With the widespread use of the Internet, the popularity of web applications has significantly increased. Such applications are subject to unpredictable workload conditions that vary from time to time. For example, an e-commerce website may face higher workloads than normal during festivals or promotional schemes. Such applications are critical and performance related issues, or service disruption can result in financial losses. Cloud computing with its attractive feature of dynamic resource provisioning (elasticity) is a perfect match to host such applications. The rapid growth in the usage of cloud computing model, as well as the rise in complexity of the web applications poses new challenges regarding the effective monitoring and management of the underlying cloud computational resources. This thesis investigates the state-of-the-art elastic methods including the models and techniques for the dynamic management and provisioning of cloud resources from a service provider perspective. An elastic controller is responsible to determine the optimal number of cloud resources, required at a particular time to achieve the desired performance demands. Researchers and practitioners have proposed many elastic controllers using versatile techniques ranging from simple if-then-else based rules to sophisticated optimisation, control theory and machine learning based methods. However, despite an extensive range of existing elasticity research, the aim of implementing an efficient scaling technique that satisfies the actual demands is still a challenge to achieve. There exist many issues that have not received much attention from a holistic point of view. Some of these issues include: 1) the lack of adaptability and static scaling behaviour whilst considering completely fixed approaches; 2) the burden of additional computational overhead, the inability to cope with the sudden changes in the workload behaviour and the preference of adaptability over reliability at runtime whilst considering the fully dynamic approaches; and 3) the lack of considering uncertainty aspects while designing auto-scaling solutions. This thesis seeks solutions to address these issues altogether using an integrated approach. Moreover, this thesis aims at the provision of qualitative elasticity rules. This thesis proposes a novel biologically-inspired switched feedback control methodology to address the horizontal elasticity problem. The switched methodology utilises multiple controllers simultaneously, whereas the selection of a suitable controller is realised using an intelligent switching mechanism. Each controller itself depicts a different elasticity policy that can be designed using the principles of fixed gain feedback controller approach. The switching mechanism is implemented using a fuzzy system that determines a suitable controller/- policy at runtime based on the current behaviour of the system. Furthermore, to improve the possibility of bumpless transitions and to avoid the oscillatory behaviour, which is a problem commonly associated with switching based control methodologies, this thesis proposes an alternative soft switching approach. This soft switching approach incorporates a biologically-inspired Basal Ganglia based computational model of action selection. In addition, this thesis formulates the problem of designing the membership functions of the switching mechanism as a multi-objective optimisation problem. The key purpose behind this formulation is to obtain the near optimal (or to fine tune) parameter settings for the membership functions of the fuzzy control system in the absence of domain experts’ knowledge. This problem is addressed by using two different techniques including the commonly used Genetic Algorithm and an alternative less known economic approach called the Taguchi method. Lastly, we identify seven different kinds of real workload patterns, each of which reflects a different set of applications. Six real and one synthetic HTTP traces, one for each pattern, are further identified and utilised to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods against the state-of-the-art approaches.

Le « Cloud computing » est un nouveau modèle de systèmes de calcul. L’infrastructure, les applications et les données sont déplacées de machines localisées sur des systèmes dématérialisés accédés sous forme de service via Internet. Le modèle « coût à l’utilisation » permet des économies de coût en modifiant la configuration à l’exécution (élasticité). L’objectif de cette thèse est de contribuer à la gestion de la Qualité de Service (QdS) des applications s’exécutant dans le Cloud. Les services Cloud prétendent fournir une flexibilité importante dans l’attribution des ressources de calcul tenant compte des variations perçues, telles qu’une fluctuation de la charge. Les capacités de variation doivent être précisément exprimées dans un contrat (le Service Level Agreement, SLA) lorsque l’application est hébergée par un fournisseur de Plateform as a Service (PaaS). Dans cette thèse, nous proposons et nous décrivons formellement le langage de description de SLA PSLA. PSLA est fondé sur WS-Agreement qui est lui-même un langage extensible de description de SLA. Des négociations préalables à la signature du SLA sont indispensables, pendant lesquelles le fournisseur de PaaS doit évaluer la faisabilité des termes du contrat. Cette évaluation, par exemple le temps de réponse, le débit maximal de requêtes servies, etc, est fondée sur une analyse du comportement de l’application déployée dans l’infrastructure cloud. Une analyse du comportement de l’application est donc nécessaire et habituellement assurée par des tests (benchmarks). Ces tests sont relativement coûteux et une étude précise de faisabilité demande en général de nombreux tests. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une méthode d’étude de faisabilité concernant les critères de performance, à partir d’une proposition de SLA exprimée en PSLA. Cette méthode est un compromis entre la précision d’une étude exhaustive de faisabilité et les coûts de tests. Les résultats de cette étude constituent le modèle initial de la correspondance charge entrante-allocation de ressources utilisée à l’exécution. Le contrôle à l’exécution (runtime control) d’une application gère l’allocation de ressources en fonction des besoins, s’appuyant en particulier sur les capacités de passage à l’échelle (scalability) des infrastructures de cloud. Nous proposons RCSREPRO (Runtime Control method based on Schedule, REactive and PROactive methods), une méthode de contrôle à l’exécution fondée sur la planification et des contrôles réactifs et prédictifs. Les besoins d’adaptation à l’exécution sont essentiellement dus à une variation de la charge soumise à l’application, variations difficiles à estimer avant exécution et seulement grossièrement décrites dans le SLA. Il est donc nécessaire de reporter à l’exécution les décisions d’adaptation et d’y évaluer les possibles variations de charge. Comme les actions de modification des ressources attribuées peuvent prendre plusieurs minutes, RCSREPRO réalise un contrôle prédictif fondée sur l’analyse de charge et la correspondance indicateurs de performance-ressources attribuées, initialement définie via des tests. Cette correspondance est améliorée en permanence à l’exécution. En résumé, les contributions de cette thèse sont la proposition de langage PSLA pour décrire les SLA ; une proposition de méthode pour l’étude de faisabilité d’un SLA ; une proposition de méthode (RCSREPRO) de contrôle à l’exécution de l’application pour garantir le SLA. Les travaux de cette thèse s’inscrivent dans le contexte du projet FSN OpenCloudware (www.opencloudware.org) et ont été financés en partie par celui-ci. / Cloud computing is a new computing model. Infrastructure, application and data are moved from local machines to internet and provided as services. Cloud users, such as application owners, can greatly save budgets from the elasticity feature, which refers to the “pay as you go” and on-demand characteristics, of cloud service. The goal of this thesis is to manage the Quality of Service (QoS) for applications running in cloud environments Cloud services provide application owners with great flexibility to assign “suitable” amount of resources according to the changing needs, for example caused by fluctuating request rate. “Suitable” or not needs to be clearly documented in Service Level Agreements (SLA) if this resource demanding task is hosted in a third party, such as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider. In this thesis, we propose and formally describe PSLA, which is a SLA description language for PaaS. PSLA is based on WS-Agreement, which is extendable and widely accepted as a SLA description language. Before signing the SLA contract, negotiations are unavoidable. During negotiations, the PaaS provider needs to evaluate if the SLA drafts are feasible or not. These evaluations are based on the analysis of the behavior of the application deployed in the cloud infrastructure, for instance throughput of served requests, response time, etc. Therefore, application dependent analysis, such as benchmark, is needed. Benchmarks are relatively costly and precise feasibility study usually imply large amount of benchmarks. In this thesis, we propose a benchmark based SLA feasibility study method to evaluate whether or not a SLA expressed in PSLA, including QoS targets, resource constraints, cost constraints and workload constraints can be achieved. This method makes tradeoff between the accuracy of a SLA feasibility study and benchmark costs. The intermediate of this benchmark based feasibility study process will be used as the workload-resource mapping model of our runtime control method. When application is running in a cloud infrastructure, the scalability feature of cloud infrastructures allows us to allocate and release resources according to changing needs. These resource provisioning activities are named runtime control. We propose the Runtime Control method based onSchedule, REactive and PROactive methods (RCSREPRO). Changing needs are mainly caused by the fluctuating workload for majority of the applications running in the cloud. The detailed workload information, for example the request arrival rates at scheduled points in time, is difficult to be known before running the application. Moreover, workload information listed in PSLA is too rough to give a fitted resource provisioning schedule before runtime. Therefore, runtime control decisions are needed to be performed in real time. Since resource provisioning actions usually require several minutes, RCSREPRO performs a proactive runtime control which means that it predicts future needs and assign resources in advance to have them ready when they are needed. Hence, prediction of the workload and workload-resource mapping are two problems involved in proactive runtime control. The workload-resource mapping model, which is initially derived from benchmarks in SLA feasibility study is continuously improved in a feedback way at runtime, increasing the accuracy of the control.To sum up, we contribute with three aspects to the QoS management of application running in the cloud: creation of PSLA, a PaaS level SLA description language; proposal of a benchmark based SLA feasibility study method; proposal of a runtime control method, RCSREPRO, to ensure the SLA when the application is running. The work described in this thesis is motivated and funded by the FSN OpenCloudware project (www.opencloudware.org).

This work deals with provisioning of communication services via satellites for collectively mobile user groups in a heterogeneous network with several radio access technologies. The extended use of personalised user equipment beyond the coverage of one single terrestrial network by means of a satellite transport link, represents an increasingly important trend in mobile satellite communication. This trend is confirmed by the commercial introduction of broadband satellite communication to mobile terminals mounted on vehicles, trains, ships or aircraft. This work provides a consequent and structured approach for provisioning of services to broadband satellite terminals for mobile user groups and addresses: -- a systematic satellite communication system design process for collective mobile terminals; -- mobile satellite modelling at a wide range of frequencies, including current and potential frequencies; -- an optimised Pointing Acquisition and Tracking (PAT) system design including characterisation of moments for vehicle types of all mobile scenarios; -- a general hierarchical multi-service dimensioning methodology for collectively mobile user groups, including voice, data, and multimedia services; -- an aeronautical system dimensioning scheme with (capacity and handover) requirements analysis and evaluation of results for different satellite scenarios.

In relation to the latest economic crisis much attention was paid to the bank capital requirements. Many papers discuss the pro-cyclical effect of these capital requirements and the options of how to stabilize the banking industry and financial system. In this thesis I researched another instrument which can cause the pro-cyclical effect - the loan loss provisions. In reaction to this issue the Spanish central bank has adopted the model of dynamic provisioning which acts counter-cyclically. This model is supposed to balance the amount of created provisions and banks' profit over the time. In this thesis I introduce a hypothetical situation in which the countries using the Euro currency adopted the model of dynamic provisioning and I examine the hypothesis that the adoption of this model would mitigate the latest economic crisis as the banks would achieve higher profits during the time of recession. Based on the conducted research I confirmed my hypothesis and conclude that the dynamic provisioning would balance the economic swings. However, the results also showed that the set-up of dynamic provisions model is crucial. In order to make the model efficient the model coefficients have to be precisely determined by central banks or individual banks and approved by independent supervisors. Keywords...

Les infrastructures de calcul scientifique sont en constante évolution, et l’émergence de nouvelles technologies nécessite l’évolution des mécanismes d’ordonnancement qui leur sont associé. Durant la dernière décennie, l’apparition du modèle Cloud a suscité de nombreux espoirs, mais l’idée d’un déploiement et d’une gestion entièrement automatique des plates-formes de calcul est jusque la resté un voeu pieu. Les travaux entrepris dans le cadre de ce doctorat visent a concevoir un moteur de gestion de workflow qui intègre les logiques d’ordonnancement ainsi que le déploiement automatique d’une infrastructure Cloud. Plus particulièrement, nous nous intéressons aux plates-formes Clouds disposant de système de gestion de données de type DaaS (Data as a Service). L’objectif est d’automatiser l’exécution de workflows arbitrairement complexe, soumis de manière indépendante par de nombreux utilisateurs, sur une plate-forme Cloud entièrement élastique. Ces travaux proposent une infrastructure globale, et décrivent en détail les différents composants nécessaires à la réalisation de cette infrastructure :• Un mécanisme de clustering des tâches qui prend en compte les spécificités des communications via un DaaS ;• Un moteur décentralisé permettant l’exécution des workflows découpés en clusters de tâches ;• Un système permettant l’analyse des besoins et le déploiement automatique. Ces différents composants ont fait l’objet d’un simulateur qui a permis de tester leur comportement sur des workflows synthétiques ainsi que sur des workflows scientifiques réels issues du LBMC (Laboratoire de Biologie et Modélisation de la Cellule). Ils ont ensuite été implémentés dans l’intergiciel Diet. Les travaux théoriques décrivant la conception des composants, et les résultats de simulations qui les valident, ont été publié dans des workshops et conférences de portée internationale. / The constant development of scientific and industrial computation infrastructures requires the concurrent development of scheduling and deployment mechanisms to manage such infrastructures. Throughout the last decade, the emergence of the Cloud paradigm raised many hopes, but achieving full platformautonomicity is still an ongoing challenge. Work undertaken during this PhD aimed at building a workflow engine that integrated the logic needed to manage workflow execution and Cloud deployment on its own. More precisely, we focus on Cloud solutions with a dedicated Data as a Service (DaaS) data management component. Our objective was to automate the execution of workflows submitted by many users on elastic Cloud resources.This contribution proposes a modular middleware infrastructure and details the implementation of the underlying modules:• A workflow clustering algorithm that optimises data locality in the context of DaaS-centeredcommunications;• A dynamic scheduler that executes clustered workflows on Cloud resources;• A deployment manager that handles the allocation and deallocation of Cloud resources accordingto the workload characteristics and users’ requirements. All these modules have been implemented in a simulator to analyse their behaviour and measure their effectiveness when running both synthetic and real scientific workflows. We also implemented these modules in the Diet middleware to give it new features and prove the versatility of this approach.Simulation running the WASABI workflow (waves analysis based inference, a framework for the reconstruction of gene regulatory networks) showed that our approach can decrease the deployment cost byup to 44% while meeting the required deadlines.

Environmental gradients can help shed light on the evolution of life history strategies such as parental investment. Parental investment is crucial for the fitness of many species. In this thesis, I examine reproductive investment dynamics in the Eurasian blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) in the French Pyrenees and assess potential differences in reproductive measures across an altitudinal gradient that creates variation in environmental “harshness”. Further, I investigate fine-scale aspects of bi-parental care, such as investment tactics in current reproduction, and sex differences in contributions to offspring care. To do so, I used a mixture of observational and experimental data, collected over a total of six breeding seasons from over 500 blue tits nests. I showed that breeding conditions are “harsher” due to colder temperatures with increasing elevation, leading to changes in reproductive timing and output. I found that increasing altitude leads to decreased hatching success. Nevertheless, clutch size and brood mortality is comparable across the gradient. A shift to a lower, but qualitatively comparable reproductive output may be part of a slower “pace of life” strategies pursued at high relative to low altitudes. From experimental data, I also found that parental investment is positively linked across different phases within one reproductive attempt. Finally, in line with theory, a temporary brood manipulation revealed that parents balance the benefits and costs of reproduction by partially compensating for changes in brood size. Parents also responded in similar ways to brood size. Overall, the findings presented in this thesis highlight the importance of mechanisms to fine-tune reproduction to maximise reproductive fitness. I suggest that initial reproductive decisions such as timing and amount of offspring produced heavily shape the success of a reproductive attempt. These results have implications for current versus future reproductive trade-offs in life history theory, in particular for short-lived species.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:12:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2006-Silvia Aparecida Zimmermann.pdf: 1099657 bytes, checksum: 9107a8c01b0eab28efce903aa4f9ded6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-09-01 / Funda??o Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / This study intended to problemize the aproach about the alimentary provisioning in municipal public policies and the relation that has been established with the alimentary safety. In search for an observatory for this study, I came across with the experience of Caxias do Sul, RS - which presented a municipal provisioning public policy since 1997. The local context originated important subjects for analysis, because it takes place in a traditional town concerning to food production, processing and consumption which exports products to several areas in the state and also to other states of the federation. Besides, there were farmers' fairs since 1979 and which have been stimulated by the municipal agriculture secretariat. It led the municipal provisioning policies to dedicated in order to enlarge and to qualify those fairs, turning the farmers Fairs the main equipment of the local provisioning policies. It is noticed that, at the time it was created, the municipal provisioning policies didn't make reference to alimentary safety, but along the years, with the institution of an Alimentary Safety and Social Inclusion Coordination, the program of municipal provisioning became recognized as an action of alimentary safety of the town and, so, to compose the local policies of alimentary safety. The temporary limitation of the study about the provisioning policies of Caxias do Sul is centered in the period from 1997 to 2005. The discussion about the alimentary provisioning pointed some factors which are conditional to the alimentary access: the) market regulation and creation of commercialization spaces; b) production foment - technical attendance and agricultural credit; c) information to the consumers and; d) employment and income generation. Considering the process in course in Caxias do Sul, of alimentary safety institutionalization with the social actors' participation, it is concluded that the treatment given to the alimentary provisioning has been overcoming the restricted actions to support the production and commercialization. In that sense, the local social actors participation in discussion and treatment of the alimentary provisioning was shown as fundamental. / Esse estudo buscou problematizar o tratamento dado ao abastecimento alimentar no ?mbito das pol?ticas p?blicas municipais e da rela??o que vem se estabelecendo com a seguran?a alimentar. Na busca de um observat?rio para estudo, deparei-me com a experi?ncia de Caxias do Sul, RS, que apresentava uma pol?tica p?blica de abastecimento municipal desde 1997. O contexto local despertou quest?es relevantes para an?lise, pois se d? num munic?pio de tradi??o na produ??o, processamento e consumo de alimentos, que exporta produtos para v?rias regi?es do estado e tamb?m para outros estados da federa??o. Al?m disso, contava com a exist?ncia de feiras de agricultores, criadas em 1979 e que continuavam sendo estimuladas pela secretaria municipal de agricultura (SMA). Isso fez com que a pol?tica municipal de abastecimento se dedicasse a ampliar e qualificar essas feiras, tornando as Feiras de Agricultores o principal equipamento da pol?tica local de abastecimento. Nota-se que, na ?poca em que foi criada, a pol?tica municipal de abastecimento n?o fazia refer?ncia ? seguran?a alimentar, mas ao longo dos anos, com a institui??o de uma Coordenadoria de Seguran?a Alimentar e Inclus?o Social (SAIS), o programa de abastecimento municipal passou a ser reconhecido como uma a??o de seguran?a alimentar do munic?pio e, assim compor a pol?tica local de seguran?a alimentar. O recorte temporal do estudo da pol?tica de abastecimento de Caxias do Sul centra-se no per?odo de 1997 a 2005. A problematiza??o dada ao abastecimento alimentar apontou alguns fatores condicionantes ao acesso alimentar: a) regula??o de mercado e cria??o de espa?os de comercializa??o; b) fomento a produ??o - assist?ncia t?cnica e cr?dito agr?cola; c) informa??o aos consumidores e; d) gera??o de emprego e renda. Considerando o processo em curso em Caxias do Sul, de institucionaliza??o da seguran?a alimentar, com a participa??o dos atores sociais, conclui-se que o tratamento dado ao abastecimento alimentar tem superado as a??es restritas ao apoio da produ??o e comercializa??o. Nesse sentido, apresentou-se como fundamental a participa??o dos atores sociais locais na discuss?o e tratamento do abastecimento alimentar.

Our thesis is that operating systems should manage the on-chip shared caches of multicore processors for the purposes of achieving performance gains. Consequently, this dissertation demonstrates how the operating system can profitably manage these shared caches. Two shared-cache management principles are investigated: (1) promoting shared use of the shared cache, demonstrated by an automated online thread clustering technique, and (2) providing cache space isolation, demonstrated by a software-based cache partitioning technique. In support of providing isolation, cache provisioning is also investigated, demonstrated by an automated online technique called RapidMRC. We show how these software-based techniques are feasible on existing multicore systems with the help of their hardware performance monitoring units and their associated hardware performance counters. On a 2-chip IBM POWER5 multicore system, promoting sharing reduced processor pipeline stalls caused by cross-chip cache accesses by up to 70%, resulting in performance improvements of up to 7%. On a larger 8-chip IBM POWER5+ multicore system, the potential for up to 14% performance improvement was measured. Providing isolation improved performance by up to 50%, using an exhaustive offline search method to determine optimal partition size. On the other hand, up to 27% performance improvement was extracted from the corresponding workload using an automated online approximation technique, made possible by RapidMRC.

This dissertation examines the dominant discourse of welfare dependency and its implications for lone mothers in Ontario, Canada. This hegemonic discourse has been instrumental in positioning lone mothers as deviant, pathologically flawed and ineffective citizens. Using a repeated survival analysis, I examine the spells of participants identifying the significant variables influencing social assistance exit rates. Social constructionism and critical feminism are the theoretical lenses underpinning the analysis. The quantitative study examines the current composition of the Ontario Works caseload, interrogates the legitimacy of the welfare dependency supposition, debunks numerous social constructions surrounding welfare receipt and highlights the barriers impeding participants. The study culminates with a new understanding to counter the welfare dependency paradigm, recognizing the overlooked provisioning work of women in the neoliberal post welfare state.

Our thesis is that operating systems should manage the on-chip shared caches of multicore processors for the purposes of achieving performance gains. Consequently, this dissertation demonstrates how the operating system can profitably manage these shared caches. Two shared-cache management principles are investigated: (1) promoting shared use of the shared cache, demonstrated by an automated online thread clustering technique, and (2) providing cache space isolation, demonstrated by a software-based cache partitioning technique. In support of providing isolation, cache provisioning is also investigated, demonstrated by an automated online technique called RapidMRC. We show how these software-based techniques are feasible on existing multicore systems with the help of their hardware performance monitoring units and their associated hardware performance counters. On a 2-chip IBM POWER5 multicore system, promoting sharing reduced processor pipeline stalls caused by cross-chip cache accesses by up to 70%, resulting in performance improvements of up to 7%. On a larger 8-chip IBM POWER5+ multicore system, the potential for up to 14% performance improvement was measured. Providing isolation improved performance by up to 50%, using an exhaustive offline search method to determine optimal partition size. On the other hand, up to 27% performance improvement was extracted from the corresponding workload using an automated online approximation technique, made possible by RapidMRC.