There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

Communications of the ACM (CACM for short, not the best sounding acronym around) is the ACM’s flagship magazine. Started in 1957, CACM is handy for keeping up to date on current research being carried out across all topics of computer science and realworld applications. CACM has had an illustrious past with many influential pieces of work and debates started within its pages. These include Hoare’s presentation of the Quicksort algorithm; Rivest, Shamir and Adleman’s description of the first publickey cryptosystem RSA; and Dijkstra’s famous letter against the use of GOTO. In addition to the print edition, which is released monthly, there is a fantastic website (http://cacm.acm. org/) that showcases not only the most recent edition but all previous CACM articles as well, readable online as well as downloadable as a PDF. In addition, the website lets you browse for articles by subject, a handy feature if you want to focus on a particular topic. CACM is really essential reading. Pretty much guaranteed to contain content that is interesting to anyone, it keeps tabs on the latest in computer science. It is a valuable asset for us students, who tend to delve deep into a particular area of CS and forget everything that is happening around us. — Daniel Gooch U ndergraduate research is like a box of chocolates: You never know what kind of project you will get. That being said, there are still a few things you should know to get the most out of the experience.

Communications of the ACM

A tenant-based resource allocation model for scaling Software-as-a-Service applications over cloud computing infrastructures

Load balancing mechanisms and techniques in the cloud environments

Energy-efficient scheduling for moldable real-time tasks on heterogeneous computing platforms

The paper describes methods for using Extremal Optimization (EO) for processor load balancing during execution of distributed applications. A load balancing algorithm for clusters of multicore processors is presented and discussed. In this algorithm the EO approach is used to periodically detect the best tasks as candidates for migration and for a guided selection of the best computing nodes to receive the migrating tasks. To decrease the complexity of selection for migration, the embedded EO algorithm assumes a two-step stochastic selection during the solution improvement based on two separate fitness functions. The functions are based on specific models which estimate relations between the programs and the executive hardware. The proposed load balancing algorithm is assessed by experiments with simulated load balancing of distributed program graphs. The algorithm is compared against a greedy fully deterministic approach, a genetic algorithm and an EO-based algorithm with random placement of migrated tasks.

Extremal Optimization applied to load balancing in execution of distributed programs

In Java computing context, ADAJ (Adaptive Distributed Application in Java) provides a both execution and programming system for irregular distributed applications. From the execution point of view, load balancing is an important issue and requires special information policies. Traditionally only the computer load is taken into account. Consequently, the load balancing is made by being unaware of the relations between objects. The objects are moved of a computer on the other without knowing the consequences in term of communication. To avoid that problem we introduce in that paper two mechanims: a relation observation mechanism of distributed objects and a computer load observation. The dynamical observation information provided by these mechanisms will be able to allow a general load balancing mechanism to have an intelligent adaptative object redistribution strategy. The proposed observation tools are entirely designed in Java. Some experiment results which concerns relation observations and overhead measurements are presented.

An object observation for a Java adaptative distributed application platform

Webservices oriented data mining in knowledge architecture

The aim of this chapter is to present an overview of issues concerning autonomous (possibly agent-based) \textit{Service Level Agreement} negotiations. To achieve this goal, first five European research projects are discussed that represent different approaches to the problem of integration of business and grid architectures, as well as various methods of establishing the SLA between grid users. Second, the experience gained from these projects is used as a foundation of conceptualization of the SLA negotiations in the AiG project.

Richard Olejnik

Papers

Energy-efficient scheduling for moldable real-time tasks on heterogeneous computing platforms

Extremal Optimization applied to load balancing in execution of distributed programs

An object observation for a Java adaptative distributed application platform

Webservices oriented data mining in knowledge architecture

Negotiations in an Agent-based Grid Resource Brokering System