Heterogeneity, High Performance Computing, Self-Organization and the Cloud


Book Description

This book is open access under a CC BY NC ND license. It addresses the most recent developments in cloud computing such as HPC in the Cloud, heterogeneous cloud, self-organising and self-management, and discusses the business implications of cloud computing adoption. Establishing the need for a new architecture for cloud computing, it discusses a novel cloud management and delivery architecture based on the principles of self-organisation and self-management. This focus shifts the deployment and optimisation effort from the consumer to the software stack running on the cloud infrastructure. It also outlines validation challenges and introduces a novel generalised extensible simulation framework to illustrate the effectiveness, performance and scalability of self-organising and self-managing delivery models on hyperscale cloud infrastructures. It concludes with a number of potential use cases for self-organising, self-managing clouds and the impact on those businesses.




Measuring the Business Value of Cloud Computing


Book Description

The importance of demonstrating the value achieved from IT investments is long established in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Systems (IS) literature. However, emerging technologies such as the ever-changing complex area of cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for demonstrating how IT investments lead to business value. Recent reviews of extant literature highlights the need for multi-disciplinary research. This research should explore and further develops the conceptualization of value in cloud computing research. In addition, there is a need for research which investigates how IT value manifests itself across the chain of service provision and in inter-organizational scenarios. This open access book will review the state of the art from an IS, Computer Science and Accounting perspective, will introduce and discuss the main techniques for measuring business value for cloud computing in a variety of scenarios, and illustrate these with mini-case studies.




Data Privacy and Trust in Cloud Computing


Book Description

This open access book brings together perspectives from multiple disciplines including psychology, law, IS, and computer science on data privacy and trust in the cloud. Cloud technology has fueled rapid, dramatic technological change, enabling a level of connectivity that has never been seen before in human history. However, this brave new world comes with problems. Several high-profile cases over the last few years have demonstrated cloud computing's uneasy relationship with data security and trust. This volume explores the numerous technological, process and regulatory solutions presented in academic literature as mechanisms for building trust in the cloud, including GDPR in Europe. The massive acceleration of digital adoption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is introducing new and significant security and privacy threats and concerns. Against this backdrop, this book provides a timely reference and organising framework for considering how we will assure privacy and build trust in such a hyper-connected digitally dependent world. This book presents a framework for assurance and accountability in the cloud and reviews the literature on trust, data privacy and protection, and ethics in cloud computing.




Managing Distributed Cloud Applications and Infrastructure


Book Description

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), combined with greater heterogeneity not only online in cloud computing architectures but across the cloud-to-edge continuum, is introducing new challenges for managing applications and infrastructure across this continuum. The scale and complexity is simply so complex that it is no longer realistic for IT teams to manually foresee the potential issues and manage the dynamism and dependencies across an increasing inter-dependent chain of service provision. This Open Access Pivot explores these challenges and offers a solution for the intelligent and reliable management of physical infrastructure and the optimal placement of applications for the provision of services on distributed clouds. This book provides a conceptual reference model for reliable capacity provisioning for distributed clouds and discusses how data analytics and machine learning, application and infrastructure optimization, and simulation can deliver quality of service requirements cost-efficiently in this complex feature space. These are illustrated through a series of case studies in cloud computing, telecommunications, big data analytics, and smart cities.




Entrepreneurial Finance in Emerging Markets


Book Description

This book presents a wide range of tools and techniques used in entrepreneurial finance in emerging markets. Among them, venture capital is perhaps the best known, understood, and researched mode of entrepreneurial finance. However, a significant focus of the book is dedicated to other modes of entrepreneurial finance such as ‘bootstrapping,’ angel financing, bank financing, and other alternative means of financing, which could include government assistance programs, business incubation, technology parks, or family financing. In addition, the book highlights how new and innovative financial technologies (comprised of software, business processes, and other modern technologies), known under the term of FinTech, may support, enable, and enhance the provision of different modes of entrepreneurial finance in emerging markets. The book also discusses entrepreneurial finance in emerging markets in the context of women entrepreneurs. A comprehensive analysis of entrepreneurial finance in emerging market countries, this book will appeal to academics, researchers, and students of entrepreneurial finance, venture capital and private equity, entrepreneurship, and international business.




Computing Technologies and Applications


Book Description

Making use of digital technology for social care is a major responsibility of the computing domain. Social care services require attention for ease in social systems, e-farming, and automation, etc. Thus, the book focuses on suggesting software solutions for supporting social issues, such as health care, learning about and monitoring for disabilities, and providing technical solutions for better living. Technology is enabling people to have access to advances so that they can have better health. To undergo the digital transformation, the current processes need to be completely re-engineered to make use of technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and others. Furthermore, it is also important to consider digital initiatives in tandem with their cloud strategy instead of treating them in isolation. At present, the world is going through another, possibly even stronger revolution: the use of recent computing models to perform complex cognitive tasks to solve social problems in ways that were previously either highly complicated or extremely resource intensive. This book not only focuses the computing technologies, basic theories, challenges, and implementation but also covers case studies. It focuses on core theories, architectures, and technologies necessary to develop and understand the computing models and their applications. The book also has a high potential to be used as a recommended textbook for research scholars and post-graduate programs. The book deals with a problem-solving approach using recent tools and technology for problems in health care, social care, etc. Interdisciplinary studies are emerging as both necessary and practical in universities. This book helps to improve computational thinking to "understand and change the world’. It will be a link between computing and a variety of other fields. Case studies on social aspects of modern societies and smart cities add to the contents of the book to enhance book adoption potential. This book will be useful to undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, and industry professionals. Every chapter covers one possible solution in detail, along with results.




Blockchain based Internet of Things


Book Description

The book is aimed to foster knowledge based on Blockchain technology highlighting on the framework basics, operating principles and different incarnations. The fundamental problems encountered in existing blockchain architectures and means for removing those would be covered. It would also touch upon blockchain based IoT systems and applications. The book covers applications and use cases of blockchain technology for industrial IoT systems. In addition, methods for inducing computational intelligence into existing blockchain frameworks thereby thwarting most of the limitations are also discussed. The readers would benefit from the rich technical content in this rapidly emerging field thereby enabling a skilled workforce for the future.




Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems


Book Description

This book gathers the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Complex, Intelligent, and Software Intensive Systems (CISIS-2017), held on June 28–June 30, 2017 in Torino, Italy. Software Intensive Systems are characterized by their intensive interaction with other systems, sensors, actuators, devices, and users. Further, they are now being used in more and more domains, e.g. the automotive sector, telecommunication systems, embedded systems in general, industrial automation systems and business applications. Moreover, the outcome of web services delivers a new platform for enabling software intensive systems. Complex Systems research is focused on the understanding of a system as a whole rather than its components. Complex Systems are very much shaped by the changing environments in which they operate, and by their multiple internal and external interactions. They evolve and adapt through internal and external dynamic interactions. The development of Intelligent Systems and agents, which invariably involves the use of ontologies and their logical foundations, offers a fruitful impulse for both Software Intensive Systems and Complex Systems. Recent research in the fields of intelligent systems, robotics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences is essential to the future development of and innovations in software intensive and complex systems. The aim of the volume “Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems” is to provide a platform of scientific interaction between the three interwoven and challenging areas of research and development of future Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-enabled applications: Software Intensive Systems, Complex systems and Intelligent Systems.




Cloud Computing


Book Description

Cloud Computing: Theory and Practice, Third Edition provides students and IT professionals with an in-depth analysis of the cloud from the ground up. After an introduction to network-centric computing and network-centric content, the book reviews basic concepts of concurrency and parallel and distributed systems, presents critical components of the cloud ecosystem as cloud service providers, cloud access, cloud data storage, and cloud hardware and software, covers cloud applications and cloud security, and presents research topics in cloud computing. Specific topics covered include resource virtualization, resource management and scheduling, and advanced topics like the impact of scale on efficiency, cloud scheduling subject to deadlines, alternative cloud architectures, and vehicular clouds. An included glossary covers terms grouped in several categories, from general to services, virtualization, desirable attributes and security. - Presents updated content throughout chapters on concurrency, cloud hardware and software, challenges posed by big data, mobile applications and advanced topics - Includes an expanded appendix that presents several cloud computing projects - Provides more than 400 references in the text, including recent research results in several areas related to cloud computing




Emergency Management


Book Description

After the large-scale disasters that we have witnessed in the recent past, it has become apparent that complex and coordinated emergency management systems are required for efficient and effective relief efforts. Such management systems can only be developed by involving many scientists and practitioners from multiple fields. Thus, this book on emergency management discusses various issues, such as the impact of human behavior, development of hardware and software architectures, cyber security concerns, dynamic process of guiding evacuees and routing vehicles, supply allocation, and vehicle routing problems in preparing for, and responding to large scale emergencies. The book is designed to be useful to students, researchers and engineers in all academic areas, but particularly for those in the fields of computer science, operations research, and human factor. We also hope that this book will become a useful reference for practitioners.