Jeff Tian - US grants

9724517 Dunham, Margaret Barr, Richard Southern Methodist University MRI: A Laboratory for Telecommunications Management Network Research Southern Methodist University will be acquiring four ATM switches and associated network hardware to establish a telecommunications laboratory which will support research in the areas of database, optimization and network planning, fault tolerant and distributed processing, and visualization. Southern Methodist University plans to use the telecommunications laboratory to support graduate student research as well as an experimental testing facility for graduate level courses such as Operating Systems, Parallel and Distributed Processing, Database Management, Software Engineering, Telecommunication Network Management, and Systems in Telecommunications.

9733588 Tian This research project combines software reliability engineering and software measurement to develop an integrated approach to early measurement and improvement of software reliability. Key research activities include: 1) Integrating research findings in software reliability engineering and software measurement to assess and improve software quality over extended development phases and application domains. 2) Developing analysis techniques and tools to effectively analyze diverse measurement data. 3) Practical implementation of this integrated approach and adaptation of it to a wide variety of software development environments in collaboration with several industrial partners. (4) Developing or enhancing several graduate and undergraduate level courses in software engineering and computer science. The key benefits of this research project include: (1) a systematic technique to measure software quality early in development and to identify early problems for effective quality improvement, (2) construction of support tools that can help the implementation and deployment of these techniques in industry, and (3) educational opportunities for students to work on leading edge research projects that solve practical problems. ***

This research develops an integrated strategy for the effective
testing of ubiquitous software systems accessed by the massive user
population, such as those used to support the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW),
to ensure their satisfactory performance and reliability from the users'
perspective. This strategy includes three important components:

1. Development of a set of high-level operational profiles (OPs),
which enumerates major functions to be supported by a software and their
usage frequencies by target users, organized in groups of related user
functions.

2. For each high-level function group above, a Markov chain based
model is constructed to exhaustively test high-level operations and
selectively test important low-level implementations, with the testing results
analyzed to identify system bottlenecks for reliability improvement.

3. Reliability of the critical parts identified above can be assured
using traditional testing techniques or other quality assurance techniques.

This research will involve industrial partners, including IBM, Nortel
Networks, and Lockheed-Martin Aeronautics, for result validation,
software tool support, and future deployment.

A planning meeting will be held to determine if Southern Methodist will become a research site of the existing Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Embedded Systems. As part of the sensor revolution in the various applications of ubiquitous sensing vast amounts of data are generated and there is a need to have an efficient network of smart sensors to harvest these mixed signal data into aggregated digital signals for further processing in an embedded system or networks of embedded systems. A goal of this research site is to provide an infrastructure for university/industry interaction and collaboration in this area.

A result of joining the I/UCRC will be an increase in creation of new intellectual property, commercialization of technology, licensing revenue, and more collaborations among partners of the consortium.

This project, aiming to develop instrumentation that enables rigorous experimental quality and dependability assessment of cloud computing systems, including cloud service-oriented architecture
(SOA) systems, dramatically enhances the validation capability of cloud platform services and cyberinfrastructure. Cloud platforms must meet specified service level agreements (SLA) and provide mechanisms to support the minimization of the power used in cloud data centers without adversely affecting the quality of service (QoS). Also, some safety-critical emerging cloud applications, such as health-care and transportation applications, must meet stringent dependability requirements, that include high availability, reliability, performance, resilience, safety, and security. The proposed work establishes a high performance, metrics-driven instrument enabling rigorous evaluation for the following research projects on cloud performance:
- Assurance of QoS in Service Clouds,
- Optimization of Dependability in Evolving Clouds,
- Mobile Device Power Management in Service Clouds,
- Achievement of Highly Secure Compositions in Service Clouds, and
- Testing and Validation of Secure Hardware-Software Architectures.
The work aims to develop a flexible instrument for validation and verification of cloud performance, seen to be a key element in the future of computing services. In recent years, computer services have been moving to remote virtual machines ?in the cloud.? The commercial success of this new business model is based on service quality guarantees, which are becoming increasingly hard to verify as the complexity and volume of cloud services increase. Testbeds of this type are critical to the economic and research vitality of the academic and industrial communities.

Broader Impacts:
This instrumentation substantially raises the quality, scale, and scope of experimental research in dependability enhancement methods for cloud computing systems. It helps foster a strong scientifically based experimental paradigm for computing and provides capabilities that will greatly enhance the quality of undergraduate and graduate courses in computer science and engineering, as well as senior design projects by enabling students to work on realistic platforms. The instrumentation enhances the facilities of an NSF I/UCRC and will be available to researchers at the participating institutions and industrial partners.