Today, organisations that seek a competitive advantage are adopting virtual infrastructures that share and manage computing resources. The trend is towards implementing collaborating applications that are supported by web services technology. Even though web services technology is rapidly becoming a fundamental development paradigm, adequate security constitutes the main concern and obstacle to its adoption as an industry solution. An important issue to address is the development of suitable access control models that are able to not only restrict access to unauthorised users, but also to discriminate between users that originate from different collaborating parties. In web services environments, access control is required to cross the borders of security domains, in order to be implemented between heterogeneous systems. Traditional access control systems that are identity-based do not provide a solution, as web services providers have to deal with unknown users, manage a large user population, collaborate with others and at the same time be autonomous of nature. Previous research has pointed towards the adoption of attribute-based access control as a means to address some of these problems. This approach is still not adequate, as the trustworthiness of web services requestors cannot be determined. Trust in web services requestors is thus an important requirement to address. For this reason, the thesis investigated trust, as to promote the inclusion of trust in the web services access control model. A cognitive approach to trust computation was followed that addressed uncertain and imprecise information by means of fuzzy logic techniques. A web services trust formation framework was defined that aims to populate trust concepts by means of automated, machine-based trust assessments. The structure between trust concepts was made explicit by means of a trust taxonomy. This thesis presents the WSACT – or the Web Services Access Control incorporating Trust –model. The model incorporates traditional role-based access control, the trust levels of web services requestors and the attributes of users into one model. This allows web services providers to grant advanced access to the users of trusted web services requestors, in contrast to the limited access that is given to users who make requests through web services requestors with whom a minimal level of trust has been established. Such flexibility gives a web services provider the ability to foster meaningful business relationships with others, which portrays humanistic forms of trust. The WSACT architecture describes the interacting roles of an authorisation interface, authorisation manager and trust manager. A prototype finally illustrates that the incorporation of trust is a viable solution to the problem of web services access control when decisions of an autonomous nature are to be made. / Thesis (PhD (Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Computer Science / unrestricted

Submitted by Kamila Costa (kamilavasconceloscosta@gmail.com) on 2015-06-19T18:45:56Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação-Wagner Gomes Barroso Abrantes.pdf: 6959158 bytes, checksum: 5c58a6988615f58002fe8fe195b57d48 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2015-07-06T18:51:39Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação-Wagner Gomes Barroso Abrantes.pdf: 6959158 bytes, checksum: 5c58a6988615f58002fe8fe195b57d48 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2015-07-06T19:03:08Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação-Wagner Gomes Barroso Abrantes.pdf: 6959158 bytes, checksum: 5c58a6988615f58002fe8fe195b57d48 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-07-06T19:03:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação-Wagner Gomes Barroso Abrantes.pdf: 6959158 bytes, checksum: 5c58a6988615f58002fe8fe195b57d48 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-01-12 / Não Informada / The periodic functions are a topic of enormous importance for the High School. This Labor Completion of course covers the basics for understanding the topic, the characteristics of these functions and those with whom students have contact in basic education. The use of computational resources in the teaching of Periodic Functions and their applications are also part of the research. / As funções periódicas constituem um tema de enorme relevância para o Ensino Médio. Este Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso aborda os conceitos básicos para a compreensão do tema, as características dessas funções e aquelas com as quais os alunos tem contato na educação básica. O emprego dos recursos computacionais no ensino das Funções Periódicas e suas aplicações também fazem parte da pesquisa.

Les avancées des nouvelles techniques de séquençage (NGS) ont permis dans le cadre des études en écologie microbienne de passer de l'analyse de quelques centaines de séquences par étude à des centaines de millions de séquences. Cette différence quantitative des données produites a induit des différences qualitatives quant aux études réalisées. En effet, avec le changement du type de données, les approches classiques d'analyse ne peuvent être appliquées et il est devenu nécessaire de définir de nouvelles stratégies en tenant compte des contraintes que posent ces données. Alors qu'il était possible d'insérer classiquement quelques dizaines de séquences issues des techniques de première génération dans des phylogénies expertisées, le nombre de séquences généré aujourd'hui par les NGS à chaque expérience rend cette tâche irréalisable et nécessite la mise en place de nouvelles stratégies et l'utilisation d'outils adaptés. Par ailleurs, les outils disponibles d'analyse de la diversité microbienne adaptés aux amplicons de nouvelle génération, implémentent des approches probabilistes et/ou de recherche de similitude pour l'identification des séquences environnementales. L'approche phylogénétique quant à elle, bien qu'elle soit la plus robuste, n'est pas utilisée pour l'annotation taxonomique de ce type de données du fait de ses besoins en temps et en ressources de calcul. Au-delà de l'approche d'annotation taxonomique, les nouvelles techniques de séquençage posent également le problème de la qualité des séquences produites et son impact sur l'estimation de la diversité. Ainsi, ce travail de thèse avait pour objectif la définition d'une stratégie d'analyse bioinformatique de données de séquençage massif dans le contexte de l'étude de la diversité microbienne, en tenant compte des limitations imposées par les ressources informatiques actuelles (matérielles et logicielles) d'un côté, et de l'avantage des méthodes phylogénétiques par rapport aux autres approches d'annotation taxonomique. Ce travail a donné lieu au développement d'une chaîne de traitement proposant une série d'analyses allant des séquences brutes jusqu'à la visualisation des résultats, tout en replaçant les séquences environnementales dans un contexte évolutif. L'approche développée a été optimisée pour la gestion de gros volumes de données, et a été comparée en terme de précision d'affiliation aux autres approches communément utilisées en écologie microbienne. Les tests et simulations ont montré qu'à partir d'une taille d'amplicons de 400 pb, l'affiliation phylogénétique avait les meilleurs résultats mais aussi, que la qualité de cette affiliation différait selon la région hypervariable ciblée. La chaîne de traitements mise en place a ensuite été par implémentée dans un contexte de calcul à haute performance, notamment sur un cluster de calcul, pour proposer un service web dédié à l'analyse de la diversité microbienne. / The characterization of microbial community structure via SSU rRNA gene profiling has been greatly advanced in recent years by the introduction of NGS amplicons, leading to a better representation of sample diversity at a lower cost. This progress in method development has provided a new window into the composition of microbial communities and sparked interest in the members of the rare biosphere. Concurrently, the processing of such amount of data has become an important bottleneck for the effectiveness of microbial ecology studies, and a multitude of analysis platforms have been developed for the handling of these data. As implemented, these tools have a steep learning curve for the biologist who is not computationally inclined, as they require extensive user intervention and consume many CPU hours due to dataset analysis and complexity, which can present a significant barrier to researchers. Moreover, although phylogenetic affiliation has been shown to be more accurate for the taxonomic assignment of NGS reads, the existing tools assign taxonomy by either a similarity search or a probabilistic approach, with the phylogenies being restricted to samples' comparison. Beyond the taxonomic assignment, the new sequencing technologies also arise the problem of the quality of the generated sequences and its impact on the richness estimation. In this work, we aimed to define a strategy for the bioinformatic analysis of high-throughput sequences in order to depict the microbial diversity, taking into account both the limitations imposed by current computer resources (hardware and software), and the advantage of the phylogenetic methods over the other taxonomic annotation approaches. This work has led to the development of a pipeline offering a set of analyzes ranging from raw sequences processing to the visualization of the results, while replacing the environmental sequences in an evolutionary framework. The developed approach was optimized for managing large volumes of data, and has been compared in term of the accuracy of taxonomic assignment to the approaches commonly used in the field of microbial ecology. This pipeline was then used to the developement of a dedicated web server for high-throughput sequencing analysis, that relies on a computing cluster and performs large-scale phylogeny-based analyses of rRNA genes with no need for specialized informatics expertise, and uses the phylogenies for both the taxonomy assessment and the delineation of monophyletic groups to highlight clades of interest.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-12T20:22:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Mauro Hinz.pdf: 2658972 bytes, checksum: 50ee82c291499d5ddc390671e05329d4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The outsourcing of computing services has been through constant evolutions in the past years, due to the increase of demand for computing resources. Accordingly, data centers are the main suppliers of computing service and cloud-based computing services provide a new paradigm for the offer and consumption of these computing resources. A substantial motivator for using cloud computing is its pricing model, which enables to charge the customer only for the resources he used, thus adopting a pay-as-you-use cost model. Among cloud-based computing services, the service type Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the one mostly used by companies that would like to outsource their computing infrastructure. The IaaS service, in most cases, is offered through virtual machines. This paper revisits the cost models used by data centers and analyses the costs of supply of virtual machines based on IaaS. This analysis identifies that electricity represents a considerable portion of this cost and that much of the consumption comes from the use of processors in virtual machines, and that this aspect is not considered in the identified cost models. This paper describes the Virtual Power Model, a cost model based on energy consumption of the processor in cloud-based, virtual machines in IaaS. The model is based on the assumptions of energy consumption vs. processing load, among others, which are proven through experiments in a test environment of a small data center. As a result, the Virtual Power Model proves itself as a fairer pricing model for the consumed resources than the identified models. Finally, a case study is performed to compare the costs charged to a client using the cost model of Amazon for the AWS EC2 service and the same service charged using the Virtual Power Model. / A terceirização dos serviços de computação tem passado por evoluções constantes nos últimos anos em função do contínuo aumento na demanda por recursos computacionais. Neste sentido, os data centers são os principais fornecedores de serviço de computação e os serviços de computação em nuvem proporcionam um novo paradigma na oferta e consumo desses recursos computacionais. Um considerável motivador do uso das nuvens computacionais é o seu modelo de tarifação que possibilita a cobrança do cliente somente dos recursos que ele utilizou, adotando um modelo de custo do tipo pay-as-you-use. Dentre os serviços de computação em nuvem, o serviço do tipo IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) é um dos mais utilizados por empresas que desejam terceirizar a sua infraestrutura computacional. O serviço de IaaS, na grande maioria dos casos, é ofertado através de instâncias de máquinas virtuais. O presente trabalho revisita os modelos de custos empregados em data centers analisando a formação dos custos no fornecimento de máquina virtuais em nuvens baseadas em IaaS. Com base nesta análise identificasse que a energia elétrica possui uma parcela considerável deste custo e que boa parte deste consumo é proveniente do uso de processadores pelas máquinas virtuais, e que esse aspecto não é considerado nos modelos de custos identificados. Este trabalho descreve o Modelo Virtual Power, um modelo de custo baseado no consumo de energia do processador por máquina virtual em nuvens IaaS. A constituição do modelo está baseada nas premissas de consumo de energia vs. carga de processamento, entre outros, que são comprovados através de experimentação em um ambiente de testes em um data center de pequeno porte. Como resultado o Modelo Virtual Power mostra-se mais justo na precificação dos recursos consumidos do que os modelos identificados. Por fim, é realizado um estudo de caso comparando os custos tarifado a um cliente empregando o modelo de custo da Amazon no serviço AWS EC2 e o mesmo serviço tarifado utilizando o Modelo Virtual Power.