Session 8: systems and applications

Abstract

he first paper “Flexible Service Provision Considering Specific Customer Resource Needs” is by D. Thiessen. The paper discusses a mechanism for performance management of services in distributed environments. A service trader is used as a central component, supporting a customer in choosing a suitable service while considering the global state of the distributed system’s resources using a load balancer. Management proxies encapsulate services or service groups and observe performance and availability characteristics of the resources involved in a service usage process to fulfill quality characteristics of a mediated service. The second paper by S. Petit, J. Sahuquillo and A. Pont is entitled “Characterizing Parallel Workloads to Reduce Multiple Writer Overhead in Shared Virtual Memory Systems”. The paper presents a study of workload behavior aimed at improving the design of Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) protocols. The work focuses on the identification of the type of shared data patterns that can appear in the accesses to protected sections using semaphores. Most coherence actions in SVM systems are performed as a consequence of the write operations executed in critical sections, so this study pays special attention to the write operations performed when multiple writers are allowed. As these write operations may present spatial locality, they also study the write patterns on shared pages with similar behavior. The third paper “Integration of Legacy Client-Server Applications in a Secure Multi-Tier Architecture” is by L. Romano, D. Cotroneo, A. Mazzeo, and S. Russo. The paper present a CORBA-based multi-tier architecture which is capable of adding security to an existing service. They assume the legacy application is available as a compiled program, consisting of a client and a server module. Under these assumptions, they show how to build a new system, which reintegrates the original service, and secures it. The fourth paper by K. Klockner is entitled “BSCW: Cooperation Support for Distributed Workgroups”. The paper presents the cooperation support facilities of the BSCW system (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) that was developed at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD). It uses the World Wide Web as a platform for communication and offers a number of functions for supporting collaboration in an workgroup environment. The fifth paper “A Hardware-Accelerated Novel IR System” is by M. Weeks, V.J. Hodge, and J. Austin. This work continues the AURA II (Advanced Uncertain Reasoning Architecture) project’s research into distributed binary Correlation Matrix Memory (CMM) based upon the PRESENCE (PaRallEl Structured Neural Computing Engine) hardware architecture. They describe how a novel CMM-based information retrieval (IR) system, called MinerTaur, was implemented using the distributed-CMM hardware. T