Jul
15
Written by:
Event Zero Administrator
7/15/2008 5:08 PM
DEBS day 3 (Thurs)
Ok, I thought yesterday had a lot of content. Today was even more! 15 presentations plus the first of two fast abstract sessions where researchers were given 8 minutes to present the summery of their submissions – 11 of those in total making for a grand total of 26 presentations giving true meaning to death by powerpoint! On another note, I was talking to the conference organizer about the air conditioning issue and found out that the air conditioning in the first venue was not actually broken, but turned off due to a dispute with a neighboring building (and has been for 20 days)! How Italian! Apparently the relatively new system causes vibration and noise in both buildings. As a result a complaint was lodged with the police and orders were issued to turn it off. The organizer had a tough time scrambling to find a venue suitable for the crowd. The entire AC unit (very large) at the original venue will be moved to a new undecided location.
Session 1: Availability and reliability of event-based systems
I was very interested in the topic of this session, but all the presentations in this track were ESB oriented – large scale publish/subscribe distributed system with optimized adaptive routing of events. There were three academic presentations in this track: 2 from IIT Bombay and one from UC Riverside, CA). The first presentation discussed QOS for priority events in a very large publish subscribe environment. The architecture consists of many subscribers with self declared reliability requirements, an overlay broker network, an underlay p2p network, and an adaptive reliability algorithm that uses persistent path quality data to dynamically refine routing. The next presentation focused on the overlay network reliability and an algorithm to pair of overlay nodes for resiliency. The last presentation covered replica placement in large scale stream processing systems, design principles for ha replica placement algorithm, and a resulting protocol for distributed replica placement. The implementation and measurements were done using the Synergy event processing platform.
Session 2: Event processing middleware
Three presentations in this track. Majority of the content in the two academic presentations was related to how to optimize highly distributed systems (ESB related topics). Of interest was an oracle branded BEA presentation describing the Web Logic event server. They started by positioning the platform as a domain specific (event processing) extension of the general purpose web logic server (wls). The example use cases were stream processing specific (ie. Trends over short time intervals). They described their value add to the ESPER engine in areas of scalability and throughput. They gave a quick overview of their/ESPER stream query language: filtering, correlation, temporal pattern matching, and nested queries – much lighter than the presentation done by Shalendra on Tuesday for the Oracle developed CEP solution. The presentation wrapped up with the usual discussion about throughput vs. latency a review of performance measurements. They performed a test using 400 relatively simple continuous queries scaling from 100k to 1M/second and presented the high/low latency measured.
Keynote : Towards Trustworthy ICT service infrastructure
Jaques Bus, Security (ICT Programme) DG Information Society and Media, EU gave the presentation. I mentioned that the conference included both academia and industry. This presentation added the additional element of large scale government (EU) funded initiatives. This initiative, is concerned with how future blended internet computing technology will be secure, trustworthy, and protect privacy. He went on to describe the FP7-ICT work program for 2009-20010 which is focused on security and trust. Basically all EU countries have kicked in 19b Euros for the overall research program which is broken down into tracks. The upcoming work program is broken down into the following diminsions…
Mobility, environment, energy
Personal healthcare
Independent living
Pervasive & trusted network & service infrastructure
As an outsider to this community initiative, it appears to be a vast array of research areas related to almost every dimension of computing and includes many companies. I’m behind the principle of a future secure computing environment (both internet and private) that is secure, resilient to attacks, and where individual privacy prevails – but it may be difficult to produce tangible end results given such a wide area of focus and large number of participants.
Panel discussion: Security issues in event based infrastructure as seen from the European technology platforms
Jaques hosted a panel discussion that included 4 individuals responsible for each of the dimensions above. Each panel gave a high level presentation that described each associated discipline, emerging technologies, and areas of focus. One interesting point is that EDA and event processing was mentioned in every presentation as a key enabling technology. When all 4 presentations were done, there were no questions asked – maybe we were just all glazed over from our nice lunch provided by the conference or more likely it was all a little bit confusing with lots of alphabet soup in each of the presentations.
Fast abstract session:
I don’t really have anything significant to writeup based on the fast track presentations – I’ll go back and read the abstracts and may be able to make sense of the publications. It was a torrent of 11 – 8 minute presentations. I do appreciate all of the effort put in by those that contributed – there are some great topics. Unfortunately, in most cases the presentations were crammed in rather than boiled down (and I was burned out at that point also). I think everyone was a little burned out from the last group of ICT presentations. There were only a few of us left at the bitter end. Tomorrow begins with the rest of the fast abstracts – I’m going to drink LOTS of coffee before!
Tags: