EclipseCon 2011

In this post we have invited Charles Bonneau, software architect & Eclipse addict at Euranova. Charles will share his feedback from EclipseCon EU 2011. Welcome Charles !

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One year of academic research

The R&D Department has been very active this academical year 2010-2011 and has organized research activities in association with many academic organizations such as the Université Libre the Bruxelles (ULB-Belgium), the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCl-Belgium) and the University of Tunis El Manar (Tunisia). These collaborations have taken the form of students Master Theses and Master internships.

In total, four Master Theses have been conducted, with 2 students from the ULB and 2 students from the UCl, along with 3 internships with 2 students from the ULB and 1 student from the enginnering faculty of Tunis. Here is a summary of these work:

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ER 2011: Trends in conceptual modeling researches

This year we published a paper in the industrial track of ER 2011 [1], the annual conference on conceptual modeling research. In this context I spent a couple of days in Brussels at the conference. This gives me the opportunity to share with you an (high level) overview of the trends in this area. Please, notice that this post is only a summary of the discussions I saw and talks I had the chance to see.

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EURA NOVA Publications in 2011

As we usually do at the end of the year,  we will try to summarize the activities led at EURA NOVA R&D during this year. In this post I come back on our scientific publications we had this year. Those publications cover distributed data storage, model management & governance in finance and, finally, elastic architectures for cloud infrastructures. Let me briefly introduce you those papers.

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EQS: an elastic and scalable message queue for the cloud

With the emergence of cloud computing, on-demand resources usage is made possible. This allows applications to elastically scale out according to the load. One design pattern that suits this paradigm is the event-driven architecture (EDA) in which messages are sent asynchronously between distributed application instances using message queues. However, existing message queues are only able to scale for a certain number of clients and are not able to scale out elastically. We present the Elastic Queue Service (EQS), an elastic message queue architecture and a scaling algorithm which can be adapted to any message queue in order to make it scale elastically. EQS architecture is layered onto multiple distributed components and its management components can be integrated with the cloud infrastructure management. We have implemented a prototype of EQS and deployed it on a cloud infrastructure. A series of load testings have validated our elastic scaling algorithm and show that EQS is able to scale out in order to adapt to an applied load. We then discuss about the elastic scaling of the management layers of EQS and their possible integration with the cloud infrastructure management.

Nam-Luc Tran, Sabri Skhiri, and Esteban Zimány, EQS: An Elastic and Scalable Message Queue for the Cloud, proceedings of the 3rd International IEEE conference on Cloud computing technology and science (IEEE CloudCom 2011), Athens, Greece, November 2011.

Click here to access the paper.

EURA NOVA selected for the erasmus mundus joint doctorate (EMJD) in distributed computing

The EMJD in Distributed Computing (EMJD-DC) is an international joint doctoral school for the study of distributed computing. EMJD-DC combines a well-structured, interdisciplinary training programme with high-quality research work. The training and research is carried out in cooperation with leading research groups from four universities in different countries: UPC (Spain), KTH (Sweden), IST Lisbon (Portugal), and UCL (Belgium).

Governance issues on heavy models in an industrial context

SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative providing secure messaging capabilities to the financial services industry. One critical mission of SWIFT is the standardization of the message flows between the industry players. The model-driven approach naturally came as a solution to the management of these message definitions. However, one of the most important challenges that SWIFT has been facing is the global governance of the message repository and the management of each element. Nowadays modeling tools exist but none of them enables the management of the complete life-cycle of the message models. In this paper wepresent the challenges that SWIFT had to face in the development of a dedicated platform.

 

Sabri Skhiri, Marc Delbaere, Yves Bontemps, Grégoire de Hemptinne, and Nam-Luc Tran, Governance issues on heavy models in an industrial context. Advances in Conceptual Modeling. Recent Developments and New Directions ER 2011, Brussels, Belgium, November 2011.

Click here to access the paper.