Autonomic workflow activities: the award framework

Workflows have been successfully applied to express the decomposition of complex scientific applications. This has motivated many initiatives that have been developing scientific workflow tools. However the existing tools still lack adequate support to important aspects namely, decoupling the enactment engine from workflow tasks specification, decentralizing the control of workflow activities, and allowing their tasks to run autonomous in distributed infrastructures, for instance on Clouds. Furthermore many workflow tools only support the execution of Direct Acyclic Graphs (DAG) without the concept of iterations, where activities are executed millions of iterations during long periods of time and supporting dynamic workflow reconfigurations after certain iteration. We present the AWARD (Autonomic Workflow Activities Reconfigurable and Dynamic) model of computation, based on the Process Networks model, where the workflow activities (AWA) are autonomic processes with independent control that can run in parallel on distributed infrastructures, e. g. on Clouds. Each AWA executes a Task developed as a Java class that implements a generic interface allowing end-users to code their applications without concerns for low-level details. The data-driven coordination of AWA interactions is based on a shared tuple space that also enables support to dynamic workflow reconfiguration and monitoring of the execution of workflows. We describe how AWARD supports dynamic reconfiguration and discuss typical workflow reconfiguration scenarios. For evaluation we describe experimental results of AWARD workflow executions in several application scenarios, mapped to a small dedicated cluster and the Amazon (Elastic Computing EC2) Cloud.

Autonomic Activities in the Execution of Scientific Workflows: Evaluation of the AWARD Framework

Workflows have been successfully applied to express the decomposition of complex scientific applications. However the existing tools still lack adequate support to important aspects namely, decoupling the enactment engine from tasks specification, decentralizing the control of workflow activities allowing their tasks to run in distributed infrastructures, and supporting dynamic workflow reconfigurations. We present the AWARD (Autonomic Workflow Activities Reconfigurable and Dynamic) model of computation, based on Process Networks, where the workflow activities (AWA) are autonomic processes with independent control that can run in parallel on distributed infrastructures. Each AWA executes a task developed as a Java class with a generic interface allowing end-users to code their applications without low-level details. The data-driven coordination of AWA interactions is based on a shared tuple space that also enables dynamic workflow reconfiguration. For evaluation we describe experimental results of AWARD workflow executions in several application scenarios, mapped to the Amazon (Elastic Computing EC2) Cloud.

World press photo 2012: a construção discursiva da Primavera Árabe

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Jornalismo.

Direcção de obra numa empreitada do ramo de hidráulica

Trabalho de Dissertação de natureza científica para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Civil do Ramo Hidráulica

Implementation of thr INSPIRE Directive on road infrastructure in Portugal

Prémio - CEN/TC 287 AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN INSIRE 2012 Implementation of the INSPIRE Directive on Road Infrastructure in Portugal Inês Soares, aluna de Mestrado em engenharia civil do ISEL, Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa e Paulo Martins, e o seu orientador, receberam um prémio europeu, no dia 27 de junho, em Istambul na Turquia, numa conferência internacional organizada pela Comissão Europeia e pelo governo Turco.  A jovem portuguesa foi escolhida entre cerca de 20 candidatos de vários países. Paulo Matos Martins, professor no ISEL, além de mentor do trabalho premiado, foi orientador de mestrado da aluna e explica que se trata de um estudo sobre a aplicação da Diretiva comunitária INSPIRE à infraestrutura rodoviária nacional que contou com a estreita colaboração do InIR, Instituto da Infraestrutura Rodoviária através da coorientação da engenheira Adelaide Costa e colaboração técnica do engenheiro Rui Luso Soares.  O projeto-piloto correspondeu à criação de uma aplicação informática que permite aceder a informação geográfica harmonizada relativa à infraestrutura rodoviária nacional, de acordo com as disposições de execução INSPIRE, dando cumprimento aos requisitos impostos pela Diretiva às entidades responsáveis por este tipo de informação, entre as quais se incluem diversos organismos públicos (podendo no futuro vir a incluir as autarquias), permitindo aos decisores políticos e a todos os cidadãos o fácil acesso a informação de qualidade sobre as infraestruturas, o território e o ambiente. 

Enabling Global Experiments With Interactive Reconfiguration And Steering By Multiple Users

In global scientific experiments with collaborative scenarios involving multinational teams there are big challenges related to data access, namely data movements are precluded to other regions or Clouds due to the constraints on latency costs, data privacy and data ownership. Furthermore, each site is processing local data sets using specialized algorithms and producing intermediate results that are helpful as inputs to applications running on remote sites. This paper shows how to model such collaborative scenarios as a scientific workflow implemented with AWARD (Autonomic Workflow Activities Reconfigurable and Dynamic), a decentralized framework offering a feasible solution to run the workflow activities on distributed data centers in different regions without the need of large data movements. The AWARD workflow activities are independently monitored and dynamically reconfigured and steering by different users, namely by hot-swapping the algorithms to enhance the computation results or by changing the workflow structure to support feedback dependencies where an activity receives feedback output from a successor activity. A real implementation of one practical scenario and its execution on multiple data centers of the Amazon Cloud is presented including experimental results with steering by multiple users.

Data analytics in the cloud with flexible mapreduced workflows

Data analytic applications are characterized by large data sets that are subject to a series of processing phases. Some of these phases are executed sequentially but others can be executed concurrently or in parallel on clusters, grids or clouds. The MapReduce programming model has been applied to process large data sets in cluster and cloud environments. For developing an application using MapReduce there is a need to install/configure/access specific frameworks such as Apache Hadoop or Elastic MapReduce in Amazon Cloud. It would be desirable to provide more flexibility in adjusting such configurations according to the application characteristics. Furthermore the composition of the multiple phases of a data analytic application requires the specification of all the phases and their orchestration. The original MapReduce model and environment lacks flexible support for such configuration and composition. Recognizing that scientific workflows have been successfully applied to modeling complex applications, this paper describes our experiments on implementing MapReduce as subworkflows in the AWARD framework (Autonomic Workflow Activities Reconfigurable and Dynamic). A text mining data analytic application is modeled as a complex workflow with multiple phases, where individual workflow nodes support MapReduce computations. As in typical MapReduce environments, the end user only needs to define the application algorithms for input data processing and for the map and reduce functions. In the paper we present experimental results when using the AWARD framework to execute MapReduce workflows deployed over multiple Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances.

Carla Galvão: uma arquitecta das mágoas boas

Texto justificativo para a atribuição de uma Menção Especial do Prémio da Crítica 2008 à actriz Carla Galvão.

A causa dos divertimentos

Texto justificativo para a atribuição da Menção Especial da Crítica 2011 ao actor Miguel Guilherme pela sua interpretação em O senhor Puntilla e o seu criado Matti, de Bertolt Brecht (enc. João Lourenço / Teatro Aberto, 2010).

O sonho: teatro-música experimental

Trabalho de Projeto submetido à Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em TEATRO - especialização em Artes Performativas (Teatro-Música).

A gestão e coordenação de projecto e obra: considerações gerais sobre duas abordagens em casos concretos

Trabalho de Projecto Relatório de Estágio para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Civil

O cinema ibérico e os óscares: razões para a não selecção dos filmes portugueses ao óscar de melhor filme em língua estrangeira, através da análise comparativa entre as cinematografias de Espanha, Portugal e o modelo de produção de Hollywood

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.