Ad-Hoc Parallel Data Processing on Pay-As-You-Go Clouds with Nephele

In recent years, so-called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds have become increasingly popular as a flexible and inexpensive platform for ad-hoc parallel data processing. Major players in the cloud computing space like Amazon EC2 have already recognized this trend and started to create special offers which bundle their compute platform with existing software frameworks for these kinds of applications. However, the data processing frameworks which are currently used in these offers have been designed for static, homogeneous cluster systems and do not support the new features which distinguish the cloud platform. This chapter examines the characteristics of IaaS clouds with special regard to massively-parallel data processing. The author highlights use cases which are currently poorly supported by existing parallel data processing frameworks and explains how a tighter integration between the processing framework and the underlying cloud system can help to lower the monetary processing cost for the cloud customer. As a proof of concept, the author presents the parallel data processing framework Nephele, and compares its cost efficiency against the one of the well-known software Hadoop.

Cloud Computing and Enterprise Migration Strategies

Cloud Computing is a prevalent issue for organizations nowadays. Different service providers are starting to roll out their Cloud services to organizations in both commercial and industrial sectors. As for an enterprise, the basic value proposition of Cloud Computing includes but not limit to the outsourcing of the in-house computing infrastructure without capitalizing their investment to build and maintain these infrastructures. Challenges have never been ceased for striking a balance between Cloud deployment and the need to meet the continual rise in demand for computing resources. It becomes a strategic tool to increase the competitive advantage and to survival in the market for an enterprise. To reconcile this conflict, IT leaders must find a new IT operating model which can enhance business agility, scalability, and shifts away from traditional capital-intensive IT investments.

Specifying Business-Level Protocols for Web Services Based Collaborative Processes

Business collaboration is increasingly conducted over the Internet. Trading parties require business-level protocols for enabling their collaborative processes and a number of standardised languages, and approaches have been proposed for specifying business-level protocols. To illustrate the specification of web services based collaborative processes, three inter-related specification languages, namely, the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS), the Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL), and the Web Services Conversations Language (WSCL) are discussed in this chapter. A contract negotiation protocol is used as an example to illustrate the concepts involved in the specification. The chapter also discusses different strategies for deploying these specification languages.

Impact Analysis of Web Services Substitution on Configurable Compositions

Web services substitution is a promising solution that enables process continuity of SOA-based applications associated with composite Web services (WSs). This chapter proposes an approach that assesses the impact of substitution on the composition and selects the best substitute, from a pool of substitutes, in order to reduce potential conflicts due to different ontologies with other peers in this composition, for example. Two types of impact along with their assessment metrics are defined: local (semantic/policy compatibility matching degree) and global (QoS satisfaction degree). This chapter addresses the selection issue as an optimization problem whose main objective is to minimize the efforts to put into resuming the ongoing composition under some temporal constraints. A set of experiments are conducted as a proof of concept and the findings show that our approach provides the necessary means for achieving Web services substitution with minimal disruption time.

Workflow Validation Framework in Collaborative Engineering Environments

Automation systems like power plants or industrial production plants usually involve heterogeneous engineering domains, e.g., mechanical, electrical, and software engineering, which are required to work together to deliver good products and/or services to the customers. However, the heterogeneity of workflows used in different engineering domains makes it hard for project managers to integrate and validate such workflows. A workflow modification language can be used to define the workflows and their modifications; however, further formalization is needed to integrate the workflows. The authors of this chapter propose to extend the Engineering Service Bus (EngSB) framework with a mechanism to integrate and validate heterogeneous workflows from different engineering fields and to link connections between different types of signals in broader sense, including process interfaces, electrical signals, and software I/O variables. For evaluation, they perform a feasibility study on a signal change management use case of an industry partner in the hydro power plant engineering domain. Major results show that the framework can support workflow validation and improve the observability of heterogeneous workflows in collaborative engineering environments.

New Directions in Social Question Answering

Social Question Answering (SQA) services are emerging as a valuable information resource that is rich not only in the expertise of the user community but also their interactions and insights. The next generation SQA services are challenged in many fronts, including but not limited to: massive, heterogeneous, and streaming collections, diverse and challenging users, and the need to be sensitive to context and ambiguity. However, scholarly inquiries have yet to dovetail into a composite research stream where techniques gleaned from various research domains could be used for harnessing the information richness in SQA services to address these challenges. This chapter first explores the SQA domain by understanding the service and its modules, and then investigating previous studies that were conducted in this domain. This chapter then compares SQA services with traditional question answering systems to identify possible research challenges. Finally, new directions in SQA are proposed.

Social Web Services Research Roadmap

There is a growing interest in the research and industry communities to examine the possible weaving of social elements into Web services-based applications. This interest is backed by the widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and tools developed using various online means such as social networks and blogs. Social Web services incorporate the result of this weaving and are concerned with establishing relationships with their peers like people do daily. This chapter reviews the recent developments in this new topic and identifies new research opportunities and directions that are still unexplored such as security, engineering, reputation, trust, and argumentation.

Self-Stabilizing Graph Coloring Algorithms

The concept of self-stabilization in distributed systems was introduced by Dijkstra in 1974. A system is said to be self-stabilizing if (1) it can converge in finite time to a legitimate state from any initial state, and (2) when it is in a legitimate state, it remains so henceforth. That is, a self-stabilizing system guarantees to converge to a legitimate state in finite time no matter what initial state it may start with; or, it can recover from transient faults automatically without any outside intervention. This chapter first introduces the self-stabilization concept in distributed computing. Next, it discusses the coloring problem on graphs and its applications in distributed computing. Then, it introduces three self-stabilizing algorithms. The first two are for vertex coloring and edge coloring on planar graphs, respectively. The last one is for edge coloring on bipartite graphs.

Virtualization and Cloud Computing

This chapter explores the interface between virtualization and cloud computing for global enterprise mobility. It also investigates the potential both virtualization and cloud computing hold for global enterprises. In this context, it argues that the virtualization of computing operations, applications, and services and the consumerization of digital technologies serve as one of the key drivers of cloud computing. Against this backdrop, the chapter first provides an overview of virtualization, consumerization, and cloud computing. Second, it showcases real life instances in which five enterprises leverage virtualization and cloud computing as part of their cloud business solutions. Third, it outlines some of the hollows and pain points characterizing cloud computing. Fourth and last, the chapter briefly presents possible future trends likely to typify cloud computing.

Adding Personalization and Social Features to a Context-Aware Application for Mobile Tourism

The proliferation of location-aware mobile devices, together with the advent of Web 2.0 services, promotes the creation of hybrid applications which can provide innovative personalized context-aware services. Personalized recommendation services aim at suggesting products and services to meet users’ preferences and needs, while location-based services focus on providing information based on users’ current positions. Due to the fast growing of users’ needs in the mobile tourism domain, the provision of personalized location-based recommendation services becomes a critical research and practical issue. In this proposal, the authors present GiveMeAPlan, a mobile service which supplies tourist recommendations taking into account both the user preferences (personalization) and context information (time, location, weather, etc.) enriched with social features and targeted advertisements to support its business model. An application prototype is also being implemented to illustrate and test the system feasibility and effectiveness.