795895
Management as a Service for IT Service Management
With the advent of the distributed computing model, IT service management has to face ranging from simple point products to entire enterprise frameworks to address the various multi-device systems management challenges. The existing technology offerings rarely solve the entire problem because they are expensive to purchase, difficult to implement, and do not incorporate the full range of features and functions to meet the systems management requirements today's organizations face. Now, with low-cost information appliances creeping their way into the data center, the only way to truly address today's heterogeneous IT challenge is to enable systems management capabilities at the service level. IT professionals should be able to simply take management service and accumulated knowledge to improve management performance. A new approach to IT service management is emerging that enables this level of integration. Management as a service (MaaS) enable IT service management to build network management appliances, services and knowledge repository that are extremely flexible and capable of evolving as customer needs evolve. MaaS implementations unify different systems management features and products into a common management environment that spans all system management types. MaaS-based management service offer greater flexibility and more cost-effective implementation than any enterprise framework can achieve. MaaS helps to make full use of the benefits offered by enterprise's converged network by identifying and resolving problems more quickly, more accurately, less expensively, and with more visibility than silos might be able to achieve on enterprise own.
14513982
An Online Model Checking Tool for Safety and Liveness Bugs
Modern software model checkers are usually used to find safety violations. However, checking liveness properties can offer a more natural and effective way to detect errors, particularly in complex concurrent and distributed e-business systems. Specifying global liveness properties which should always eventually be true proves to be more desirable, but it is hard for existing software model checkers to verify liveness in real codes because doing so requires finding an infinite execution. For solving such a challenge, this paper proposes an online checking tool to verify the safety and liveness properties of complex systems. We adopt the linear temporal logic to describe the semantics of the finite model checking, use binary instrumentation to obtain the distribute states and apply a checking engine to dynamically verify the finite trace linear temporal logic properties. At last, we demonstrate the method in a distributed system using distributed protocol Paxos and achieve good results by experiments.
12111515
Algorithm of integrating QFD and TRIZ for the innovative design process
TRIZ, the Russian acronym of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, is a useful tool that can solve the problem of "how to do" effectively in the innovative design process, while QFD (Quality Function Deployment) is able to settle the problem of "what to do". Although the potential of using both QFD and TRIZ in the product design process is huge, there are little tools to integrate these two methods effectively. In this research, we describe an algorithm that can integrate QFD and TRIZ effectively for the purpose of the innovative design process. The core of the algorithm is to identify the contradictions in TRIZ by defining rules based on HOQ (House of Quality) in QFD. A software tool called TRIZmatrix is developed based on this algorithm. Application of the algorithm to the case of the airbag problem is studied in detail. The software application and the case study show the advantage of this algorithm for CAI (computer aided innovation) software development.
15004157
A Semantic QoS-Aware Discovery Framework for Web Services
Augmenting web services with explicit semantics forms the foundation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) automation. As more and more Semantic Web Services (SWSs) are deployed, similar SWSs could have quite different quality-of-service (QoS) levels. The QoS-aware discovery becomes an important challenge. While some efforts try to solve it via Constraint Programming (CP), they suffer from the purely syntactic matchmaking method. Furthermore, the construction of constraints and the selection of services are completely dependent on the literal translation from QoS descriptions, which increase obstacles to actually apply CP. In this paper, we propose a semantic QoS-aware framework for SWSs discovery by combining the semantic matchmaking and CP. Initially, a QoS ontology is presented to define QoS data into service descriptions. Then the ontology reasoning is adopted to change previous syntactic matchmaking into a semantic way. Through confirming the compatibility of concepts, complex QoS conditions are solved as constraints and a selection algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal offer. Finally, the prototype implementation of our framework is discussed and a SWSs discovery case is used to illustrate the comprehensive discovery process.
10702245
A wireless LAN-based indoor positioning technology
Context-aware computing is an emerging computing paradigm that can provide new or improved services by exploiting user context information. In this paper, we present a wireless-local-area-network-based (WLAN-based) indoor positioning technology. The wireless device deploys a position-determination model to gather location information from collected WLAN signals. A model-based signal distribution training scheme is proposed to trade off the accuracy of signal distribution and training workload. A tracking-assistant positioning algorithm is presented to employ knowledge of the area topology to assist the procedure of position determination. We have set up a positioning system at the IBM China Research Laboratory. Our experimental results indicate an accuracy of 2 m with a 90% probability for static devices and, for moving (walking) devices, an accuracy of 5 m with a 90% probability. Moreover, the complexity of the training procedure is greatly reduced compared with other positioning algorithms.
5812455
Knowledge Enhanced IT Service Management
To manage the increasing complexity of IT systems and align IT services with business is the main theme of IT Service Management (ITSM). Current ITSM architecture adopts ITU as the framework to integrate silos of operational management tools and configuration information to build an end-to-end solution based on best practices. However, it lacks of a systematic means to address an important aspect of IT operation, i.e., managing the knowledge separated in various tools and experts' minds. In this paper, a novel knowledge-enhanced architecture is proposed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of ITSM. The essential contribution of this novel architecture is to involve a Knowledge Management Database (KMDB) which provides assistance for knowledge capture, mining, storage and sharing. The paper will discuss an approach of how to construct such a KMDB with motivating scenarios and detailed description of key components. To validate the approach, a prototype system is developed and evaluated by being applied for problem analysis on a Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) system. The experiment results show a remarkable improvement in the effectiveness and efficiency for practical IT service management operations.
21956342
Architectural design and implementation of highly available and scalable medical system with IBM Websphere middleware
Medical systems require the end-to-end high availability and scalability. There are many components in a medical system, and each individual component contributes to the overall system availability and scalability. We present the formulas to assess the overall system availability and capacity planning, and we architect approaches and technologies to make all components highly available in all tiers by clustering, workload management, and replication. We discuss how to unify all medical systems and design the uniform framework for different kinds of medical systems to hook up with this framework so that we can maintain a highly available and highly scalable system with ease. We use the n-tier distributed component based architecture and J2EE technologies as well as Web services to interact with .NET and others. We discuss how to program in the framework for high availability and scalability and how to upgrade application software without service interruption to achieve continuous availability. We show how to add or reduce hardware capacity in each tier and how to maintain hardware and software without service interruption as well as how to balance the capacity and availability among tiers.
28870218
An algorithm for optimal difference systems of sets
Abstract
Difference Systems of Sets (DSS) are combinatorial structures that generalize cyclic difference sets and are used in code synchronization. A DSS is optimal if the associated code has minimum redundancy for the given block length n, alphabet size q, and error-correcting capacity ρ. An algorithm for finding optimal DSS is presented together with tables of optimal solutions found by this algorithm.

10510054
Words in the History of a Turing Machine with a Fixed Input
The usual decision (halting or printing) problems for Turing machines (T.M.) are relative to an infinite class of them or an infinite class of inputs or1 a single T.M. We consider now a new type of problem (the consequence problem) con-neeted with a single input on a single T.M. It is known that in a definite sense everything which an erasing T.3{. can do can also be done by a nonerasing T.M., e.g., the halting problem is undeeidable in both bases. It turns out that for the consequence problem erasing does make an essential difference: decidable without erasing, but undecidable Mth erasing. From the undeeidability of the consequence problem for a T.M., it also follows that the same problem is undeeidable for certain simple monogenie normal systems. Consider a fixed finite alphabet A including a symbol b for the blank squares on a tape. For definiteness, we may assume that A = {b, ,, a}. Assume some familiar formulation of Turing machines. Definition. The word at any moment t in the history of a T.M. is the string consisting of the contents of the squares in the minimum block on the tape at t that includes all the marked squares and the square scanned at the initial moment (the origin). THEOREM 1. For arty fixed (finite) word at the initial moment, we can find a T.M. such that the set of words in its subsequent history is not ~cursive. Ullian shows [1] that there exists some nonrecursive but recursively enumerable set S such that there is a general recursive function f such that S = {f(0), f(f(O)), f(f(f(O))),-.. }. We can now give a T.M. which first erases the finitely many marks on the initial tape and returns to the origin, then it puts down the representation of 0 on tape, calculates the value of f(0), erasing everything else except the representation of f(0), calculates f2(0). In particular, we can do it in such a way that the symbol a is used, after the initial tape content is erased, only to mark f(0), f2(0), etc; it is erased before we evaluate f(f (0)) from f(0). Moreover, the string of a followed by the representation of f(0) always begins at the origin. Clearly the set of words in the history of this T.M. cannot be recursive because otherwise the set S would be recursive, whether a 'gd(0) ' belongs to the …
694386
A Data Storage Mechanism for P2P VoD Based on Multi-channel Overlay
It is a big challenge to provide Video-on-Demand streaming services over Internet in a scalable way. Currently, many researchers use a single channel overlay to implement the scalability of on-demand streaming services. However, in a real application environment, various channels in a P2P VOD system have different popularities, which probably cause the imbalance of data storage-capability of the whole system. It results in a problem that a mass of unpopular channels' caching capability can not be used to satisfy the data requirements of the whole system. In order to solve the problem, this paper proposes a new data-storage mechanism, which constructs a multi-channel overlay to optimize the whole system's caching-capability and greatly improves unpopular channel's caching efficiency. The experimental results show that this mechanism can achieve significant effects.
14445176
Dynamics of Stoichiometric Bacteria-Algae Interactions in the Epilimnion
Bacteria-algae interaction in the epilimnion is modeled with the explicit consideration of carbon (energy) and phosphorus (nutrient). Global qualitative analysis and bifurcation diagrams of this model are presented. We hypothesize that there are three dynamical scenarios determined by the basic reproductive numbers of bacteria and algae. Effects of key environmental conditions are examined through these scenarios and from systematic and extensive simulations. It is also shown that excessive sunlight will destroy bacterial communities. Bifurcation diagrams for the depth of epilimnion mimic the profile of Lake Biwa, Japan. Competition of bacterial strains are modeled to examine Nishimura's hypothesis that in severely P-limited environments such as Lake Biwa, P-limitation exerts more severe constraints on the growth of bacterial groups with higher nucleic acid contents, which allows low nucleic acid bacteria to be competitive.