Scope of Projects

With the goal of providing easier development, deployment, reconfiguration, maintenance and adaptation of a web service-based IT infrastructure, CERAS will investigate two technological aspects:

• virtualization of computing resources
• model driven engineering

Of interest is a perpetual beta environment where applications are continuously evolving. Under this environment, a repeating cycle is maintained, consisting of application design and development, application deployment, operations, and run time analysis that results in feedback to application design.

Included in our investigation are applications that rely on dynamically discovering and composing application services. Using this approach, an application may be built from components provided by different parties and may require access to data available at some remote locations. CERAS will initially focus on applications in the life science area and the automotive area. Other application areas will be added in the future. The types of applications to be deployed on a virtual infrastructure may range from batch to highly interactive.

Future IT infrastructures are expected to support a much more diverse and a much greater number of applications. The will lead to new challenges in managing the hardware and software resources. Moreover, different types of computing resources may be available, e.g., clusters, grid, and individual systems; and these resources may be scattered across many geographical regions and time zones. Effective resource management is an important issue. An important objective of CERAS is to conduct research on making application services more autonomic by providing automatic capabilities for their configuration, management, tuning, and repair.

_Current Projects_