OOTI 20 Year Anniversary Symposium

 

Abstracts

Cloud Computing :Architecturing a dynamic infrastructure - by Nicky Hekster (IBM)

Cloud Computing is an emerging computing model by which users can gain access to their applications from anywhere, through any connected device. A user-centric interface makes the cloud infrastructure supporting the applications transparent to users. The applications reside in massively scalable data centers where computational resources can be dynamically provisioned and shared to achieve significant economies of scale. Thanks to a strong service management platform, the management costs of adding more IT resources to the cloud can be significantly lower than those associated with alternate infrastructures.
What is driving the adoption of cloud computing? Many factors, including the proliferation of smart mobile devices, high-speed connectivity, higher density computing and data-intensive Web 2.0 applications. But also cost-effectiveness and energy-efficacy.
As a result, vendors across the ICT industry have announced Cloud Computing efforts of varying capabilities and among corporate clients there is an increasing interest in aspects of the Cloud, such as infrastructure outsourcing, software as a service key processes as a service and next-generation distributed computing.
This presentation will dwell on the notion of Cloud Computing, with an emphasis on the architecture needed to provide a request-driven, dynamic allocation of computing resources for a mix of workloads on a massively scalable, heterogeneous and virtualized environment. In addition, it will gives examples how ICT companies, among them IBM, are catering to developments in Cloud Computing.

LOFAR: A challenge in software architecture - by Ruud Overeem (ASTRON)

In the mid 90’s the idea was born to build a complete new type of radio telescope, a telescope without dishes.  When you have enough (>10.000) dish-less antennas in the field it must be possible to get a signal to noise ratio that is high enough for doing science.
This idea opened the door to many new opportunities. Since you don't have dishes anymore it must be possible to look in several directions simultaneously! What's more, you are able to receive a very width band of the radio spectrum instead of 1 or 2 relative small bands that is common for conventional telescopes.
The telescope was named LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray). Needless to say that LOFAR brought a lot of challenges. How do you manage more than 10.000 antennas that are spread over an area with a diameter of 350 km? How do you handle an incoming datastream of 14 Tb/s? How do you process 512 subbands simultaneously in real time? How many TFlop do you need for processing the datastreams?
After many years of research and hard work we finally found the solutions for these (and a lot more) challenges. The presentation will show most of the components of the LOFAR telescope and will drag you along in the challenges we faced and decisions we made.

Not all mobile software is mobile - by Jan van der Meer (Ericsson)

 The presentation will briefly touch on the architecture of a public mobile communication network and then discuss the invocation of applications in an IMS network on the Service Layer. The current Service Layer application architecture will be described and finally a way to interface applications on a mobile terminal to counterparts on the service layer.

Innovations in TV system design - by Hans Rijns, NXP Semiconductors

 The fierce competition in the consumer electronics industry drives the evolution of Digital TV in terms of performance and price more than ever. Consumers expect crystal clear and sparkling picture quality on their very large and ultra-thin flat screens, independent of the quality of input signals that may vary from poor "YouTube" quality to full-HD. Furthermore, they want full flexibility in watching and recording multiple channels simultaneously from a growing number of sources; terrestrial, cable, satellite, internet and personally generated content from their own mobile devices.
These challenges need to be faced within even more stringent constraints: the fast growing environmental awareness makes people want their next TV sets to consume far less electric power than today and of course be realized at continously lowered price levels.  This poses a wealth of innovation challenges on set makers as well as on TV IC manufacturers.
In his presentation Hans Rijns will address exciting developments in three areas of the TV system design. He will elaborate on the latest wideband multi-channel receiver technology: a single tuner solution that combines wideband signal reception with parallel digital channel decoding. It provides full watching and recording flexibility, at lower cost levels than offered by conventional single channel receivers. On the video processing end he will show how low quality video input signals can be enhanced to high quality motion pictures by the application of new smart algorithms. On the display processing side, he will provide insight in the energy characteristics of the image processing sequence for different types of LCD-TV displays and explain how active backlight dimming technologies can yield huge power savings, at even enhanced picture quality.

Asynchronous Silicon Compilation - by Ad Peeters (Handshake Solutions)

The design of integrated circuits is a continuous roller coaster in which both the technology and the market are changing quickly. On the technology side, Moore's law enables an exponential growth of the number of transistors that can be integrated in silicon in ever smaller dimensions with ever increasing design complexity. On the market side, windows of opportunities are getting smaller and smaller, demanding ever faster design cycles.

In 1985, a project was started in Philips Research in which asynchronous circuit design in combination with silicon compilation was proposed as a way to efficiently design chips. This technology has lead to some successes, most notably in the smartcard and identification domain, where several 100 millions of ICs have been sold.

Smart Dust: science, fiction or a real business opportunity? - by Paul Havinga

 Rapid advances in technology have enabled a new generation of tiny, inexpensive, networked sensors. Sensors are tiny devices capable of capturing physical information, such as heat, light or motion, about an environment. Embedding millions of sensors into an environment creates a digital skin or wireless network of sensors, each sensor capable of capturing physical information about its immediate space. These massively distributed sensor networks communicate with one another and summarize the immense amounts of low-level information to produce data representative of the overall environment. Collaborative, smart sensor networks present information in a qualitative, human-interpretable form, which allows the system and the people to respond intelligently.
The past several years of wireless sensor network research have resulted in advancements in many areas. The generality and potential of this will be investigated in various application domains. This talk will highlight some of the challenges as we are advancing this technology from academic prototypes to broad commercial usage.

Programmes

Software Technology
PDEng degree programme