Things to clarify:

what's the difference between cloud and grid?

Where would result of self-optimization research be used? Pre-deployment? Post-deployment?

Does the publish/subscribe paradigm and Service Oriented Architecture fit in with cloud? How're they related?

mechanism to express adaptation

How does one express adaptation in software architecture? What's the DNA? Do we use the component-connector-topology permutations? Or is there another mechanism possible?

Would add-C/C/T? and delete-C/C/T be enough?

The more that I think about it, the natural way of adaptation where multiple organisms evolve in different ways and the fittest survive doesn't seem feasible. No practical application will have the luxury of trying out multiple solutions till the best one emerges. Each particular adaptation that the application makes will have to be incrementally better or rolled back immediately.

What does this mean for the monitoring mechanism? Will it necessarily have to be like the one described in [1]? Without layers, would it be impossible to have something sensible and workable?


[1] @inproceedings{citeulike:1840134,
address = {Washington, DC, USA},
author = {Kramer, Jeff and Magee, Jeff },
booktitle = {FOSE '07: 2007 Future of Software Engineering},
doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/FOSE.2007.19},
isbn = {0769528295},
keywords = {architecture, self-organising},
pages = {259--268},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
title = {Self-Managed Systems: an Architectural Challenge},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/FOSE.2007.19},
year = {2007}
}

starting from scratch -- almost

The christmas hols (and the associated lack of work done) have put paid to any continuity of thought. The only thing I've done is track down three PhD theses that are pretty close to my idea of what I'm doing.

The first one is from CMU (I might even have had coffee with this guy once):
Rainbow: Cost-effective software architecture based adaptation by Shang-Wen Cheng, Ph.D, Carnegie Mellon University, 2008

Supporting architecture- and policy-based self-adaptive software systems
by Georgas, John C., Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2008

Service clouds: Overlay-based infrastructure for autonomic communication services
by Alam-Samimi, Farshad, Ph.D., Michigan State University, 2007

I've gotten in touch with Cheng and John Georgas, but I'm unable to get in touch with Farshad to get a copy of his PhD thesis.

Of course, getting a copy of the thesis isn't the same as reading, absorbing and understanding it. But it's a start.

Epidemic algorithms

I wonder if epidemic algorithms are the only way to fly, in a strictly self-organising system. I'm going to try and look into what they are and whether they'd contribute to self-organisation. This could be a dead-end, but I won't know until I look.

The links that I'm looking at right now are:

http://wwwcs.uni-paderborn.de/cs/ag-madh/WWW/Teaching/2004SS/AlgInternet/Submissions/09-Epidemic-Algorithms.pdf

http://www.s3.kth.se/lcn/courses/2E1624/project-epidemic_algorithms.pdf

My readings

My readings so far (of academic papers) are at:

http://www.citeulike.org/user/viveknallur

It's a nice site for a minimal recording of the papers that one reads, online. The best part that I like about it, is the javascript button that it provides. Said button allows me to record bibliographic data about each paper, mostly automatically from the website (say ACM, IEEE, citeseer etc). Most useful while writing papers.

architecture of apps in the cloud

I'm looking to do some research on self-organising architectures for applications in the cloud. As a part of the lit-survey, I'm looking to understand the current architectures of apps in the cloud, how they manage scaling, how they optimise w.r.t to performance vs. cost tradeoffs.

The urls that seem to at least mention the architectures of apps in the cloud are:

http://www.vertica.com/casestudies/Sonian

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2-smugmug/

http://www.rds.com/books/looselyCoupled/index.html

First Page

I've been thinking about jotting down my thoughts with regard to my research. The road to a PhD is not a royal one and there'll be several wrong turns, dead ends and missteps. The purpose of this blog is:

1. To serve as a quick notebook to jot down urls that I might find useful in research
2. To serve as a board for me to pin up ideas and then throw darts at
3. To enable me to see the continuity or the lack thereof in my progression of ideas
4. To allow others to see and comment on the content inside