Project summary
"The notion of 'cloud
computing', where computing infrastructure, platforms, and software
application services are offered at low cost from remote
very-large-scale data centres accessed over the internet, is one that
has recently received large amounts of attention in the IT industry.
There have been predictions that this 'utility computing' will
predominate in future with organisations discarding their internal
servers in favour of applications accessible 'in the cloud'. To service
users, clouds clearly offer advantages in scalability, may reduce the
costs of application management, and may reduce overall hardware costs.
To service providers, they offer the opportunity to leverage existing
data-centre infrastructure and to take advantage of the economies of
scale available exclusively to purchasers of extremely large volumes of
hardware and network capacity. While we think that some predictions of
the costs savings from cloud adoption are optimistic, we are confident
that cloud computing offers real business benefits. These will mean that
more and more business and public-sector organisations will migrate
some of their applications from dedicated servers to private or public
clouds.
This
EPSRC-funded project extends the work of the
Large-Scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS) Initiative's
research programme. The interests of the LSCITS Initiative in cloud
computing are twofold: we argue that there is a need to provide
analytical and predictive methods and tools that support decision making
about the costs, benefits and risks of migrating applications to the
cloud; and we believe that, because cloud data centres are instances of
LSCITS, there are research challenges in their setting-up, operation,
management and evolution while providing guaranteed levels of
performance and dependability, quantified environmental impact, support
for the development of scalable applications; and a range of resource
pricing models."
People
Postdoctoral Research Fellow: Kenneth Johnson
PhD student: Yasmin Rafiq
Publications
R. Calinescu, L. Grunske, M. Kwiatkowska, R. Mirandola, G. Tamburrelli (2011) —
Dynamic QoS Management and Optimisation in Service-Based Systems. In:
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering,
37(3):387-409.
K. Johnson, S. Reed and R. Calinescu (2011) — Specification and
Quantitative Analysis of Probabilistic Cloud Deployment Patterns. In:
Proceedings of the 7th Haifa Verification Conference (HVC 2011). To appear.
R. Calinescu, S. Kikuchi (2011) — Formal Methods @ Runtime. In: Foundations of Computer Software. Modeling, Development, and Verification of Adaptive Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6662, 122-135, Springer.
R. Calinescu (2011) - When the Requirements for Adaptation and High Integrity Meet. Invited paper at the 2011 ESEC/FSE Workshop on Assurances for Self-Adaptive Systems. To appear.
R. Calinescu, S. Kikuchi
and M. Kwiatkowska (2011) — Formal Methods for the Development and
Verification of Autonomic IT Systems. In Cong-Vinh, P. (ed.), Formal and Practical Aspects of Autonomic
Computing and Networking: Specification, Development and Verification, IGI
Global. To appear.
R. Calinescu, K. Johnson
and Y. Rafiq (2011) — Using observation ageing
to improve Markovian model learning in QoS engineering. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/SPEC
International Conference on Performance Engineering.
News articles
Aston Aspects article
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