1480760
Evaluation of a resource selection mechanism for complex network services
Providing complex (resource-intensive) network services is challenging because the resources they need and the resources that are available can vary significantly from request to request. To address this issue, we have proposed a flexible mechanism, called active frames, that provides a basis for selecting a set of available distributed computing resources, and then mapping tasks onto those resources. As a proof of concept, we have used active frames to build a remote visualization service, called Dv, that allows users to visualize the contents of scientific datasets stored at remote locations. We evaluate the performance of active frames, in the context of Dv. In particular, we address the following two questions: (1) what performance penalty do we pay for the flexibility of the active frames mechanism? (2) can the throughput of a service based on active frames be predicted with reasonable accuracy from micro-benchmarks? The results of the evaluation suggest that the overhead imposed by active frames is reasonable (roughly 5%), and that simple models based on micro-benchmarks can conservatively predict measured throughput with reasonable accuracy (at most 20%).
1101949
Preliminary Report on the Design of a Framework for Distributed Visualization
The paper is a preliminary report on the de- sign of a framework, called Dv, for building interactive distributed visualizations on computational grids. The framework is based on a form of mobile object, called an active frame, that consists of application data and a pro- gram that manipulates the data. The system provides a flexible framework for building distributed applications that are performance-portable in the presence of hetero- geneous resources and that adapt to dynamic changes in the status of system resources such as processor cycles and network bandwidth.
7567479
Stardust: tracking activity in a distributed storage system
Performance monitoring in most distributed systems provides minimal guidance for tuning, problem diagnosis, and decision making. Stardust is a monitoring infrastructure that replaces traditional performance counters with end-to-end traces of requests and allows for efficient querying of performance metrics. Such traces better inform key administrative performance challenges by enabling, for example, extraction of per-workload, per-resource demand information and per-workload latency graphs. This paper reports on our experience building and using end-to-end tracing as an on-line monitoring tool in a distributed storage system. Using diverse system workloads and scenarios, we show that such fine-grained tracing can be made efficient (less than 6% overhead) and is useful for on- and off-line analysis of system behavior. These experiences make a case for having other systems incorporate such an instrumentation framework.
3778117
Towards a Trustful and Flexible Environment for Secure Communications with Public Administrations
Interaction of citizens and private organizations with Public Administrations can produce meaningful benefits in the accessibility, efficiency and availability of documents, regardless of time, location and quantity. Although there are some experiences in the field of e-government there are still some technological and legal difficulties that avoid a higher rate of communications with Public Administrations through Internet, not only from citizens, but also from private companies. We have studied two of the technological problems, the need to work in a trustful environment and the creation of tools to manage electronic versions of the paper-based forms.
3776057
How to Specify Security Services: A Practical Approach
Security services are essential for ensuring secure communications. Typically no consideration is given to security requirements during the initial stages of system development. Security is only added latter as an afterthought in function of other factors such as the environment into which the system is to be inserted, legal requirements, and other kinds of constraints. In this work we introduce a methodology for the specification of security requirements intended to assist developers in the design, analysis, and implementation phases of protocol development. The methodology consists of an extension of the ITU-T standard requirements language MSC and HMSC, called SRSL, defined as a high level language for the specification of security protocols. In order to illustrate it and evaluate its power, we apply the new methodology to a real world example, the integration of an electronic notary system into a web-based multi-users service platform.
3856838
Trust, Privacy and Security in E-Business: Requirements and Solutions
An important aspect of e-business is the area of e-commerce. One of the most severe restraining factors for the proliferation of e-commerce, is the lack of trust between customers and sellers, consumer privacy concerns and the lack of security measures required to assure both businesses and customers that their business relationship and transactions will be carried out in privacy, correctly, and timely. This paper considers trust privacy and security issues in e-commerce applications and discusses methods and technologies that can be used to fulfil the pertinent requirements.