Developments in electronics, computing and communication technologies have transformed IT systems from desktop and tightly coupled mainframe computers of the past to modern day highly complex distributed systems. These ICT systems interact with humans at a much advanced level than what was envisaged during the early years of computer development. The ICT systems of today have gone through various phases of developments by absorbing intermediate and modern day concepts such as networked computing, utility, on demand and autonomic computing, virtualisation and so on. We now live in a ubiquitous computing and digital economy era where computing systems have penetrated into the human lives to a degree where these systems are becoming invisible. The price of these developments is in the increased costs, higher risks and higher complexity. There is a compelling need to study these emerging systems, their applications, and the emerging market sectors that they are penetrating into. Motivated by the challenges and opportunities offered by the modern day ICT technologies, we aim in this thesis to explore the major technological developments that have happened in the ICT systems during this century with a focus on developing techniques to manage applied ICT systems in digital economy. In the process, we wish to also touch on the evolution of ICT systems and discuss these in context of the state of the art technologies and applications. We have identified the two most transformative technologies of this century, grid computing and cloud computing, and two application areas, intelligent healthcare and transportation systems. The contribution of this thesis is multidisciplinary in four broad areas. Firstly, a workload model of a grid-based ICT system in the healthcare sector is proposed and analysed using multiple healthcare organisations and applications. Secondly, an innovative intelligent system for the management of disasters in urban environments using cloud computing is proposed and analysed. Thirdly, cloud computing market sectors, applications, and workload are analysed using over 200 real life case studies. Fourthly, a detailed background and literature review is provided on grid computing and cloud computing. Finally, directions for future work are given. The work contributes in multidisciplinary fields involving healthcare, transportation, mobile computing, vehicular networking, grid, cloud, and distributed computing. The discussions presented in this thesis on the historical developments, technology and architectural details of grid computing have served to understand as to how and why grid computing was seen in the past as the global infrastructure of the future. These discussions on grid computing also provided the basis that we subsequently used to explain the background, motivations, technological details, and ongoing developments in cloud computing. The introductory chapters on grid and cloud computing, collectively, have provided an insight into the evolution of ICT systems over the last 50+ years - from mainframes to microcomputers, internet, distributed computing, cluster computing, and computing as a utility and service. The existing and proposed applications of grid and cloud computing in healthcare and transport were used to further elaborate the two technologies and the ongoing ICT developments in the digital economy. The workload models and analyses of grid and cloud computing systems can be used by the practitioners for the design and resource management of ICT systems.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:678445 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Altowaijri, Saleh |
| Publisher | Swansea University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42944 |
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