Research and Innovation

Consensus in Computer and Communication Systems in a Stochastic Environment

by Natalia Amelina and Yuming Jiang

During the process of resource allocation in a computer system, it is vital that consensus is attained, ie: every node in the system must reach the same state with respect to certain chosen measures, such as having the same amount of steady-state remaining workload. Despite its importance, consensus is rarely considered in studies that model and evaluate resource allocation problems in computer and communication systems. Our research focuses on resource allocation from a consensus angle: we investigate the consensus properties of a distributed control strategy and apply this control strategy to various computer and communication systems.

SECCRIT: Secure Cloud Computing for High Assurance Services

by Roland Bless, David Hutchison, Marcus Schöller, Paul Smith and Markus Tauber

Owing to concerns about privacy, security and resilience, critical infrastructure service providers are not yet making wide-scale use of cloud computing for their high-assurance ICT services. The EU-funded SECCRIT project aims to address this problem so the benefits of the cloud can be leveraged in this sector in a safe and secure manner.

Interdependencies of Genetic and Epigenetic Events in a Computational Model for Colon Cancer Dynamics

by Irina-Afrodita Roznovăţ and Heather J. Ruskin

The aim of our current work is to investigate the interdependencies of genetic and epigenetic mechanisms leading to aberrations in cancer initiation and progression. The objectives are to develop a computational model for colon cancer dynamics, linking microscopic effects to macroscopic outcomes, and to analyse the impact of different risk factors on malignant tumour development.

Using the BonFIRE Testbed for Testing Scalability of the KOPI Service

by András Micsik, Péter Pallinger, László Kovács and András Benczúr

The KOPI Online Plagiarism Search Portal announced the detection of cross-language or translational plagiarism in 2011. This new feature requires more data intensive processing than the traditional monolingual plagiarism search (offered since 2004). As our service suffered from performance problems, we sought a platform for trying and testing automated scaling solutions applied on our service. Within the BonFIRE open call experiment we successfully implemented and analysed our elastic scaling solutions for KOPI.

MIDAS: Automated SOA Testing on the Cloud

by Alberto De Francesco, Claudia Di Napoli, Marc-Florian Wendland and Fabio De Rosa

MIDAS is a research project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme. Its goal is to design and build an integrated framework for the automation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) testing able to cover the complete lifecycle of software testing (test generation, execution, evaluation, planning and scheduling). The framework will be made available as Testing as a Service (TaaS) on a public Cloud infrastructure, so as to accommodate, in an affordable way, the varying and sometimes unpredictable computational requirements typical of testing activities.