Mobile Agent Coordination for Distributed Network Management

Mobile agents are a promising technology to face the problems raised by the increasing complexity and size of today's networks. In particular, in the area of network management, mobile agents can lead to a fully distributed paradigm to overcome the limits of traditional centralized approaches. A basic requirement for the management of a complex network is the definition of high-level and flexible models to coordinate the accesses to the resources—data and services—provided by the network nodes. On this basis, this paper describes the MARS coordination architecture for mobile agents. MARS is based on the definition of programmable tuple spaces associated with the network nodes: mobile agents can access the local resources and services via the tuple space, thus adopting a standard and high-level interface. The network administrator—via mobile agents—can dynamically program the behavior of the tuple space in reaction to the agents' access to the tuple space, thus leading to a flexible network model. Several examples show the effectiveness of the MARS approach in supporting network management activities.     

Potent,Metabolically Stable 2‐Alkyl‐8‐(2H‐1,2,3‐triazol‐2‐yl)‐9H‐adenines as Adenosine A2A Receptor Ligands

Inhibition of adenosine A_2A receptors has been shown to elicit a therapeutic response in preclinical animal models of Parkinson’s disease (PD). We previously identified the triazolo‐9H‐purine, ST1535, as a potent A_2AR antagonist. Studies revealed that ST1535 is extensively hydroxylated at the ω‐1 position of the butyl side chain. Here, we describe the synthesis and evaluation of derivatives in which the ω‐1 position has been substituted (F, Me, OH) in order to block metabolism. The stability of the compounds was evaluated in human liver microsomes (HLM), and the affinity for A_2AR was determined. Two compounds, (2‐(3,3‐dimethylbutyl)‐9‐methyl‐8‐(2H‐1,2,3‐triazol‐2‐yl)‐9H‐purin‐6‐amine ( 3 b ) and 4‐(6‐amino‐9‐methyl‐8‐(2H‐1,2,3‐triazol‐2‐yl)‐9H‐purin‐2‐yl)‐2‐methylbutan‐2‐ol ( 3 c ), exhibited good affinity against A_2AR (K_i=0.4 nM and 2 nM , respectively) and high in vitro metabolic stability (89.5 % and 95.3 % recovery, respectively, after incubation with HLM for two hours).     

MARS: a programmable coordination architecture for mobile agents

Mobile agents offer much promise, but agent mobility and Internet openness make coordination more difficult. Mobile Agent Reactive Spaces (MARS), a Linda-like coordination architecture with programming features, can handle a heterogeneous network while still allowing simple and flexible application design     

A proxy‐based framework to support synchronous cooperation on the Web

Owing to its widespread diffusion and ease of use, the Web is an attractive platform to support distributed cooperative work. The paper presents an object‐oriented proxy‐based framework to support synchronous cooperation on the Web. The framework implements the general‐purpose mechanisms of a proxy server. Specific application‐dependent functionalities have to be implemented in a module to be installed in the proxy‐framework. This leads to the implementation of an extensible proxy‐framework, which facilitates the development of specific cooperative services. The paper presents and evaluates several applications enabling different cooperative Web activities, to confirm the effectiveness of our proposal in terms of reusability, usability and performance. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Isokinetic strength aspects in human joints and muscles

The isokinetic concept of exercise has become an increasingly popular means to assess musculoskeletal function. The isokinetic apparatus enables the control of angular velocity of the moving limb (which is held constant during the range of movement) whilst giving an accomodated resistance. The resistance produced by the device is accommodated to the net external moment exerted by the subject. Some of the advantages of isokinetic assessment are discussed. However, a number of restrictions and limitations should be considered when interpreting these strength measurements.     

Mobile JikesRVM: A framework to support transparent Java thread migration

Today’s complex applications must face the distribution of data and code among different network nodes. Computation in distributed contexts is demanding increasingly powerful languages and execution environments, able to provide programmers with appropriate abstractions and tools. Java is a wide-spread language that allows developers to build complex software, even distributed, but it cannot handle the migration of computations (i.e. threads), due to intrinsic limitations of many traditional JVMs. After analyzing the approaches in the literature, this paper presents our thread migration framework (called Mobile JikesRVM), implemented on top of the IBM Jikes Research Virtual Machine (RVM): exploiting some of the innovative techniques in the JikesRVM, we implemented an extension of its scheduler that allows applications to easily capture the state of a running thread and makes it possible to restore it elsewhere (i.e. on a different hardware architecture or operating system), but still with a version of the framework installed). Our thread serialization mechanism provides support for both proactive and reactive migration, available also for multi-threaded Java applications, and tools to deal with the problems of resource relocation management. With respect to previous approaches, we implemented Mobile JikesRVM without recompiling its JVM (Java Virtual Machine) source code, but simply extending JikesRVM functionalities with a full Java package to be imported when thread migration is needed.     

Characterizing gold in refractory sulfide gold ores and residues

Gold is present in refractory sulfide gold ores mainly in arsenian pyrite and arsenopyrite, where it occurs in both the chemically bonded state and as nano-size grains of metallic gold. During roasting or pressure oxidation, the sulfide matrix is destroyed and essentially all the gold is converted to the metallic form. The liberated gold is readily dissolved in conventional cyanide media, although a few residual gold particles, commonly encapsulated by films of silica-rich gel or by calcium sulfate, are detected. Chloridecontaining gold ores can generate soluble gold chlorocomplexes during hydrometallurgical processing and the dissolved gold can be sequestered on the surfaces of associated carbon particles, resulting in reduced gold recoveries.     

Taking back cyberspace

We count trustworthiness the most important prerequisite of our willingness to commit aspects of our lives and resources into other hands. For similar reasons, people expect a high level of trustworthiness before delegating complex and important tasks to software agents.     

Mobile-agent coordination models for Internet applications

Internet applications face challenges that mobile agents and the adoption of enhanced coordination models may overcome. Each year more applications shift from intranets to the Internet, and Internet-oriented applications become more popular. New design and programming paradigms call help harness the Web's potential. Traditional distributed applications assign a set of processes to a given execution environment that, acting as local-resource managers, cooperating a network-unaware fashion. In contrast, the mobile-agent paradigm defines applications as consisting of network-aware entities-agents-which can exhibit mobility by actively changing their execution environment, transferring themselves during execution. The authors propose a taxonomy of possible coordination models for mobile-agent applications, then use their taxonomy to survey and analyze resent mobile-agent coordination proposals. Their case study, which focuses on a Web-based information-retrieval application, helps show that the mobility of application components and the distribution area's breadth can create coordination problems different from those encountered in traditional distributed applications