Danilo Ardagna

Q-ImPrESS

Q-ImPrESS (Quality Impact Prediction for Evolving Service-oriented Software) is a medium-sized focused research project (STREP) funded under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme, within the ICT Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering priority.

Today, complex software systems are an integral part of many every day products and services from diverse application domains. All these systems need to evolve over long periods of time and service orientation provides the flexibility needed to adapt them to ever changing requirements. Unfortunately, current standards for service-oriented development do not support the analysis of software systems with respect to their quality of service and as a result, many major innovative application domains are not fully exploiting the advantages of service orientation.

The Q-ImPrESS project aims at bringing service orientation to critical application domains, such as industrial production control, telecommunication and critical enterprise applications, where guaranteed end-to-end quality of service is particularly important. The main challenge here is to create a method for quality-driven software development and evolution, where the consequences of design decisions and system resource changes on performance, reliability and maintainability can be foreseen through quality impact analysis and simulation.

More information about the Q-ImPrESS project can be found in the official web site.

SMSCom

Emerging requirements are challenging our current knowledge about software engineering, and require a shift from the incremental improvements we have experienced in the past to radical changes to the way software is conceived, developed, and operated.

In particular: (i) Software development and operation are increasingly decentralized; applications are composed dynamically out of parts that are developed and operated by independent parties. (ii) Changes in the requirements ask for continuous software adaptation and evolution. (iii) The infrastructures on which applications run are fully distributed and can change both in physical and in logical structure; the so-called Internet of Things is fostering a situation where computing power and connectivity are not only possible any-time and any-place, but also for any-thing.

As a consequence, software must behave in a situational, self-managing manner. The term situational indicates that software is built to address a particular situation, problem, or challenge, and behaves according to the evolving situation in which it operates. Developing and running situational software imposes a paradigmatic shift from a fairly conventional design-implement-maintain development, in which the application builders are skilled professionals, to new and challenging scenario in which bits of applications are built by professionals, then composed (in an autonomic way, or by users without formal training) in myriad and unpredictable possible ways. The SMScom (Self-Managing Situated Computing) project (ERC Advanced Investigator Grant N. 227977) aims at developing a consistent, integrated, and homogeneous set of methods and tools for the design, validation, and operation of dependable self-managing situational software.

More information about the SMSCom project can be found in the official web site.

GAME-IT

In recent years, the energy consumption associated with Information Technology (IT) infrastructures has been steadily increasing. The reduction of energy usage is one of the primary goals of green computing, a new discipline and practice of using computing resources with a focus on the impact of IT on the environment. For example, the US Department of Energy's 2007 estimate of 59 billion kWh spent in US data centres translates to several million tons of coal consumption and CO2 emission per year. Overall, IT accounts for 2% of global CO2 emissions, i.e., IT pollutes to the same extent as the global air traffic.

A significant amount of work has been done to achieve power reduction of hardware devices (e.g., in mobile systems to extend battery life). Nowadays, low power techniques and energy savings mechanisms are being introduced also in data centers environments. In such systems, software is accessed as a service and computational capacity is provided on demand to many customers who share a pool of IT resources. Energy savings can be obtained by dynamically allocating computing resources among running applications and trading off application performance levels with energy consumption. As the customers' access rates change significantly within a single business day, energy-aware resource allocation is a challenging problem and techniques able to control the system at very fine grained time scales and in transient conditions are needed.

The aim of the GAME-IT (Green Active Management of Energy in IT systems) research is the development of a systematic set of methods and tools towards the design of novel resource allocation policies for energy-aware computing systems. The project will develop an advanced middleware framework for the management of IT systems based on Service Oriented Architecture via a novel interdisciplinary approach grounded on expertise from several research areas: service technologies, optimization, performance evaluation, model identification and control theory.

GAME-IT is one of the 8 projects selected out of 77 proposals by Politecnico di Milano to support junior researchers.

More information about the GAME-IT project can be found in the official web site.

PARVIS

Virtualization of physical resources is receiving great interest both from industry and academia as a way to develop smart and flexible cloud infrastructures. Virtual machine monitors (VMMs) provide performance differentiation and performance isolation to competing running virtual machines (VMs). Each VM has access to a time-varying fraction of the physical server capacity defined by the VMM resource allocation parameters (i.e., VMWare shares or Xen weights), which can be updated in few milliseconds without introducing any system overhead. Hence, this feature can be adopted effectively to control and adapt the application performance to incoming workload on very fine-grained time scales.

However, virtualization introduces new problems related to resource multiplexing and scheduling of multiple VMs: the performance modelling of virtualized environments is challenging, as the impact of the choice of the VMM scheduler, its parameters and I/O management overhead is still only partially understood. Furthermore, the autonomic management implemented today by virtualization products (e.g., VMWare DRS or Virtuoso VSched) aims at equalizing the use of resources but cannot provide any Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee.

The problem is made particularly challenging by the high variability of the incoming workload, which can change, by several orders of magnitude within a single business day. Techniques able to model and control the system at very fine-grained time scales and in transient conditions have to be developed.

The aim of PARVIS (Performance mAnagement of VIrtualized Systems) is to develop novel resource allocation policies for smart dependable virtualized cloud infrastructures via an interdisciplinary approach.

The research proposes the adoption of performance evaluation and optimization methods for the long-term (e.g., half an hour) management of the physical infrastructure, while system identification and control engineering methods are used to derive load-dependent black-box models of virtualized cloud systems from experimental data and to design short-term control systems (e.g., operating at minute time scale).

This model-based approach allows an accurate and effective management of the running applications providing performance and dependability guarantees.

This research is has been funded by IBM with the IBM Faculty Award 2010.

More information about the PARVIS project can be found in the official web site.

S-Cube

S-Cube the European Network of Excellence in Software Services and Systems, will establish an integrated, multidisciplinary, vibrant research community. This will enable Europe to lead the software-services revolution, thereby helping shape the software-service based Internet which is the backbone of our future interactive society.

S-Cube's Major Research Objectives are:

• Europe as a leader in the software services revolution
• Incubator for the next wave of service technologies
• Agile & holistic service engineering & adaptation principles, techniques & methods to foster innovation

S-Cube's Major Integration Objectives are:

• Establish a unified, multidisciplinary, vibrant research community
• Inaugurate a Europe-wide education and training programme for researchers and industry
• Establish a trust relationship with industry
• Create a European distributed services laboratory

More information about the S-Cube can be found in the official web site.

WS-Diamond

WS-Diamond (Web Services - DIAgnosability, Monitoring and Diagnosis) is a project of the Sixth Framework Programme Priority2 - Information Society Technologies. It's a Specific Targeted Research or Innovation Project.

Self-healing software is one of the challenges for IST research. This project aims to take a step in this direction by developing a framework for self-healing Web Services.

The project will produce:

• an operational framework for self-healing service execution of conversationally complex Web Services, where monitoring, detection and diagnosis of anomalous situations, due to functional or non-functional errors (e.g., Quality of Service) is carried on and repair/reconfiguration is performed, thus guaranteeing reliability and availability of Web Services;
• a methodology and tools for service design that guarantee effective and efficient diagnosability/repairability during execution;
• demonstration of these results on real applications.

More information about the WS-Diamond project can be found in the official web site.

DISCoRSO

The goal of the DISCoRSO (Distributed Information System for CoORdinated Service Oriented interoperability ) project is the implementation of a Service-based platform that enable the automation of the supply chain within industrial districts and the cooperation of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME).

More information about the DISCoRSO project can be found in the official web site.

MAIS

The current fast evolution in the ICT world suggests that it will be possible to offer access to information systems, in a ubiquitous way, through various kinds of interaction devices (PCs, laptops, palmtops, cellular phones, TV sets, and so on).

The MAIS (Multichannel Adaptive Information Systems) project main research goal was to provide a flexible environment to adapt the interaction and provided information and services according to ever changing requirements, execution contexts, and user needs.

More information about the MAIS project can be found in the official web site.

WASFO

The WASFO (Workload Analysis for Server Farm Optimization) projects starts from the collaboration among IBM Italy, Politecnico di Milano and the Universita' degli Studi di Milano. The project aims to study and develop optimization algorithms and a software tool to determine the Server Farm of minimum cost able to support Servers Consolidations Projects and guarantee high availability and scalability of the physical infrastructure. The research is performed under the SSME (Services Sciences, Management and Engineering) IBM initiative.

More information about the WASFO project can be found at the IBM web site.