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Quantum computing is a relatively new paradigm that has raised considerable interest in physics and computer science in general but has so far received little attention in software engineering and architecture. Hybrid applications that consist of both quantum and classical components require the development of appropriate quantum software architectures. However, given that quantum software engineering (QSE) in general is a new research area, quantum software architecture–a subresearch area in QSE is also understudied. The goal of this chapter is to provide a list of research challenges and opportunities for such architectures. In addition, to make the content understandable to a broader computer science audience, we provide a brief overview of quantum computing and explain the essential technical foundations.
Currently, Parkinson’s Disease (PD) has no cure or accurate diagnosis, reaching approximately 60, 000 new cases yearly and worldwide, being more often in the elderly population. Its main symptoms can not be easily uncorrelated with other illness, being way more difficult to be identified at the early stages. As such, computer-aided tools have been recently used to assist in this task, but the challenge in the automatic identification of Parkinson’s Disease still persists. In order to cope with this problem, we propose to employ Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) to learn features in an unsupervised fashion by analyzing images from handwriting exams, which aim at assessing the writing skills of potential individuals. These are one of the main symptoms of PD-prone people, since such kind of ability ends up being severely affected. We show that RBMs can learn proper features that help supervised classifiers in the task of automatic identification of PD patients, as well as one can obtain a more compact representation of the exam for the sake of storage and computational load purposes.
Basierend auf einer systematischen und umfangreichen Analyse von Praxisbeiträgen zum Thema Schatten-IT und einer Interviewstudie mit 16 IT-Führungskräften beschreibt der vorliegende Artikel Governance-Aspekte zu diesem Phänomen. Er ergänzt damit vorhergehende akademische Studien. Es zeigt sich, dass unter Praktikern der Eindruck vorherrscht, dass IT-Abteilungen unter zunehmendem Druck stehen, schneller auf sich ändernde Anforderungen aus den Fachbereichen reagieren zu müssen. Können IT-Abteilungen diesen Erwartungen nicht entsprechen, beschaffen sich Fachbereiche und Nutzer selbst Lösungen in Form von Schatten-IT. Als mögliche Antwort darauf kann sich die IT-Abteilung agiler organisieren und die IT-Architektur im Unternehmen modernisieren. Eine weitere Möglichkeit besteht darin, sich das innovative Potenzial von Schatten-IT zunutze zu machen und deren Umsetzung aktiv durch organisatorische und technische Maßnahmen zu unterstützen. IT-Sicherheitsmanagement und technische Schutzmechanismen können helfen, die so entstandenen Lösungen abzusichern und die Risiken zu minimieren. Die IT-Abteilung könnte sich als Konsequenz aus all diesen Maßnahmen zu einem nutzerorientierten, internen Service-Provider und strategischen Partner für die Fachbereiche entwickeln.
NoSQL databases are popular in agile software development, where a frequently changing database schema imposes challenges for the production database. In this demo, we present Darwin, a middleware for systematic, tool-based support specifically designed for NoSQL database systems. Darwin carries out schema evolution and data migration tasks. To the best of our knowledge, Darwin is the first tool of its kind that supports both eager and lazy NoSQL data migration.
We analyze sparse frame based regularization of inverse problems by means of a diagonal frame decomposition (DFD) for the forward operator, which generalizes the SVD. The DFD allows to define a non-iterative (direct) operator-adapted frame thresholding approach which we show to provide a convergent regularization method with linear convergence rates. These results will be compared to the well-known analysis and synthesis variants of sparse ℓ1-regularization which are usually implemented thorough iterative schemes. If the frame is a basis (non-redundant case), the three versions of sparse regularization, namely synthesis and analysis variants of ℓ1-regularization as well as the DFD thresholding are equivalent. However, in the redundant case, those three approaches are pairwise different.
This paper deals with one of the fundamental properties of grid computing – transferring code between grid nodes and executing it remotely on heterogeneous hosts. Contemporary middleware relies for this purpose on Web Services, which makes application programs complicated and low-level and requires much additional expertise from programmers. We compare two mechanisms for grid application programming with regard to their handling of code transfer – the de-facto standard WS-GRAM in Globus and the higher-level approach based on HOCs (Higher-Order Components). We study the advantages and problems of each approach using a real-world application case study – the sequent alignment problem from bioinformatics. Our experiments show the trade-off between reduced development costs and software complexity when HOCs are used and the higher performance of the applications on the grid when using WS-GRAM.
This work integrates two distinct research areas of parallel and distributed computing, (1) automatic loop parallelization, and (2) component-based Grid programming. The latter includes technologies developed within CoreGRID for simplifying Grid programming: the Grid ComponentModel (GCM) and Higher- Order Components (HOCs). Components support developing applications on the Grid without taking all the technical details of the particular platform type into account (network communication, heterogeneity, etc.). The GCMenables a hierarchical composition of programpieces and HOCs enable the reuse of component code in the development of new applications by specifying application-specific operations in a program via code parameters. When a programmer is provided, e. g., with a compute farm HOC, only the independent worker tasks must be described. But, once an application exhibits data or control dependences, the trivial farm is no longer sufficient. Here, the power of loop parallelization tools, like LooPo, comes into play: by embedding LooPo into a HOC, we show that these two technologies in combination facilitate the automatic transformation of a sequential loop nest with complex dependences (supplied by the user as a HOC parameter) into an ordered task graph, which can be processed on the Grid in parallel. This technique can significantly simplify GCM-based systems which combine multiple HOCs and other components. We use an equation system solver based on the successive overrelaxation method (SOR) as our motivating application example and for performance experiments.
Computational grids combine computers in the Internet for distributed data processing and are an attractive platform for the data-intensive applications of bioinformatics. We present an extensible genome processing software for the grid and evaluate its performance. Our software was able to discover previously unknown circular permutations (CP) in the ProDom database containing more than 70MB of protein data. A specific feature of our software is its design as a component: the Alignment HOC, a Higher-Order Component that makes use of the latest Globus toolkit as grid middleware. Besides genome data, the Alignment HOC accepts plugin code for processing this data as its input, and contains all the required configuration to run the component on top of Globus, thus, freeing the non-grid-expert user from dealing with grid middleware. Instead of writing data distribution procedures and configuring the middleware appropriately for every new algorithm, Alignment HOC users reuse the existing component and only write application-specific plugins. To maintain plugins persistently in a reusable manner, we built a web-accessible plugin database with a comfortable administration GUI. The flexible component-based implementation makes it easy to study CPs in other databases (e.g. UniProt/Swiss-Prot) or to use an alignment algorithm different than the standard Needleman-Wunsch. For the efficient distribution of workload, we developed a library of group communication operations for HOCs.
We suggest that parallel software components used for grid computing should be adaptable to application-specific requirements, instead of developing new components from scratch for each particular application. As an example, we take a parallel farm component which is “embarrassingly parallel”, i. e., free of dependencies, and adapt it to the wavefront processing pattern with dependencies that impact its behavior. We describe our approach in the context of Higher-Order Components (HOCs), with the Java-based system Lithium as our implementation framework. The adaptation process relies on HOCs’ mobile code parameters that are shipped over the network of the grid. We describe our implementation of the proposed component adaptation method and report first experimental results for a particular grid application — the alignment of DNA sequence pairs, a popular, time-critical problem in computational molecular biology.
While high-level software components simplify the programming of grid applications and Web services increase their interoperability, developing such components and configuring the interconnecting services is a demanding task. In this paper, we consider the combination of Higher-Order Components (HOCs) with the Fractal component model and the ProActive library.
HOCs are parallel programming components, made accessible on the grid via Web services that use a special class loader enabling code mobility: executable code can be uploaded to a HOC, allowing one to customize the HOC. Fractal simplifies the composition of components and the ProActive library offers a generator for automatically creating Web services from components composed with Fractal, as long as all the parameters of these services have primitive types.
Taking all the advantages of HOCs, ProActive and Fractal together, the obvious conclusion is that composing HOCs using Fractal and automatically exposing them as Web services on the grid via ProActive minimizes the required efforts for building complex grid systems. In this context, we solved the problem of exchanging code-carrying parameters in automatically generated Web services by integrating the HOC class loading mechanism into the ProActive library.
This paper deals with the problem of application programming for grid systems that combine heterogeneous data and computational resources via the Internet. We argue that grid programming is still too complex because of the big gap between the currently used and anticipated grid middleware, (e.g., Globus or WSRF) and the application level. We suggest that this gap needs to be closed in future-generation grids and propose a novel approach to bridging the gap by using Higher-Order Components (HOCs) — recurring patterns of parallel behaviour that are provided to the user as program building blocks with pre-packaged implementation and middleware setup. The presentation is illustrated with a simple case study of computing fractal images. Our experiments demonstrate that HOCs can simplify grid application programming significantly, without serious performance loss.
Skeletons are common patterns of parallelism, such as farm and pipeline, that can be abstracted and offered to the application programmer as programming primitives. We describe the use and implementation of skeletons on emerging computational grids, with the skeleton system Lithium, based on Java and RMI, as our reference programming syttem. Our main contribution is the exploration of optimization techniques for implementing skeletons on grids based on an optimized, future-based RMI mechanism, which we integrate into the macro-dataflow evaluation mechanism of Lithium. We discuss three optimizations: 1) a lookahead mechanism that allows to process multiple tasks concurrently at each grid server and thereby increases the overall degree of parallelism, 2) a lazy taskbinding technique that reduces interactions between grid servers and the task dispatcher, and 3) dynamic improvements that optimize the collecting of results and the work-load balancing. We report experimental results that demonstrate the improvements due to our optimizations on various testbeds, including a heterogeneous grid-like environment.
Cybersecurity in Health Care
(2020)
Ethical questions have always been crucial in health care; the rapid dissemination of ICT makes some of those questions even more pressing and also raises new ones. One of these new questions is cybersecurity in relation to ethics in health care. In order to more closely examine this issue, this chapter introduces Beauchamp and Childress’ four principles of biomedical ethics as well as additional ethical values and technical aims of relevance for health care. Based on this, two case studies—implantable medical devices and electronic Health Card—are presented, which illustrate potential conflicts between ethical values and technical aims as well as between ethical values themselves. It becomes apparent that these conflicts cannot be eliminated in general but must be reconsidered on a case-by-case basis. An ethical debate on cybersecurity regarding the design and implementation of new (digital) technologies in health care is essential.
Medical confidentiality is very important because it builds the fundament of trust between doctors and patients. In modern health services data protection is essential. But there are also other important security objectives, such as integrity and authenticity of medical data and health services, as their breach can potentially lead to life threatening conditions. State of the art security mechanisms are necessary to protect medical data and services and prevent attacks known as “hacking”. They should include in particular cryptography, as you can usually rely on mathematics, more than in software security and access control mechanisms. As patients normally cannot assess the security of a service, security audits or certifications of health services should be provided to generate trust and confidence.