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Patients are required to be observed and treated continually in some emergency situations. However, due to time constraints, visiting the hospital to execute such tasks is challenging. This can be achieved using a remote healthcare monitoring system. The proposed system introduces an effective data science technique for IoT supported healthcare monitoring system with the rapid adoption of cloud computing that enhances the efficiency of data processing and the accessibility of data in the cloud. Many IoT sensors are employed, which collect real healthcare data. These data are retained in the cloud for the processing of data science. In the Healthcare Monitoring-Data Science Technique (HM-DST), initially, an altered data science technique is introduced. This algorithm is known as the Improved Pigeon Optimization (IPO) algorithm, which is employed for grouping the stored data in the cloud, which helps in improving the prediction rate. Next, the optimum feature selection technique for extraction and selection of features is illustrated. A Backtracking Search-Based Deep Neural Network (BS-DNN) is utilized for classifying human healthcare. The proposed system's performance is finally examined with various healthcare datasets of real time and the variations are observed with the available smart healthcare systems for monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the wide deployment of cloud computing in scientific computing, cost minimization is increasingly critical for large-scale scientific workflow. Unfortunately, due to the highly intricate directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based workflow and the flexible usage of virtual machines (VMs) in cloud platform, the existing workflow scheduling approaches are inefficient to strike a balance between the parallelism and the topology of the DAG-based workflow while using the VMs, which causes a low utilization of VMs and consumes more cost. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel task scheduling framework named cost minimization approach with the DAG splitting method (COMSE) for minimizing the cost of running a deadline-constrained large-scale scientific workflow. First, we provide comprehensive theoretical analyses on how to improve the utilization of a resource-balanced multi-vCPU VM for running multiple tasks simultaneously. Second, considering the balance between the parallelism and the topology of a workflow, we simplify the DAG-based workflow, and based on the simplified DAG, a DAG splitting method is devised to preprocess the workflow. Third, since the cloud is charged by hours, we also design an exact algorithm to find the optimal operation pattern for a given schedule to make the consumed instance hours minimum, and this algorithm is named as instance hours minimization by Dijkstra (TOID). Finally, by employing the DAG splitting method and the TOID, the COMSE schedules a deadline-constrained large-scale scientific workflow on the multi-vCPU VMs and incorporates two important objects: minimizing the computation cost and the communication cost. Our solution approach is evaluated through rigorous performance evaluation study using real-word workflows, and the results show that the proposed COMSE approach outperforms existing algorithms in terms of computation cost and communication cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first is the ongoing emergence of multicore and hybrid microprocessor designs, ushering in a new era of computing in which system designers must accept energy usage as a first-order constraint, and application designers must be able to exploit parallelism and data locality to an unprecedented degree. The research areas of cluster, cloud, and data analytics computing, which today provide fundamental infrastructure for all areas of advanced computational science, are being radically transformed by the convergence of at least two unprecedented trends. [Extracted from the article]

The Cloud Computing paradigm is focused on the provisioning of reliable and scalable virtual infrastructures that deliver execution and storage services. This paradigm is particularly suitable to solve resource-greedy scientific computing applications such as parameter sweep experiments (PSEs). Through the implementation of autoscalers, the virtual infrastructure can be scaled up and down by acquiring or terminating instances of virtual machines (VMs) at the time that application tasks are being scheduled. In this paper, we extend an existing study centered in a state-of-the-art autoscaler called multiobjective evolutionary autoscaler (MOEA). MOEA uses a multiobjective optimization algorithm to determine the set of possible virtual infrastructure settings. In this context, the performance of MOEA is greatly influenced by the underlying optimization algorithm used and its tuning. Therefore, we analyze two well-known multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (NSGA-II and NSGA-III) and how they impact on the performance of the MOEA autoscaler. Simulated experiments with three real-world PSEs show that MOEA gets significantly improved when using NSGA-III instead of NSGA-II due to the former provides a better exploitation versus exploration trade-off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing is recently getting increasingly popular for supporting scientific applications and complex business processes. Clouds are highly potent for executing workflow-based tasks due to the fact that they provide elastic resource provisioning styles through which computational-intensive workflows can obtain requested resources according to their elastic demand and establish execution environment over virtual machines (VMs). However, it remains a challenge to guarantee cost-effectiveness and quality of service of workflow deployed upon clouds due to the fact that real-world cloud infrastructures are usually with fluctuating and time-varying performance. Existing researches mainly consider that cloud infrastructures are with fixed, random, or bounded quality of service (QoS). In this work, however, we consider that scientific computing processes to be supported by decentralized cloud infrastructures with fluctuating QoS and aim at managing the monetary cost of workflows with the completion-time constraint to be satisfied. We address the performance-variation-aware workflow scheduling problem by leveraging a time-series-based prediction model and a Critical-Path-Duration-Estimation-based (CPDE for short) VM Selection strategy. The proposed method is capable of exploiting real-time trends of performance changes of cloud infrastructures and generating dynamic workflow scheduling plans. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed method, we perform extensive experimental case analysis over real-world third-party commercial clouds and show that our method clearly beats existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cloud computing paradigm has revolutionised the computer science horizon during the past decade and has enabled the emergence of computing as the fifth utility. It has captured significant attention of academia, industries, and government bodies. Now, it has emerged as the backbone of modern economy by offering subscription-based services anytime, anywhere following a pay-as-you-go model. This has instigated (1) shorter establishment times for start-ups, (2) creation of scalable global enterprise applications, (3) better cost-to-value associativity for scientific and high-performance computing applications, and (4) different invocation/execution models for pervasive and ubiquitous applications. The recent technological developments and paradigms such as serverless computing, software-defined networking, Internet of Things, and processing at network edge are creating new opportunities for Cloud computing. However, they are also posing several new challenges and creating the need for new approaches and research strategies, as well as the re-evaluation of the models that were developed to address issues such as scalability, elasticity, reliability, security, sustainability, and application models. The proposed manifesto addresses them by identifying the major open challenges in Cloud computing, emerging trends, and impact areas. It then offers research directions for the next decade, thus helping in the realisation of Future Generation Cloud Computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frost is an agro-meteorological event which causes both damage in crops and important economic losses, therefore frost prediction applications (FPA) are very important to help farmers to mitigate possible damages. FPA involves the execution of many CPU-intensive jobs. This work focuses on efficiently running FPAs in paid federated Clouds, where custom virtual machines (VM) are launched in appropriate resources belonging to different providers. The goal of this work is to minimize both the makespan and monetary cost. We follow a federated Cloud model where scheduling is performed at three levels. First, at the broker level, a datacenter is selected taking into account certain criteria established by the user, such as lower costs or lower latencies. Second, at the infrastructure level, a specialized scheduler is responsible for mapping VMs to datacenter hosts. Finally, at the VM level, jobs are assigned for execution into the preallocated VMs. Our proposal mainly contributes to implementing bio-inspired strategies at two levels. Specifically, two broker-level schedulers based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), which aim to select the datacenters taking into account the network latencies, monetary cost and the availability of computational resources in datacenters, are implemented. Then, VMs are allocated in the physical machines of that datacenter by another intra-datacenter scheduler also based on ACO and PSO. Performed experiments show that our bio-inspired scheduler succeed in reducing both the makespan and the monetary cost with average gains of around 50% compared to genetic algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A panel of experts--including Gordon Bell, Jack Dongarra, William E. (Bill) Johnston, Horst Simon, Erich Strohmaier, and Mateo Valero--discuss historical reflections on the past 30 years of the Supercomputing (SC) conference, its leading role for the professional community and some exciting future challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decomposition of a matrix into low-rank matrices is a powerful tool for scientific computing and data analysis. The purpose is to obtain a low-rank matrix by decomposition of the original matrix into a product of smaller and lower-rank matrices or by randomly projecting the matrix down to a lower-dimensional space. Such decomposition requires less storage and computational burden. The focus of this paper is on randomized methods which try as much as possible to preserve the original matrix properties by applying the subspace sampling. In many applications, randomized algorithms in terms of accuracy, stability and speed are much better than the classical decomposition algorithms. In this study, we propose a sparse orthogonal transformation matrix to reduce the dimension of the data. The results show that compared with the most accurate methods, the transformation speed is much faster and can save a lot of memory in the case of huge matrices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A summary of articles published in Computer 50 and 25 years ago. This edition also includes a “Computing through Time” comic by Ergun Akleman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microscopes can now cover large spatial areas and capture stem cell behavior over time. However, without discovering statistically reliable quantitative stem cell quality measures, products cannot be released to market. A Web-based measurement system overcomes desktop limitations by leveraging cloud and cluster computing for offline computations and by using Deep Zoom extensions for interactive viewing and measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the adoption of Cloud Computing platforms and Service Computing technologies are almost natural for the different e-Science communities. Cost benefits for data-intensive applications, ease of access, rich and varied offers for services are examples of positive returns by users. However, beyond this favorable welcome for the technology, some research problems remain and are still challenging. In this paper, we focus on the problems of automatically deploying IaaS for computing and for data management, using the SlapOS Cloud. The core of the system is a distributed protocol for orchestrating data and compute nodes. Using this interaction scheme, users are able to deploy, without any system administrator intervention, a PaaS inside the IaaS basically a Desktop Grid middleware. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the Desktop Grid and Cloud paradigms may merge and may be widely used by non-experts in the different areas of e-Science. We propose a fully self-organized volunteer Cloud for researchers where they can carry out e-Science experiments and process large amounts of data in a coherent way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the popularization and development of cloud computing, lots of scientific computing applications are conducted in cloud environments. However, current application scenario of scientific computing is also becoming increasingly dynamic and complicated, such as unpredictable submission times of jobs, different priorities of jobs, deadlines and budget constraints of executing jobs. Thus, how to perform scientific computing efficiently in cloud has become an urgent problem. To address this problem, we design an elastic resource provisioning and task scheduling mechanism to perform scientific workflow jobs in cloud. The goal of this mechanism is to complete as many high-priority workflow jobs as possible under budget and deadline constraints. This mechanism consists of four steps: job preprocessing, job admission control, elastic resource provisioning and task scheduling. We perform the evaluation with four kinds of real scientific workflow jobs under different budget constraints. We also consider the uncertainties of task runtime estimations, provisioning delays, and failures in evaluation. The results show that in most cases our mechanism achieves a better performance than other mechanisms. In addition, the uncertainties of task runtime estimations, VM provisioning delays, and task failures do not have major impact on the mechanism's performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a more controlled way to capture images, services to generate and process 3D data point clouds, and a 3D printer, amateur photographers can convert 2D photos into physical 3D objects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The science cloud paradigm has been actively developed and investigated, but still requires a suitable model for science cloud system in order to support increasing scientific computation needs with high performance. This paper presents an effective provisioning model of science cloud, particularly for large-scale high throughput computing applications. In this model, we utilize job traces where a statistical method is applied to pick the most influential features to improve application performance. With these features, a system determines where VM is deployed (allocation) and which instance type is proper (provisioning). An adaptive evaluation step which is subsequent to the job execution enables our model to adapt to dynamical computing environments. We show performance achievements by comparing the proposed model with other policies through experiments and expect noticeable improvements on performance as well as reduction of cost from resource consumption through our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pydron, a system that bridges the gap between interactive data analysis and scalable computing, enables astronomers to process large datasets with Python without the complexities of managing parallel processing code. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background Ongoing advancements in cloud computing provide novel opportunities in scientific computing, especially for distributed workflows. Modern web browsers can now be used as high-performance workstations for querying, processing, and visualizing genomics' "Big Data" from sources like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) without local software installation or configuration. The design of QMachine (QM) was driven by the opportunity to use this pervasive computing model in the context of the Web of Linked Data in Biomedicine. Results QM is an open-sourced, publicly available web service that acts as a messaging system for posting tasks and retrieving results over HTTP. The illustrative application described here distributes the analyses of 20 Streptococcus pneumoniae genomes for shared suffixes. Because all analytical and data retrieval tasks are executed by volunteer machines, few server resources are required. Any modern web browser can submit those tasks and/or volunteer to execute them without installing any extra plugins or programs. A client library provides high-level distribution templates including MapReduce. This stark departure from the current reliance on expensive server hardware running "download and install" software has already gathered substantial community interest, as QM received more than 2.2 million API calls from 87 countries in 12 months. Conclusions QM was found adequate to deliver the sort of scalable bioinformatics solutions that computation- and data-intensive workflows require. Paradoxically, the sandboxed execution of code by web browsers was also found to enable them, as compute nodes, to address critical privacy concerns that characterize biomedical environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many scientific and engineering areas there are emerging software services available over the Web. The reason for deploying such services in the Cloud is either to reduce the operational costs or to support the peaks in their usage profiles. The algorithms employed in such services are usually result of a long term research and technology development work, so it is beneficial to reuse those critical application parts when developing new Cloud applications. This paper investigates the possibilities to introduce a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) for the Cloud computing domain, which would support composition, customization, flexibility, maintenance and reusability of Cloud application components in the particular case of scientific and engineering applications. The underlying middleware technology of choice is the mOSAIC Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. This choice is motivated by the fact that in mOSAIC a Cloud application consists of loosely coupled components, which are either generic and provide for key resource types needed by an application (computation, storage, communication) or custom made, e.g. based on existing legacy software. The MDA approach is illustrated through the design and operation of an application for analysis of structures under static loading. It is shown that a relatively simple design can be used to address two application bottlenecks: the varying number of users and the computational complexity of the given problem. The design reduces the necessary application development efforts and the key components can be reused for similar applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, intense usage of computing has been the main strategy of investigations in several scientific research projects. The progress in computing technology has opened unprecedented opportunities for systematic collection of experimental data and the associated analysis that were considered impossible only few years ago. This paper focuses on the strategies in use: it reviews the various components that are necessary for an effective solution that ensures the storage, the long term preservation, and the worldwide distribution of large quantities of data that are necessary in a large scientific research project. The paper also mentions several examples of data management solutions used in High Energy Physics for the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments in Geneva, Switzerland which generate more than 30,000 terabytes of data every year that need to be preserved, analyzed, and made available to a community of several tenth of thousands scientists worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry has rapidly evolved in the last decade and can be considered today as a mature technology, which incorporates computationally intensive and data-intensive tasks. In this paper, a perspective on the state-of-the-art of high performance computing (HPC) methodologies applied to spaceborne SAR interferometry (InSAR) is presented, and the different parallel algorithms for interferometric processing of SAR data are critically discussed at different levels. Emphasis is placed on the key processing steps, which typically occur in the interferometric techniques, categorized according to their computational relevance. Existing implementations of the different InSAR stages using diverse parallel strategies and architectures are examined and their performance discussed. Furthermore, some InSAR computational schemes selected in the literature are analyzed at the level of the entire processing chain, thus emphasizing their potentialities and limitations. Therefore, the survey focuses on the inherent computational approaches enabling large-scale interferometric SAR processing, thus offering insight into some open issues, and outlining future trends in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This survey paper describes the Network Computing Laboratory (NCLab), a novel public cloud computing platform for mathematics, programming, scientific computing and computer simulations. Through a web-browser interface, it provides users with free access to interactive graphical modules that include symbolic and numerical methods, programming in several languages, computing with Python scientific libraries, computing with GNU Octave, GPU computing with CUDA, computational geometry, 3D CAD design, computational graph theory, finite element programming with the Hermes library, and interactive graphical finite element modules. Users can upload files and data from their local computers, clone projects from the database, share files, form teams, and collaborate on projects. This paper briefly describes how NCLab operates, and it provides concise descriptions of NCLab computational modules with examples of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The ability to support Quality of Service (QoS) constraints is an important requirement in some scientific applications. With the increasing use of Cloud computing infrastructures, where access to resources is shared, dynamic and provisioned on-demand, identifying how QoS constraints can be supported becomes an important challenge. However, access to dedicated resources is often not possible in existing Cloud deployments and limited QoS guarantees are provided by many commercial providers (often restricted to error rate and availability, rather than particular QoS metrics such as latency or access time). We propose a workflow system architecture which enforces QoS for the simultaneous execution of multiple scientific workflows over a shared infrastructure (such as a Cloud environment). Our approach involves multiple pipeline workflow instances, with each instance having its own QoS requirements. These workflows are composed of a number of stages, with each stage being mapped to one or more physical resources. A stage involves a combination of data access, computation and data transfer capability. A token bucket-based data throttling framework is embedded into the workflow system architecture. Each workflow instance stage regulates the amount of data that is injected into the shared resources, allowing for bursts of data to be injected while at the same time providing isolation of workflow streams. We demonstrate our approach by using the Montage workflow, and develop a Reference net model of the workflow. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article suggests that substantial and often disturbing change is the only way that libraries can achieve a bright future in an increasingly digital world. Libraries must quickly adopt mobile technology, cloud computing, eScience, and the systematic organization and dissemination of quality information—and do so within the context of collaboration with other libraries in the region, nation, and world. Fiscal shortages can not be used as an excuse to postpone imperative changes; money has to be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Baker Hughes high-performance computing environment is deploying a three-tier approach to providing technical computing resources as an alternative to typical high-performance computing. Baker Hughes uses a complete spectrum of computer resources that break from the standards of high-density, dedicated resources. This environment is intended to provide a more flexible and efficient approach that is responsive to business needs. The design has been proven in production systems in the United States and the Russian Federation since the second quarter of 22001100 with multiple proprietary and in-house scientific applications. This paper will discuss a computing infrastructure that Baker Hughes has built to better adapt to meet changing requirements in high-performance computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing, with its promise of virtually infinite resources, seems to suit well in solving resource greedy scientific computing problems. To study the effects of moving parallel scientific applications onto the cloud, we deployed several benchmark applications like matrix-vector operations and NAS parallel benchmarks, and DOUG (Domain decomposition On Unstructured Grids) on the cloud. DOUG is an open source software package for parallel iterative solution of very large sparse systems of linear equations. The detailed analysis of DOUG on the cloud showed that parallel applications benefit a lot and scale reasonable on the cloud. We could also observe the limitations of the cloud and its comparison with cluster in terms of performance. However, for efficiently running the scientific applications on the cloud infrastructure, the applications must be reduced to frameworks that can successfully exploit the cloud resources, like the MapReduce framework. Several iterative and embarrassingly parallel algorithms are reduced to the MapReduce model and their performance is measured and analyzed. The analysis showed that Hadoop MapReduce has significant problems with iterative methods, while it suits well for embarrassingly parallel algorithms. Scientific computing often uses iterative methods to solve large problems. Thus, for scientific computing on the cloud, this paper raises the necessity for better frameworks or optimizations for MapReduce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multidisciplinary approaches in science are still rare, especially in completely different fields such as agronomy science and computer science. We aim to create a state-of-the-art floating ebb and flow system greenhouse that can be used in future scientific experiments. The objective is to create a self-sufficient greenhouse with sensors, cloud connectivity, and artificial intelligence for real-time data processing and decision making. We investigated various approaches and proposed an optimal solution that can be used in much future research on plant growth in floating ebb and flow systems. A novel microclimate pocket-detection solution is proposed using an automatically guided suspended platform sensor system. Furthermore, we propose a methodology for replacing sensor data knowledge with artificial intelligence for plant health estimation. Plant health estimation allows longer ebb periods and increases the nutrient level in the final product. With intelligent design and the use of artificial intelligence algorithms, we will reduce the cost of plant research and increase the usability and reliability of research data. Thus, our newly developed greenhouse would be more suitable for plant growth research and production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the workshop on clusters, cloud and data for scientific computing (CCDSC), scientific parallel computing, and high performance computing.

This special issue gathers selected papers of the Workshop on Clusters, Clouds and Data for Scientific Computing that was held at La Maison des Contes, Dareize-France, on October 3-6, 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses topics including clouds and data for scientific computing.