Quality of Service-based Scheduling of e-Research Application Workflows on Global Grids. e-Research has the potential to offer Australia significant economic and social benefits as it enables researchers from different disciplines and organisations to engage in collaborative scientific investigation. In e-Research environments, users need to have secure access to remote resources owned by different organisations. Since these resources are not directly under the control of e-Research applications ....Quality of Service-based Scheduling of e-Research Application Workflows on Global Grids. e-Research has the potential to offer Australia significant economic and social benefits as it enables researchers from different disciplines and organisations to engage in collaborative scientific investigation. In e-Research environments, users need to have secure access to remote resources owned by different organisations. Since these resources are not directly under the control of e-Research applications, they need to negotiate with resource providers for access time, duration, and the level of quality of service expected to make sure that the interlinked operations are performed as required. This project develops information and communications technologies that enable the creation of such e-Research environments.Read moreRead less
Mapping Trusted Systems Technologies to E-security Requirements. A new software based approach, strongly guided by national and international security standards based upon mandatory access control, is required to simplify for management the protection of their information infrastructure. This will be in the form of a security definition toolset aligned to trusted systems technologies currently under consideration internationally. No such trusted system has been developed to address current comme ....Mapping Trusted Systems Technologies to E-security Requirements. A new software based approach, strongly guided by national and international security standards based upon mandatory access control, is required to simplify for management the protection of their information infrastructure. This will be in the form of a security definition toolset aligned to trusted systems technologies currently under consideration internationally. No such trusted system has been developed to address current commercial IT product environments. The safety and security of information systems against attack and illicit usage form an essential component of ?National Information Infrastructure Protection (NIIP)?, a move to better ?e-security?. Existing commercial (untrusted) operating systems lack the critical security bases for e-security making e-applications vulnerable to tampering and bypass which can cause failures in overall system security.Read moreRead less
Self Discovery, Self Configuration and Self Healing of Enterprise Grids. Firstly, the project will assist the elevation of grid computing into mainstream computing, and by this provide a direct response to some problems identified by the working party on the Australia's ICT research and research training. Secondly, our country is an excellent consumer of IT technology. But, it needs software artifacts that could be sold. A set of proposed services will be a saleable commodity of great commercial ....Self Discovery, Self Configuration and Self Healing of Enterprise Grids. Firstly, the project will assist the elevation of grid computing into mainstream computing, and by this provide a direct response to some problems identified by the working party on the Australia's ICT research and research training. Secondly, our country is an excellent consumer of IT technology. But, it needs software artifacts that could be sold. A set of proposed services will be a saleable commodity of great commercial value. A software company that will develop its commercial version could be set up. Thirdly, the project will help Early Career Researchers in gaining an experience necessary to carry out independent research and assist in training new researchers: Postdocs, PhDs and Masters.Read moreRead less
Dynamic Load Balancing for Systems under Heavy Traffic Demand and High Task Size Variation. Current computer systems cannot cope with extremely heavy traffic demands. A solution to such a difficult problem is to dynamically balance the load across the system's servers. Several solutions have been proposed and demonstrate advances in certain limited conditions (e.g. uniform distribution). However fundamental research work must be undertaken beyond the current way of dealing with the core issues o ....Dynamic Load Balancing for Systems under Heavy Traffic Demand and High Task Size Variation. Current computer systems cannot cope with extremely heavy traffic demands. A solution to such a difficult problem is to dynamically balance the load across the system's servers. Several solutions have been proposed and demonstrate advances in certain limited conditions (e.g. uniform distribution). However fundamental research work must be undertaken beyond the current way of dealing with the core issues of load balancing. Accounting for realistic conditions is a theoretical and practical challenge. This project aims at developing theoretical and computational models for dynamic task distribution for the studied systems. The benefits include substantial improvement of the system response time.Read moreRead less
Megha: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services. In the next 20 years, service-oriented computing will play an important role in shaping the industry, impacting the way business is conducted and how services are delivered and managed. This paradigm will have major impact on the services economy, which contributes significantly towards Australia's GDP. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, providers are ....Megha: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services. In the next 20 years, service-oriented computing will play an important role in shaping the industry, impacting the way business is conducted and how services are delivered and managed. This paradigm will have major impact on the services economy, which contributes significantly towards Australia's GDP. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, providers are looking for novel ways of hosting their application services on Clouds at low cost while meeting users' quality of service expectations. This project develops novel utility-oriented technologies for federation of Clouds to support scaling of application services and thereby, transform the Australian service industry and economy.Read moreRead less
Provable elimination of information leakage through timing channels. This project aims to develop techniques to solve the issue in information security of unauthorised information flow resulting from competition for shared hardware resources. The project will combine operating systems design, formal hardware models, information-flow reasoning and theorem proving to achieve a goal that is widely considered infeasible. The project is expected to result in a system that prevents leakage of critical ....Provable elimination of information leakage through timing channels. This project aims to develop techniques to solve the issue in information security of unauthorised information flow resulting from competition for shared hardware resources. The project will combine operating systems design, formal hardware models, information-flow reasoning and theorem proving to achieve a goal that is widely considered infeasible. The project is expected to result in a system that prevents leakage of critical information, such as encryption keys, through timing channels. This should prevent sophisticated attacks on public clouds, mobile devices and military-grade cross-domain devices.Read moreRead less
Design and verification of correct, efficient and secure concurrent systems. This project aims to provide methods for the design and verification of correct, secure and efficient concurrent software that are scalable and mechanised. Computers with multiple processors are now the norm and are used in a wide range of safety, security and mission critical software applications such as transport, health and infrastructure. These multi-core architectures have the potential to lead to important effici ....Design and verification of correct, efficient and secure concurrent systems. This project aims to provide methods for the design and verification of correct, secure and efficient concurrent software that are scalable and mechanised. Computers with multiple processors are now the norm and are used in a wide range of safety, security and mission critical software applications such as transport, health and infrastructure. These multi-core architectures have the potential to lead to important efficiency gains, but can introduce complex and error-prone behaviours that cannot be managed using traditional software development approaches. This project will produce better, scalable and mechanised methods for the design and verification of such software which is expected to reduce the prevalence of failures in efficient, modern software.Read moreRead less
Job Scheduling Strategies for General-Purpose High-Performance Computing Clusters. High-performance computing is moving away from specialised platforms to cheaper clusters and it is expected that clusters will become the mainstream computing platforms for general-purpose applications. One major problem that hinders the application of clusters is the lack of effective scheduling facilities to efficiently allocate system resources to meet the performance requirements of various applications. We sh ....Job Scheduling Strategies for General-Purpose High-Performance Computing Clusters. High-performance computing is moving away from specialised platforms to cheaper clusters and it is expected that clusters will become the mainstream computing platforms for general-purpose applications. One major problem that hinders the application of clusters is the lack of effective scheduling facilities to efficiently allocate system resources to meet the performance requirements of various applications. We shall design a new and innovative job scheduling system to solve this problem. The emphasis will be on practical designs in the context of real operating systems. The successful completion of this research will greatly promote a wide application of clusters.Read moreRead less
Security for Virtual Machine based Systems. Secure information systems have become paramount importance to our society and economies, which are increasingly based on online services and Internet infrastructures. Trusted interactions are a strategic necessity for businesses, governments and individuals in this ever-increasing digital world. It is critically important for Australia to develop new technologies to anticipate and respond to security threats to its industry and society. The outcomes ....Security for Virtual Machine based Systems. Secure information systems have become paramount importance to our society and economies, which are increasingly based on online services and Internet infrastructures. Trusted interactions are a strategic necessity for businesses, governments and individuals in this ever-increasing digital world. It is critically important for Australia to develop new technologies to anticipate and respond to security threats to its industry and society. The outcomes of this research will result in novel policy based secure and trusted system models and new techniques for malicious attacks detection, which will help to achieve secure Internet applications and large scale systems in Grid computing and e-Science.Read moreRead less
Economic Scheduling for Efficient Management of Clusters and their Cooperative Federation. Clusters of commodity computers have emerged as mainstream parallel and distributed platforms for high-performance computing. They are presented together as a single, unified resource to the end users by middleware technologies such as resource management and scheduling (RMS) systems. However, existing cluster RMS systems continue to use system centric models rather than utility models for the management a ....Economic Scheduling for Efficient Management of Clusters and their Cooperative Federation. Clusters of commodity computers have emerged as mainstream parallel and distributed platforms for high-performance computing. They are presented together as a single, unified resource to the end users by middleware technologies such as resource management and scheduling (RMS) systems. However, existing cluster RMS systems continue to use system centric models rather than utility models for the management and allocation of resources. There is also little emphasis on the construction of a cooperative federation of clusters to facilitate transparent sharing of resources. To enhance the value delivered by shared clusters, we propose the use of computational economy metaphor in resource management. This project aims to develop (A) computational economy based scheduling policies for allocation of resources and (B) a software infrastructure for creation of cooperative federation of distributed clusters.Read moreRead less