Cloud Computing for Large-Scale Complex IT Systems

University of York Principal Investigator:  Dr Radu Calinescu	Type of project: EPSRC Grant EP/H042644/1
Project partners:     University of Bristol     University of St. Andrews	Start date: October 2010  End date: March 2014

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: Dr. Kenneth Johnson
PhD student: Yasmin Rafiq

Publications

R. Calinescu, K. Johnson and Y. Rafiq (2013) — Developing Self-Verifying Service-Based Systems. In: 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 734-737.

K. Johnson, R. Calinescu and S. Kikuchi (2013) — An Incremental Verification Framework for Component-Based Software Systems. In: 16th International ACM Sigsoft Symposium on Component-Based Software Engineering, pages 33-42.

R. Calinescu and Y. Rafiq (2013) — Using Intelligent Proxies to Develop Self-Adaptive Service-Based Systems. In: 7th IEEE International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, 131-134.

J. Keen, R. Calinescu, R. Paige and J. Rooksby (2013) — Big data + politics = open data: The case of health care data in England. In: Policy & Internet, 5(2):228-243.

D. Perez-Palacin, R. Calinescu and J. Merseguer (2013) — log2cloud: Log-based prediction of cost-performance trade-offs for cloud deployments. In: S.Y. Shin, J.C. Maldonado (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 397-404.

T. Baker, O.F. Rana, R. Calinescu, R. Tolosana-Calasanz, J.A. Banares (2013) — Towards Autonomic Cloud Services Engineering via Intention Workflow Model. 10th International Conference on Economics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services, pages 212-227.

K. Johnson, Y. Wang, R. Calinescu, I. Sommerville, G. Baxter and J.V. Tucker (2013) — Services2Cloud: A Framework for Revenue Analysis of Software-as-a-Service Provisioning. In: 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, vol. 2, pages 144-151.

G.C. Silva, L.M. Rose and R. Calinescu (2013) — A Systematic Review of Cloud Lock-in Solutions. In: 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, vol. 2, pages 363-368.

G.C. Silva, L.M. Rose and R. Calinescu (2013) — Towards a Model-Driven Solution to the Vendor Lock-in Problem for Cloud Computing. In: 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science, vol. 1, pages 711-716.

R. Calinescu, K. Johnson, S. Kikuchi (2012) — Compositional Reverification of Probabilistic Safety Properties for Large-Scale Complex IT Systems. In: Large-Scale Complex IT Systems - Development, Operation and Management, vol. 7539 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 303-329, Springer.

R. Calinescu, C. Ghezzi, M. Kwiatkowska, R. Mirandola (2012) — Self-adaptive software needs quantitative verification at runtime, Communications of the ACM, 55(9):69-77, September 2012.

I. Sommerville, D. Cliff, R. Calinescu, J. Keen, T. Kelly, M. Kwiatkowska, J. McDermid and R. Paige (2012) — Large-scale Complex IT Systems, Communications of the ACM 55(7):71-77, July 2012.

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).

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.

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, 1-37, IGI Global.