Douglas C. Schmidt

Professor, Vanderbilt University

February 27th, 2015, 11am-12pm, DBH 6011

Title:

Elastic Software Infrastructure to Support Computing Clouds for Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract:

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are increasingly composed of services and applications deployed across a range of communication topologies, computing platforms, and sensing and actuation devices. These services and applications often form parts of multiple end-to-end cyber-physical flows (i.e., end-to-end task chains) that operate in resource constrained environments. In such operating conditions, each service within the end-to-end cyber-physical flows must process events belonging to other services or applications, while providing dependable quality of service (QoS) assurance (e.g., timeliness, reliability, and trustworthiness) within the constraints of limited resources, or with the ability to fail over to providers of last resort (e.g., a public utility in the case of a smart grid).
CPSs have traditionally been designed and implemented using resources procured and maintained in-house. Significant budget constraints are driving the researchers and practitioners to consider cost-effective alternatives, yet ensure mission- and safety-critical properties. The emergence of dependable computing clouds enable the consideration of new factors in the design and operation of CPSs, including offering economic incentives, aggregating and disaggregating behaviors dynamically to reduce risk, consolidating and sharing physical hardware among different applications to reduce power consumption and heat generation, and auto-scaling computing, communication, and even sensing and actuation resources on-demand, to ensure that CPSs can use the optimum number of resources without incurring costs when resources are idle.
Despite the promise held by cloud computing, however, supporting the dependability requirements of CPSs is hard. This talk will discuss a number of technical issues emerging in this context, including: Precise auto-scaling of resources with a system-wide focus. Flexible optimization algorithms to balance real-time constraints with cost and other goals. Improved fault-tolerance fail-over to support real-time requirements. Data provisioning and load balancing algorithms that rely on physical properties of computations.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering program at Vanderbilt University. He is also an adjunct professor of Software Engineering in the Institute for Software Research at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a Visiting Scientist at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Schmidt received B.S. and M.A. degrees in Sociology from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 1984, 1986, 1990, and 1994, respectively.