Research Areas

Economics-inspired resource allocation

This area looks at how ideas from economics can be applied to understand, model and organize the interaction between diverse users, applications and resources that occur in distributed computing systems. The research projects are:

• Catnets Economic algorithms for resource allocation based on the idea of Catallaxy, were services negotiate with resource providers in the market of resources, and end users negotiate with service providers in the market of services. The project developed a simulator and a middleware that was used to evaluate the model under dynamic conditions. The project concluded in 2007.
• SORMA Development of methods and tools for an efficient market-based allocation of resources, through a self-organizing resource management system, using market-driven models supported by extensions for Grid infrastructures.
• Grid4All Grid4All aims at enabling domestic users, non-profit organisations such as schools, and small enterprises, to share their resources and to access massive Grid resources when needed, envisioning a future in which access to resources is democratised, readily available, cooperative, and inexpensive.
• P2PGrid P2PGRID project is focused on the design of innovative large scale distributed systems, decentralized, able to adapt to complex environments (in terms of infrastructure or use) and heterogeneous in the access to communication and computation resources.

Decentralized mechanisms and algorithms for Peer-to-Peer systems

This area looks at how diverse structured, unstructured and hybrid topologic algorithms allow the construction of a decentralized, robust and adaptive substrate for e-services.

Decentralized Systems applied to Ambient Networks

This area looks at how decentralized systems can be used in ambient networks through innovative mobile network solutions in an environment with a multitude of access technologies, network operators and business actors. The objective is the development of an open platform for composition/decomposition of ambient networks using P2P architectures. The platform will consider service management using web services and policies for context-aware services into one ambient network and between heterogeneous ambient networks.

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL)

This area looks at how collaborative learning activities can be augmented with environment-aware applications. The objective is to study the different methods for obtaining and processing location data of a group of people who are working together in a same room with their respective mobile devices (e.g. laptops). This location information can be transformed into contextual information (e.g. emergence of groups, roles) that inform CSCL applications about the organization of the physical environment.

Resource management through virtualization

This area looks at the management of the capacity of virtualized resources that adapt according to service-level objectives such as rate or quality of response, and can respond to a varying external demand.