategies are considered in conjunction with the IMORE design algorithm. Design of Experiments (DOE) approaches further reduce the number of objective function calls in the online adaptive IMORE algorithm. Empirical studies conducted on a series of test functions having diverse complexities show that the proposed algorithms converge to a set of Pareto-optimal design solutions with non-dominated nominal and robustness performances efficiently.

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Using trust assumptions with security requirements

Assumptions are frequently made during requirements analysis of a system about the trustworthiness of its various components (including human components). These trust assumptions, whether implicit or explicit, affect the scope of the analysis, derivation of security requirements, and in some cases how functionality is realized. This paper presents trust assumptions in the context of analysis of security requirements. A running example shows how trust assumptions can be used by a requirements engineer to help define and limit the scope of analysis and to document the decisions made during the process. The paper concludes with a case study examining the impact of trust assumptions on software that uses the secure electronic transaction specification.

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Supporting Ubiquitous IMS-based Teleconferencing Through Discovery and Composition of IMS and Web Components

Natural communication among people happens in flexible ways and is strongly affected by the users’ situation (such as communication tools available, user’s location, and user’s preferences). This situation or context information is seldom used to initiate communication sessions among users. Current communication systems are indifferent about users’ context, often require time consuming manual configurations and often result in conferencing tools not being easily accessible when needed. This leads to lower adoption of innovative communications services. IMS SIP (IP Multimedia Subsystem, Session Initiation Protocol) sessions allow users to access the session from different points of contact (home, office, etc.), however, IMS still requires a prior knowledge of all SIP components that might be used in a SIP session. Furthermore, IMS makes limited use of context information (mainly user-defined availability). To address these issues our research approach combines techniques from pervasive computing with IMS networking principles to facilitate compositions of communication sessions based on users’ context. We propose a platform and APIs for pervasive application development support to allow greater intelligence in IMS applications. We additionally provide mechanisms for IMS applications to apply their intelligence to the configuration of physical devices and web resources used to set up a conference. The innovations proposed in this paper are: (1) A new standard for intelligent IMS-based conferencing applications. (2) Application Development Interfaces (APIs) for a platform for pervasive computing. (3) An architecture for a pervasive IMS platform.

Universal access to information services—the need for user information and its relationship to device profiles

Users access information services with a variety of devices and with different interaction modes that depend on personal characteristics (including disabilities) and on the context of usage. With the appearance of mobile devices, the industry has focused its efforts on the standardization of device characteristics, thus giving to information providers some content adaptation facilities. However, little attention has been paid to the standardization of user profiles that will allow further customization and adaptation capabilities in mainstream services. This paper will present the authors experiences in outlining and implementing user profiles, as well as possible integration paths with device characteristics.