Autumn school

October 1-2, 2013

Allied to the Workshop, we will hold a 2-day autumn school for students and early-career researchers. The school is an annual event organized by ERCIM working group on Software Engineering for Resilient Systems.

October 1, 2013

October 2, 2013

Info about the lectures:

Elena Troubitsyna, Department of IT at Abo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

Title: Formal modelling of resilient systems

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Abstract: Resilience – the ability of a system to deliver services that can be justifiably trusted despite changes- is an evolution of the dependability concept. It encompasses the system aptitude to autonomously adapt to evolving requirements, operating environment changes and/or component failures. To design resilient systems, we need scalable modelling techniques that can cope with complexity, explicitly address various aspects of resilience throughout the entire development cycle and ensure that the system adapts to changes safely.  In this talk I will present a formal resilience-explicit development process based on refinement.

Refinement is a formal model driven development approach that enables correct-by-construction development of complex systems. The approach allows us to develop complex distributed systems, create complex fault tolerant architectures and verify reachability of system goals. In my talk, I will demonstrate an application of the refinement technique to building complex systems from several domains as well as discuss the role of formal modelling in safety assurance.

Biography: Elena Troubitsyna is an Associate Professor at the Department of IT at Abo Akademi University. She got her PhD in Computer Science in 2000 on design methods for dependable systems. Her research interests include application of formal and structured methods to development of dependable complex systems. She is a leader of several national projects in the area of dependability and formal methods. She has also served in numerous programme committees of international conferences. Elena was a PC chair of SERENE 2011 – International Workshop on Software Engineering for Resilient Systems. She has published over 50 refereed articles.

Given the many challenges and open issues involved, a number of initiatives have been ongoing in the last decade, researching methods and developing tools for resilience assessment of critical infrastructures. This lecture illustrates the major challenges posed by CI from the point of view of resilience assessment and assessment needs and overviews a modeling framework for the analysis of interdependencies in Electric Power Systems (EPS), adopting a state-based stochastic approach. First, some background on stochastic state-based analysis is provided. Then, how the selected approach deals with the interdependencies, complexity, heterogeneity and scalability dictated by the infrastructures involved in framework implementation are discussed, and some illustrative examples of different typologies of analysis are provided on selected EPS scenarios.

Biography: Felicita Di Giandomenico is a Senior Researcher at the Institute ISTI of the Italian National Research Council, where she leads the Software Engineering and Dependable Computing laboratory. She worked in numerous European and National projects on dependable computing systems, including PDCS, PDCS-2, GUARDS, Caution++, CRUTIAL, SAFEDMI, CHESS, CONNECT and SmartC2Net, often covering the role of ISTI-CNR principal investigator. She has served as PC Member for many international conferences, as Program cochair/chair of IEEE DSN-WADS 2007, IEEE SRDS 2008, IEEE DSN-PDS2009, and as general chair of EWDC 2011 and SERENE 2012.

Current  research interests include the design of dependable computing systems, software implemented fault tolerance, modeling and evaluation of dependability (mainly reliability, availability, and performability), and modeling and analysis of interdependencies in electrical utilities infrastructures. She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, of the IFIP WG10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance and of the ERCIM SERENE WG.

Title: Scientific Cloud Computing – Environmental Aspects of Network Infrastructure

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Abstract: Cloud computing is emerging as a possible methodology for delivering more energy efficient computing provision. The potential advantages are well-know, and are primarily based on the opportunities to achieve economies of scale through resource sharing: in particular by concentrating data storage and processing within data centres, where energy efficiency and measurement are well established activities. However, this addresses only a part of the overall energy cost of the totality of the cloud: energy is also required to power the networking connections and the end user systems through which access to the data centre is provided, and researchers are beginning to recognise this. One further aspect of cloud provision is even less well understood: the impact of application software behaviour on the overall system’s energy use. This is of particular concern when one considers the current trend towards “off the shelf” applications accessed from application stores. This mass market for complete applications, or code segments which are included within other applications, creates a very real need for that code to be as efficient as possible, since even small inefficiencies when massively duplicated will result in significant energy loss. This talk identifies this problem in detail, and proposes a support tool which will indicate to software developers the energy efficiency of their software as it is developed. Fundamental to the delivery of any workable solution is the measurement and selection of suitable metrics, we propose appropriate metrics and indicate how they may be derived and applied within our proposed system. We believe that addressing the potential cost of application development is fundamental to achieving energy saving within the cloud – particularly as the application store model gains acceptance.

Biography: Colin Pattinson is Professor of Mobile and Converging Technologies. His research interests are in performance measurement, monitoring and management of computer networks, and he has undertaken/supervised projects in performance measurement; network simulation and security support. Current research interests include the relationship between power-saving network designs and management and security systems, and low-cost, low-energy networking solutions. He is a committee member of the British Computer Society’s Green IT Specialist Group and has recently led the development of the first “Green Computing” MSc award in the UK; he is working within the University to deliver more energy and resource efficient ICT facilities and leading a project to measure the energy consumption of thin client computing technology. He has recently completed a review for Cisco Systems of their energy monitoring and control software. He has secured several successful energy efficiency related bids: Cisco Systems for review of Energy Wise energy monitoring software; JISC: (1) measurement of thin client technologies; (2) combining time tabling and energy management systems; (3) monitoring energy in data centre; JANET(UK): for development of low-cost, low-energy portable wireless LAN; HEIF: for equipping a “mobile technology showcase” vehicle, including low energy IT support. For more than a decade, he has actively conducted research on performance, computer communications networks, energy efficiency, and security. He is a BCS Green IT SG Committee Member (http://www.bcs.org/category/10548 ) and he has been actively involved in promoting awareness of Green ICT and Greening by ICT via lectures delivered during BCS Green IT SG Workshops. He is an advisory member of the EU-funded ‘e-Infranet’ project and his involvement in the e-infranet Green ICT Network will have effects on EU Green Initiatives, and policies.  This EU-funded project has a mission of fostering world-class ICT infrastructures to support European science and the project is currently determining what Green IT initiatives it will engage with to support this mission.  He is one of the co-authors for the document entitled “e-InfraNet Green Sustainability Policy Paper for e-Infrastructures” that is disseminated to the public. He is also collaborating on EU Tempus project GREENCO, which is developing Green ICT education for Russia and Ukraine, and EU Erasmus Mundus project PERCCOM, a pan-European Masters level Sustainable IT course.

Danny Weyns, Department of Computer Science of Linnaeus University, Sweden

Title: Assurances in Self-Adaptive Systems

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Abstract: Engineering the upcoming generation of software systems and guaranteeing their required qualities (performance, robustness, etc.) is complex due to uncertainties resulting from incomplete knowledge at design time, such as new user needs, changing availability of resources, and faults that are difficult to predict. These challenges have motivated the need for self-adaptation, which is typically realized with a feedback loop that enables a system to adapt itself to internal changes and dynamics in the environment to achieve particular quality objectives. An established approach is architecture-based self-adaptation, which employs a runtime model of a software system to reason about the system and adapt it when needed. A key challenge in the design of self-adaptive systems is to provide assurances for the required adaptation goals. In this talk, I discuss prominent work on assurances in architecture-based self-adaptation and highlight some of our recent work on assurances in decentralized self-adaptive systems, which are controlled by multiple feedback loops. I conclude with outlining a promising approach to provide evidence for unanticipated changes in self-adaptive systems that is based on direct execution of formal models of the adaptation feedback loop at runtime.

Biography: Danny Weyns is a professor at the Department of Computer Science of Linnaeus University, Sweden. He received a Ph.D from for the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for research on software architectures for multiagent systems. His main research interest is in software engineering of decentralized self-adaptive systems. He recently edited a book on “Self-Organizing Architectures” published by Springer and a special issue on “State of the Art in Engineering Self-Adaptive Systems” for the Journal of Systems and Software. (Homepage: http://homepage.lnu.se/staff/daweaa/index.htm)

Contact Information
For more information, please use the contact details below, referring explicitly to the SERENE 2013 Autumn School:

Patrizio Pelliccione
Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Autumn School Director
patrizio (at) chalmers.se