Over the past ten years DRAM architects have struggled to keep up with the everincreasing clock rate of CPUs in order to deliver commensurate performance from the primary memory system. This rush to keep up with the system clock rate led architects down a path of optimizations that is beginning to get very thorny, namely optimizing based on bandwidth while ignoring latency. The specter of laten...

Service-centric systems are driven more and more towards self-adaptation in order to satisfy QoS in highly dynamic environments. However, the young age and immaturity of this domain, combined with the increasing size and complexity of these systems, hinder the architects from designing effectively self-adaptive systems. This paper addresses the main problems that architects face with respect to...

[Context and motivation] Non-functional requirements (NFRs) play a fundamental role when software architects need to make informed decisions. Criteria like efficiency or integrity determine up to a great extent the final form that the logical, development and deployment architectural views take. [Question/problem] Continuous evidence is needed about the current industrial practices of software ...

Software producing organizations are increasingly using model driven development platforms to improve software quality and developer productivity. Software architects, however, need to decide whether the platform generates code (that might be compiled) or if the model is immediately interpreted by an interpreter embedded in the application. Presently, there is no clear guidance that enables arc...

System architects are scarce. If we want to search or educate potential system architects, then it is useful to know factors that determine the success of system architects. In this presentation we look at 4 areas: nature, education, environment and experience. We will make these areas more specific by quantification and illustration. Distribution This article or presentation is written as part...

For many years the software architecting process has been understood as the engineering of a software architecture solution. This is typically documented in a number of views, which illustrate the aspects judged relevant for a number of addressed stakeholders. This perspective can be defined as “architecture as a product”. In this paper we focus on the shift from “architecture as a product” tow...

The design and development of sustainable software systems require software architects to consider a variety of architectural solutions and their trade-offs. With the frequent introduction of new architectural methods and software solutions, as well as, due to time-to-market constraints faced by software architects, considering even a subset of alternative architectural solutions during the dec...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is increasingly being used by large organizations to get a grip on the complexity and inflexibility of their business processes, information systems and technical infrastructure. Although seen as an important instrument to help solve major organizational problems, effectively applying EA seems no easy task. Efficient collaboration between architects and EA stakehold...

In face-to-face conversation, the arrangement of bodies and the shared physical environment provides a rich set of resources for communication. People use the location and orientation of their gaze, heads, hands, and torsos, to help to define, amongst other things, when a conversation begins and ends, their levels of mutualengagement, their participant roles in the conversation (e.g. speaker, h...

Dps proteins are the structural relatives of bacterioferritins and ferritins ubiquitously present in the bacterial and archaeal kingdoms. The ball-shaped enzymes play important roles in the detoxification of ROS (reactive oxygen species), in iron scavenging to prevent Fenton reactions and in the mechanical protection of DNA. Detoxification of ROS and iron chaperoning represent the most archetyp...