Many scientific problems require multiple distinct computational tasks to be executed in order to achieve a desired solution. We introduce the Ensemble Toolkit (EnTK) to address the challenges of scale, diversity and reliability they pose. We describe the design and implementation of EnTK, characterize its performance and integrate it with two distinct exemplar use cases: seismic inversion and ...

Cloud computing systems provide large-scale infrastructures for high-performance computing that are “elastic” since they are able to adapt to user and application needs. Clouds are used through a service-oriented interface that implements the *-as-a-service paradigm to offer Cloud services on demand. This paper discusses Cloud computing models and architectures, their use in parallel and distri...

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm which introduces novel opportunities to establish large scale, flexible computing infrastructures. However, security underpins extensive adoption of Cloud computing. This paper presents efforts to address one of the significant issues with respect to security of Clouds i.e. intrusion detection and severity analysis. An abstract model for integra...

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) provides a rich set of standards for implementing industrial scale multi-agent infrastructures. Despite its manifold possibilities for achieving coordinated action execution based on interaction protocols, it still lacks direct support of multi-agent planning and scheduling for goal directed action execution. In this paper, we discuss a desi...

Building up spatial data infrastructures involves the task of dealing with heterogeneous data sources which often bear inconsistencies and contradictions, respectively. One main reason for those inconsistencies emerges from the fact that one and the same real world phenomenon is often stored in multiple representations within different databases. It is the special goal of this paper to describe...

In the recent years several solutions have been proposed to implement digital infrastructures for sharing and processing scientific data and observations. Spatial data infrastructures currently enable effective and efficient geo-information data sharing in many disciplinary communities, and innovative solutions are under development to support new open data and linked data paradigms. In paralle...

The development of new products in the mobile data services market poses severe challenges for service providers and mobile network operators. Short-lived products, lack of knowledge about acceptance by users, and the requirement to embed new products in existing infrastructures lead to difficulties on several levels. Data protection, potentially ambiguous regulation of telecommunication and th...

Exploring the grand challenges for next generation eBusiness While Information Systems continue to transform organizations, organizational IT infrastructures and business models are themselves beginning to change. There is an increased focus on service orientation and performance levels of IT infrastructures and systems. Outsourcing and offshoring strategies are evolving to include utility base...

OpenFlow is a protocol-implementing Software Defined Networking, a new networking paradigm, which segregates packet forwarding and accounting from the routing decisions and advanced protocols. This segregation increases agility and flexibility and reduces operational expenses of the networking infrastructure. Despite the apparent benefits, many companies are unable to upgrade their networks to ...

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded Data Management through e-Social Sciences (DAMES) project is investigating, as one of its four research themes, how research into depression, self-harm and suicide may be enhanced through the adoption of e-Science infrastructures and techniques. In this paper, we explore the challenges in supporting such research infrastructures and describ...