Energy aware scheduling of deadline-constrained tasks in cloud computing

Energy efficiency is the predominant issue which troubles the modern ICT industry. The ever-increasing ICT innovations and services have exponentially added to the energy demands and this proliferated the urgency of fostering the awareness for development of energy efficiency mechanisms. But for a successful and effective accomplishment of such mechanisms, the support of underlying ICT platform is significant. Eventually, Cloud computing has gained attention and has emerged as a panacea to beat the energy consumption issues. This paper scrutinizes the importance of multicore processors, virtualization and consolidation techniques for achieving energy efficiency in Cloud computing. It proposes Green Cloud Scheduling Model (GCSM) that exploits the heterogeneity of tasks and resources with the help of a scheduler unit which allocates and schedules deadline-constrained tasks delimited to only energy conscious nodes. GCSM makes energy-aware task allocation decisions dynamically and aims to prevent performance degradation and achieves desired QoS. The evaluation and comparative analysis of the proposed model with two other techniques is done by setting up a Cloud environment. The results indicate that GCSM achieves 71 % of energy savings and high performance in terms of deadline fulfillment.     

Power and environment aware control of Beowulf clusters

Beowulf clusters are now deployed worldwide, chiefly in support of scientific computing. Beowulf clusters yield high computing performance, yet they also pose several challenges: (1) heat-induced hardware failure makes large scale commodity clusters fail quite frequently and (2) cost effectiveness of the Beowulf cluster is challenged by the fact that it lacks means of adapting its power state according to varying work load. This paper addresses these issues by developing a Power and Environment Awareness Module (PEAM) for a Beowulf cluster. The busty nature of computation load in an academic environment inspired the implementation and analysis of a fixed timeout Dynamic Power Management (DPM) policy. Today it is common that many Beowulf clusters in academic environment are composed of older, recycled nodes that may lack of out-of-band management technologies, thus Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) and Wake-on-LAN (WOL) technology is exploited to control the power state of cluster nodes. A data center environment monitoring system that uses Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) technology is developed and deployed to realize environment awareness of the cluster. Our PEAM module has been implemented on our cluster at Purdue University, reducing the operational cost and increasing the reliability of the cluster by reducing heat generation and optimizing workload distribution in an environment aware manner.     

Feature selection environment for genomic applications

Background  

Feature selection is a pattern recognition approach to choose important variables according to some criteria in order to distinguish or explain certain phenomena (i.e., for dimensionality reduction). There are many genomic and proteomic applications that rely on feature selection to answer questions such as selecting signature genes which are informative about some biological state, e.g., normal tissues and several types of cancer; or inferring a prediction network among elements such as genes, proteins and external stimuli. In these applications, a recurrent problem is the lack of samples to perform an adequate estimate of the joint probabilities between element states. A myriad of feature selection algorithms and criterion functions have been proposed, although it is difficult to point the best solution for each application.     

A fuzzy approach for optimal placement of IoT applications in fog-cloud computing

Fog-cloud computing is a promising distributed model for hosting ever-increasing Internet of Things (IoT) applications. IoT applications should meet different characteristics such as deadline, frequency rate, and input file size. Fog nodes are heterogeneous, resource-limited devices and cannot accommodate all the IoT applications. Due to these difficulties, designing an efficient algorithm to deploy a set of IoT applications in a fog-cloud environment is very important. In this paper, a fuzzy approach is developed to classify applications based on their characteristics then an efficient heuristic algorithm is proposed to place applications on the virtualized computing resources. The proposed policy aims to provide a high quality of service for IoT users while the profit of fog service providers is maximized by minimizing resource wastage. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed policy. Results show that the proposed policy outperforms other approaches by improving the average response time up to 13%, the percentage of deadline satisfied requests up to 12%, and the resource wastage up to 26%.

     

Building new university hospital--what citizens know and policy makers should be aware of

Survey of citizens' attitudes in the process of strategic decision making is one of the most important methods for determining health care priorities. We describe the results of a survey carried out in December 2001, with an aim to collect and analyze the attitudes of the citizens and health care professionals toward the possibilities and strategies of construction of the University Hospital in Blato, Zagreb. The first referendum on the construction of the new hospital was conducted among Zagreb citizens in 1982, when they agreed that the new University Hospital was much needed. Zagreb citizens confirmed once again their attitudes toward and opinions on the need to continue the construction of new hospital in the city outskirts. By 1992, when the construction of the hospital was halted due to insufficient financial means, Zagreb citizens had already invested over 150 epsilon million in the project. It is interesting that today, 89.4% of the citizens and 74.5% of physicians agree that the new hospital building should be completed. Also, 66.7% of the citizens and 88% of physicians think that this hospital should be a University hospital that could offer the most complex treatments and medical education. To finish the construction of the new hospital further 200 epsilon million needs to be invested. Survey showed that 71% of citizens and 82.2% of physicians think that funds should be raised from some form of credit or budget rather than by special local tax, additional tax or voluntary tax. This project will significantly determine the future of hospital and health care system in Croatia due to its capacities in terms of space, technology, and staff. Before the decision to continue with the new hospital construction be made, the expected future needs, demands, and supply of the health care services in hospital sector in Zagreb and Croatia should be provided using SWOT analysis for each of existing the facilities.     

Advances in concepts and methods for the marine environment: implications for policy

Science-based indicators aimed at measuring the sustainability of human activities on the environment have become of prime importance in the policy arena. At the international level, the Commission on Sustainable Development and the Convention on Biological Diversity and other Multilateral Environmental Agreements have recognised the need to develop a set of scientific indicators related to changes in biodiversity and other environmental issues able to direct policy decisions. In the marine realm, the study of the effects of both ‘top-down’ extractive activities such as fishing is more and more dealt with, in conjunction with ‘bottom-up’ activities such as nutrient loading and the effects on biogeochemical cycles, marine geochemistry and ecosystem structure and functioning of other pollutants and contaminants. ‘Conventional’ approaches such as the identification of taxa, model organisms and related methodologies will continue playing a key role for the monitoring of human-induced changes in the marine environment. On the other hand, newly developed disciplines such as genomics, proteomics and biodiversity informatics are increasingly looked at as a source of information and applications that can respond to questions and concerns by the policy community such as the need to adapt to global and climate change in the marine environment so as to mitigate its societal implications.

Decision of mathematical logical tasks in sensory enriched environment (classical music)

The time of a decision of mathematical logical tasks (MLT) was decreased during classical musical accompaniment (power 35 and 65 dB). Music 85 dB did not influence on the process of decision of MLT. Decision without the musical accompaniment led to increasing of coherent function values in beta1, beta2, gamma frequency ranges in EEG of occipital areas with prevalence in a left hemisphere. A coherence of potentials was decreased in EEG of frontal cortex. Music decreasing of making-decision time enhanced left-sided EEG asymmetry The intrahemispheric and the interhemispheric coherences of frontal cortex were increased during the decision of MLT accompanied by music. Using of musical accompaniment 85 dB produced a right-side asymmetry in EEG and formed a focus of coherent connections in EEG of temporal area of a right hemisphere.     

OPSA: an optimized prediction based scheduling approach for scientific applications in cloud environment

Cluster Computing - Cloud computing has attracted scientists to deploy scientific applications by offering services such as Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Software-as-a-service (SaaS), and...     

Invariant probabilities for systems in a random environment—With applications to the Brusselator

In this paper we are concerned with problems of the long-term behavior for nonlinear systems in random environment. The general model is assumed to be given by an ordinary differential equation with random parameters or random input. The disturbance process can be taken from a fairly general class of Markov processes having a bounded state space. In terms of the system’s dynamics we give sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of invariant probabilities. Finally, we apply these results to the two-dimensional biochemical model which is known as the Brusselator. This work is part of a research project supported by the ‘Stiftung Volkswagenwerk’.     

甲烷氧化菌及其在环境治理中的应用

甲烷的生物氧化包括好氧氧化和厌氧氧化两种,分别由好氧甲烷氧化菌和厌氧甲烷氧化菌完成.由于该过程是减少自然环境中温室气体甲烷排放的重要途径,越来越受到各国学者的重视.本文主要对当前甲烷氧化菌的研究现状进行了综述,对好氧甲烷氧化菌的种类、参与氧化甲烷的关键酶,厌氧甲烷氧化菌的种类、参与的微生物菌种以及氧化机理进行了论述,并对这两类微生物在温室气体减排、污染物治理、废水生物脱氮、硫及金属元素回收等方面的应用现状及前景进行了分析.     

A request aware module using CS-IDR to reduce VM level collateral damages caused by DDoS attack in cloud environment

Cluster Computing - Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) plays a significant role in threatening the cloud-based services. DDoS is a kind of attack which targets the CPU, bandwidth and other...     

Improving the performance of data center with real-time service image placement in mobile cloud environment

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is broadening the ubiquitous market for mobile devices. Because of the hardware limitation of mobile devices, the heavy computing tasks should be processed by service images (SIs) on the cloud. Due to the scalability and mobility of users and services, dynamic resource demands and time-varying network condition, SIs must be re-located to adapt the new circumstances. In this paper, we formulate the SI placement as an optimization problem which minimizes the communication cost subject to resource demand constraints. We then propose a real-time SI placement scheme which includes two sequent stages of clustering/filtering and condensed placement to solve the formulated problem. The former omits the infeasible slots prior to placement in order to improve computational complexity. The latter focuses on the SI placement through a novel condensed solution. The numerical results show that our solution converges to the global optimum with a negligible gap while performing much faster execution time compared with the exhaustive search method. This improvement leverages the real-time services especially in MCC environment.     

A simple approach for the distribution of computationally intense tasks in an heterogeneous environment: distribution of the MDPP image-processing package

A method has been developed to link the display ability of ahigh-resolution graphics workstation with the computationalpower of a local mainframe or a remote supercomputer via anelectronic data network. The method allows this link to be establishedin a manner largely transparent to the user. The applicationof the method is illustrated by our successful distributionof the computationally intensive portions of an imaging program(MDPP) from a small VAX workstation to a VAX mainframe and CrayY-MP8/832 using a simple message-passing technique. This techniquecan be applied to almost any configuration of networked machines. Received on February 5, 1991; accepted on April 23, 1991     

Effects of VDT monitor placement and single versus bifocal glasses on somatic discomfort and postural profiles in data entry tasks

A study was conducted to determine the effects of VDT monitor positions and the use of single vision versus bifocal glasses on somatic elements in the data entry task. Eight male subjects performed data entry using a word processor in eight half-hour sessions with the four different monitor placements, i.e. "eye-level", "shoulder-level-front", "shoulder-level-side", and "sunken-level", wearing the two types of glasses. A subjective discomfort rating questionnaire covering 12 somatic elements was completed by the subject after each session. The head inclination and angle of gaze to the monitor were measured with a goniometer. The results revealed that the somatic elements which were affected significantly by the placement of the VDT monitor and the type of glasses were discomfort in the neck and back regions and eyestrain, respectively. The neck-back discomfort scores were highest at the "eye-level", lowest at the "sunken-level", and intermediate at the "shoulder-level-side" position. The "shoulder-level-front" position was not significantly different in the discomfort from other three positions. The eyestrain was significantly greater with the bifocal than with the single vision glasses. The lower the monitor was placed, the more forward was the head and gaze inclined. The head was inclined less forward, or even more backward, and the gaze was inclined more forward, with the bifocal than with the single vision glasses. As a conclusion, the VDT operators were advised to avoid the "eye-level" and "shoulder-level-side" positions and to prefer the "sunken-level" and "shoulder-level-front" positions as the first and second best choices, respectively. The preference becomes more critical for the wearers of bifocal glasses that suffer from postural constraints in viewing.     

Some enzymes in marine environment: prospective applications found in patent literature

Marine enzymes are characterized by well-known habitat-related features such as salt tolerance, hyperthermostability, barophilicity and cold adaptivity although the related environmental conditions are present also in many non-marine environments. Novel chemical and stereochemical characteristics usually possessed by these biocatalysts, increase their interest from scientific and applicative points of view both in academia and in research industry. Chemical and pharmaceutical fields, embracing almost the whole body of applications based on marine catalysts, strictly rely upon their (stereo) chemical features. This review article is organized in two distinct parts. In the first, examples of different types of enzymes identified in marine environment are tabulated showing the importance of marine bioprospecting: in fact, the marine habitat is one of the most important natural locations for enzyme bioprospecting activity. In the second part technological processes based on marine enzymes are described: remarkable or unusual bioprocesses are performed by marine biocatalysts taking advantages by the habitat-related characteristics above mentioned which are desirable features recognized from a general biotechnological perspective. With this aim in mind this review did not search just for novelty in most recent patents but for important aspects within each report, enabling the reader to appreciate the importance of marine environment as source of very useful biocatalyst.     

ICT for environment in life cycle applications openLCA — A new open source software for life cycle assessment

This paper is a two-fold introduction. For one, it introduces a new, open source, LCA software. Second, it is to establish a new section in Int J LCA named ‘LCA Software’. Herewith, the editors of the journal recognise the growing possibilities and the impact of software, meaning both databases and calculation as well as modelling software, for practical applications as well as for the scientific development in LCA. This section is designed to house a broad variety of papers to beLCA focused and related to ICT (Information and Communication Technology). In this sense, announcements (as this one), conference reports, but also peer-reviewed papers on methodology and case studies, are most welcome.