Seminarie Informatica 2006/2007
Seminarie Informatica 2006/2007
Important news: from December 4, 2006 the course note, announcements and so forth
are at the following location.
From the same date this page will not be updated anymore.
The seminarie informatica course consists of 10 seminars on hot topics
of computer science. This web page provides information on the current cycle of seminars,
whose theme is "Fault-tolerant Systems: The Software Viewpoint".
course notes and agendas for the seminars shall be announced and appear in this page and
be reflected on the UA/PATS pages.
- 25 October 2006, 14:00 to 15:30, room T105, Groenenbergcampus.
Lecturer:
Vincenzo De
Florio, UA/PATS.
Lecture title:
Fault-tolerant Systems: The Software Viewpoint.
Slides are
available here.
- 15 November 2006, 14:00 to 15:30, room T105, Groenenbergcampus.
Lecturer:
Professor Geert Deconinck, K.U.Leuven/ELECTA.
Lecture title:
A fault-tolerant info'structure
for energy applications
Slides are available
here.
- 22 November 2006, 14:00 to 15:30, room T105, Groenenbergcampus.
Lecturer: Professor
Peter Van Roy,
Catholic University of Louvain,
Department of Computing Science and Engineering.
Lecture title: Self Management and the Future of Software Design
Most software is fragile: even the slightest error, such as changing a
single bit, can make it crash. As software complexity has increased,
development techniques have kept pace to manage this fragility. But
today there is a new challenge. Complexity is increasing rapidly as a
result of two factors: the increasing use of distributed systems as a
result of the sufficient reliability and bandwidth of the Internet,
and the increasing scale of these systems as a result of the addition
of many new computers to the Internet (e.g., mobile phones and other
devices). To manage this new complexity, we propose an approach based
on self-managing systems: systems that can maintain useful
functionality despite changes in their environment. The talk
motivates this approach and gives some ideas on how to build general
self-managing software systems. An important part of the approach is
to build systems as hierarchies of interacting feedback loops. We
give examples of these systems and we deduce some rules of thumb for
their design.
Slides are available
here.
- 6 December 2006, 14:00 to 15:30, room T105, Groenenbergcampus.
Lecturer:
Professor Marc Leeman, PhD,
Barco Security and Monitoring Division.
Lecture title:
Control for High Available, Mission Critical Networked Visualisation Systems.
Current embedded designs are becoming ever more intricate, not only including
more complex functionality, but also a larger amount of Common Off the Shelf
(COTS) components.
A PCB design of medium complexity quickly includes one or more processors with
accompanying peripherals, Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs)
and
a couple of flexible FPGAs as glue logic. All of these devices have their
own strengths and weaknesses and can all be controlled.
From a control logic point of view, a General Purpose Processor (GPP) is one
of the best fit devices to reliablly and 'intelligently' keep track of changing
and unpredictable circumstances and adjust the system at run time before a
system failure is inevitable.
In this session, some background information will be presented on high end
embedded video decoder boards, with a distinct focus on the embedded operating
system that hosts or prompts the control logic of much of the devices on the boards.
Slides are available
here.
- 13 February 2007, 16:00 to 17:30, room G.006, Middelheimcampus.
Lecturer:
Dr. Nico Janssens, DISTRINET group, K.U.Leuven.
Lecture title: Dynamic Software Reconfigurations in Programmable Networks.
Programmable networks allow third parties to reprogram networking devices. By opening up the execution environment of routers, firewalls, gateways, etc., users and service providers can adapt the behavior of these devices to meet their own specific needs. Programmable networks are therefore an interesting technology to build adaptive networks and to support the increasing evolution of networking software.
At the same time, it can be perceived that many distributed applications impose stringent availability and performance requirements on the employed network infrastructure, among others to meet increased user expectations. Interrupting network communication to update or to customize the network software on programmable network devices hence may have extensive consequences. A possible way to deal with these performance and availability requirements involves carrying out reconfigurations of network software dynamically --~that is, without temporarily shutting down (parts of) the network.
Whether or not such dynamic reconfigurations are beneficial depends very much on the effectiveness and efficiency of the reconfiguration process. Besides, implementing a correct reconfiguration that causes limited overhead can be very complex and error-prone (hence compromising the benefit of a dynamic reconfiguration). We argue that specific reconfiguration support is needed, therefore, which (1) conducts the effective and efficient reconfiguration of network software, and (2) conceals the complexity of these reconfigurations from users or service provides who initiate the actual reconfigurations.
This talk presents the NeCoMan middleware as reconfiguration support for programmable networks. In short, this middleware coordinates the runtime addition, replacement and removal of both local and distributed network services among out-of-band active nodes. The novelty of this middleware is in its ability to tailor the reconfiguration process. To accomplish this, the NeCoMan middleware includes various reconfiguration algorithms as well as an extensive set of customizations to these algorithms. This enables NeCoMan to customize the reconfiguration process starting from (1) a declarative description of the recomposition that must be executed and (2) a specification of the network service characteristics and the reconfiguration semantics.
Slides are available
here.
Seminarie Informatica is an oral exam where students shall discuss
2 papers:
- A 5-6 page paper based on one or more of the topics of the seminars
- A paper with the analysis of a case study from one of the topics of the exam.
See below for a few examples.
Key questions to bear in mind for the evaluation:
Do the papers contain original ideas? Do they follow too strictly the seminar?
Does the author understand the subject? Is (s)he able to reason independently about the subject?
Papers must be submitted by May 15, 2007 by
e-mailing vincenzo dot deflorio at ua dot ac dot be.
Possible case studies include:
- Consider the Arian 5 accident (see for instance here for further information): analyze what were the
main causes of the accident from a software fault tolerance perspective. Consider the cases explained in Lecture 1: which were the main mistakes, what solutions could be
adopted?
- Consider the Therac-25 accidents (see for instance here): analyze what were the
main causes of the accident from a software fault tolerance perspective. Consider the cases explained in Lecture 1: which were the main mistakes, what solutions could be
adopted?
- Consider the software fault tolerance architecture described in Lecture 2 and analyze it in view of the attributes introduced in Lecture 1.
- Consider the system structure introduced in Lecture 4, i.e., feedback loops, and the architecture introduced in Lecture 2. Draw your analogies.
The above case studies are just a few possible examples; students are kindly invited to think of other possible cases and propose them
to the course holder. The main idea is that a case study is not a report describing one of the lectures, but an original discussion of the ideas behind
two or more lectures.