Supporting application-tailored grid file system sessions with WSRF-based services
This paper presents novel service-based grid data management middleware that leverages standards defined by WSRF specifications to create and manage dynamic grid file system sessions. A unique aspect of the service is that the sessions it creates can be customized to address application data transfer needs. Application-tailored configurations enable selection of both performance-related features (block-based partial file transfers and/or whole-file transfers, cache parameters and consistency models) and reliability features (file system copy-on-write checkpointing to aid recovery of client-side failures; replication, autonomous failure detection and data access redirection for server-side failures). These enhancements, in addition to cross-domain user identity mapping and encrypted communication, are implemented via user level proxies managed by the service, requiring no changes to existing kernels. Sessions established using the service is mounted as distributed file systems and can be used transparently by unmodified binary applications. The paper analyzes the use of the service to support virtual machine based grid systems and workflow execution, and also reports on the performance and reliability of service managed wide-area file system sessions with experiments based on scientific applications (NanoMOS/Matlab, CHID, GAUSS and SPECseis).

title: On the Use of Virtualization and Service Technologies to Enable Grid-Computing
abstract: The In-VIGO approach to Grid-computing relies on the dynamic establishment of virtual grids on which application services are instantiated. In-VIGO was conceived to enable computational science to take place In Virtual Information Grid Organizations. Having its first version deployed on July of 2003, In-VIGO middleware is currently used by scientists from various disciplines, a noteworthy example being the computational nanoelectronics research community (http://www.nanohub.org). All components of an In-VIGO-generated virtual grid – machines, networks, applications and data – are themselves virtual and services are provided for their dynamic creation. This article reviews the In-VIGO approach to Grid-computing and overviews the associated middleware techniques and architectures for virtualizing Grid components, using services for creation of virtual grids and automatically Grid-enabling unmodified applications. The In-VIGO approach to the implementation of virtual networks and virtual application services are discussed as examples of Grid-motivated approaches to resource virtualization and Web-service creation.

title: Cooperative Autonomic Management in Dynamic Distributed Systems
abstract: The centralized management of large distributed systems is often impractical, particularly when the both the topology and status of the system change dynamically. This paper proposes an approach to application-centric self-management in large distributed systems consisting of a collection of autonomic components that join and leave the system dynamically. Cooperative autonomic components self-organize into a dynamically created overlay network. Through local information sharing with neighbors, each component gains access to global information as needed for optimizing performance of applications. The approach has been validated and evaluated by developing a decentralized autonomic system consisting of multiple autonomic application managers previously developed for the In-VIGO grid-computing system. Using analytical results from complex random network and measurements done in a prototype system, we demonstrate the robustness, self-organization and adaptability of our approach, both theoretically and experimentally.

title: Towards Autonomic Grid Data Management with Virtualized Distributed File Systems
abstract: Grid data management is a challenging task because of the heterogeneous, dynamic and largescale nature of Grid environments. This paper proposes an autonomic Grid data management architecture based on virtualized distributed file systems and WSRF-compliant management services. Autonomic functions are integrated into the services to provide self-managing control over the different entities of Grid-wide file system sessions in accordance with high-level objectives and operate together to automatically achieve the desired data provisioning behaviors. Important autonomic features are designed and implemented in this system in the aspects of cache configuration, data replication and session redirection. Experiments with a prototype demonstrate that this architecture can automatically and substantially improve the performance and reliability of Grid data access.

title: On the Use of Fuzzy Modeling in Virtualized Data Center Management
abstract: One of the most important goals of data-center management is to reduce cost through efficient use of resources. Virtualization techniques provide the opportunity of carving individual physical servers into multiple virtual containers that can be run and managed separately. A key challenge that comes with virtualization is the simultaneous on-demand provisioning of shared resources to virtual containers and the management of their capacities to meet service quality targets at the least cost. This paper proposes a two-level resource management system with local controllers at the virtual-container level and a global controller at the resource-pool level. Autonomic resource allocation is realized through the interaction of the local and global controllers. A novelty of the controller designs is their use of fuzzy logic to efficiently and robustly deal with the complexity of the virtualized data center and the uncertainties of the dynamically changing workloads. Experimental results obtained through a prototype implementation demonstrate that, for the scenarios under consideration, the proposed resource management system can significantly reduce resource consumption while still achieving application performance targets.

title: Iterative Turbo Channel Estimation for OFDM System over Rapid Dispersive Fading Channel
abstract: Coherent OFDM detection requires accurate channel state information (CSI). Mobile radio channels are both time and frequency dispersive, especially at high vehicular speeds, which makes channel estimation a challenging problem in system design. Conventional preamble-based and pilot-aided channel estimation require numerous reference signals, which significantly compromises the system throughput. This paper proposes a novel low complexity iterative turbo channel estimation technique which makes use of preamble, pilots and soft decoded data information in an iterative fashion to improve the system performance over the time and frequency selective fading channel while maintaining the system throughput. The numerical and analytical results show that the proposed technique can approach the performance of systems with perfect CSI with much fewer preamble and pilots symbols compared to existing channel estimation methods.

title: A CoS-enabled Request Scheduling Policy
abstract: As a lightweight SLA between service providers and consumers, class of service (CoS) can avoid the runtime overhead brought by multiple negotiation of service agreements. This is especially important in grid environment where lots of transient services exist. We bring CoS into grid environment and propose a QoS-enabled framework named CQEF for grid service. In this paper, we present a CoSenabled request scheduling policy for CoS deployment in CQEF. According to this policy, incoming requests can be identified and classified based on the CoS information attached to them and subsequently be assigned to different waiting queues with different priorities. Besides, queuing scheduling algorithm is used to achieve the CoS enabling purpose. A prototype has been developed over the Globus platform. The test results show that, by using this policy, service providers are able to offer differentiated services for different CoS and QoS of premium CoSs will be guaranteed preferentially.

title: SNCC: A Selective Network-Coded Cooperation Scheme in Wireless Networks
abstract: Network-coded cooperation is a new communication paradigm that exploits spatial diversity by pooling distributed "communication" (relay) and also the distributed "computation" resources (coding) of different nodes in a network so as to increase wireless networks system performance. In this paper, we develop a selective network-coded cooperation (SNCC) scheme suitable for multiple unicast transmission pairs in a single-cell wireless network. The relay node performs network coding on received information from multiple sources before forwarding the network-coded data towards the corresponding destinations, which can decode their desired data from the network-coded data and the data they overhear from the other sources. The performance analysis and evaluation in terms of the single-pair outage probability and diversity-multiplexing tradeoff show that under SNCC any transmission pair achieves a full diversity order of M+1 (M is the number of available relays) while holding a better diversity-multiplexing tradeoff performance than existing cooperative cooperation schemes. Moreover, due to the mechanism that the relay adapts the data on which to perform network coding according to the observed source-to-relay channel quality, SNCC smartly avoids error propagation due to incorporating erroneous data into network-coded data, which is verified by numerical results of the single-pair outage probability.

title: Subspace analysis and optimization for AAM based face alignment
abstract: Active appearance models (AAM) is very powerful for extracting objects, e.g. faces, from images. It is composed of two parts: the AAM subspace model and the AAM search. While these two parts are closely correlated, existing efforts treated them separately and had not considered how to optimize them overall. In this paper, an approach is proposed to optimize the subspace model while considering the search procedure. We first perform a subspace error analysis, and then to minimize the AAM error we propose an approach which optimizes the subspace model according to the search procedure. For the subspace error analysis, we decomposed the subspace error into two parts, which are introduced by the subspace model and the search procedure respectively. This decomposition shows that the optimal results of AAM can be achieved only by optimizing both of them jointly rather than separately. Furthermore, based on this error decomposition, we develop a method to find the optimal subspace model according to the search procedure by considering both the two decomposed errors. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can find the optimal AAM subspace model rapidly and improve the performance of AAM significantly.

title: Capacity Bounds of SIMO Systems with Co-Channel Interferers
abstract: The exact calculation of the ergodic and outage capacity for Rayleigh fading single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channels in the presence of unequal-power Rayleigh fading interferers is mathematically quite challenging due to the complicated distribution of the capacity. In this paper, a SIMO system with M receive antennas and N interferers is considered. Based on some statistical results, the closed-form upper and lower bound for the ergodic and outage capacity are derived respectively. These bounds are shown to be simple to compute and appear to be quite tight.