Keynotes

Keynote I

Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College London, "Energy Packet Networks: Optimization of QoS through Energy Allocation". Tuesday October 22 from 09:15 AM to 10:15 AM.

Summary:

In ICT, energy consumption and CO2 impact are critical issues as in other areas. In addition, many critical applications of ICT can benefit substantially from the use of renewable energy sources to increase their autonomy and improve ICT's sustainability. Thus much of our work in the last few years has included the need to understand how the energy consumption of computer systems and networks can be analyzed and optimized. To this effect, we have introduced the EPN - Energy Packet Network paradigm which allows us to use approaches from system performance modelling to jointly optimise the QoS and the energy consumption of systems. This presentation will summarise some of our work, and exhibit some interesting theoretical results, such as the optimum allocation of energy so as to minimise the response time of servers, or the optimum allocation of both jobs and energy so as to optimise composite utility functions that include both energy and QoS, as well as some experimental results.

Bio:

Erol Gelenbe (FIEEE, FACM) has worked in France at the Universities of Paris-Nord, Paris-Saclay and Paris-Descartes. He also taught at Ecole Polytechnique and founded the Research on Modelling of Computer Systems and Networks at INRIA and in French Universities.His interests include probability models of computer systems and networks, neural networks, gene regulatory networks, and system security, and he has graduated 86 PhD students. He served as Professor at the University of Liege, Belgium, Department Chair at Duke University, Director of the School of EECS at the University of Central Florida, and Professor at Imperial College. Since 2019 he is Professor in the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Researcher in the I3S Laboratory of the University of Cote d'Azur. He has received prizes from the French Academy of Sciences, the UK Institution for Engineering and Technology, ACM and other organisations. He is a Fellow of the Belgian Hungarian, Polish and Turkish Science Academies, of the French "Academie des Technologies", and Academia Europaea. For his contributions to science and higher education, he received France's honours of Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur (2014) and Commandeur du Merite (2019), and Italy's honours of Commander of Merit (2005) and Grand Officer of the Order of the Star (2007).

Keynote II

Julia Lawall, Inria/LIP6, "10 Years of Automated Evolution in the Linux Kernel". Wednesday October 23 from 08:45 AM to 10:00 AM.

Summary:

TBD.

Bio:

Julia Lawall is a Senior Research Scientist at Inria. Her research is at the intersection of programming languages and operating systems. She develops the tool Coccinelle and has over 2000 patches in the Linux kernel based on this work. Coccinelle was initially used to aid the evolution of the Linux kernel, providing support for changes to library application programming interfaces (APIs) such as renaming a function, adding a function argument whose value is somehow context-dependent, and reorganizing a data structure.

Keynote III

Gabriel Wainer, Carleton University, "Discrete-Event Modeling and Simulation for Development of Embedded and Real-Time Systems ". Thursday October 24 from 08:45 AM to 10:00 AM.

Summary:

Embedded real-time software construction has usually posed interesting challenges due to the complexity of the tasks these systems have to execute. Most methods for developing these systems are either hard to scale up for large systems, or require a difficult testing effort with no guarantee for bug-free software products. Although formal methods have showed promising results, they are difficult to apply when the complexity of the system under development scales up. Instead, systems engineers have often relied on the use of modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques in order to make system development tasks manageable. Construction of system models and their analysis through simulation reduces both end costs and risks, while enhancing system capabilities and improving the quality of the final products. M&S let users experiment with “virtual” systems, allowing them to explore changes, and test dynamic conditions in a risk-free environment. This is a useful approach, moreover considering that testing under actual operating conditions may be impractical and in some cases impossible.

In this talk, we will present a Modeling and Simulation-based framework to develop embedded systems based on the DEVS (Discrete Event systems Specification) formalism. DEVS provides a formal foundation to M&S that proved to be successful in different complex systems. This approach combines the advantages of a simulation-based approach with the rigor of a formal methodology. We will discuss how to use this framework to incrementally develop embedded applications, and to integrate simulation models with hardware components seamlessly. One of the main aspects of the methodology is that it can be integrated with models of the environment in which the embedded controller will act. We will show how the Cell-DEVS and the QSS methods can be used for this task. We will introduce the main characteristics of the Cell-DEVS and QSS methods, and will show how to model physical systems. We will introduce an integrated environment that deals with these issues, orchestrating a cellular-based simulator (CD++), a GIS (GRASS) and data visualization (Google Earth), to simulate behavior and analyze results supporting the decision making for varied environmental scenarios.

Our approach does not impose any order in the deployment of the actual hardware components, providing flexibility to the overall process. The use of DEVS improves reliability (in terms of logical correctness and timing), enables model reuse, and permits reducing development and testing times for the overall process. Consequently, the development cycle is shortened, its cost reduced, and quality and reliability of the final product is improved.

Bio:

GABRIEL A. WAINER, FSCS, SMIEEE, received the M.Sc. (1993) at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the Ph.D. (1998, with highest honors) at the Université d’Aix-Marseille III, France. In July 2000 he joined the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University (Ottawa, ON, Canada), where he is now Full Professor and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies. He has held visiting positions at the University of Arizona; LSIS (CNRS), Université Paul Cézanne, University of Nice, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, Université de Bordeaux (France); UCM, UPC (Spain), University of Buenos Aires, National University of Rosario (Argentina) and others. He is the author of four books and around 400 research articles; he edited four other books, and helped organizing numerous conferences, including being one of the founders of the Symposium on Theory of Modeling and Simulation, SIMUTools and SimAUD. Prof. Wainer was Vice-President Conferences and Vice-President Publications, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the SCS. Prof. Wainer is the Special Issues Editor of SIMULATION, member of the Editorial Board of IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering, Wireless Networks (Elsevier), Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation (SCS). He is the head of the Advanced Real-Time Simulation lab, located at Carleton University's Centre for advanced Simulation and Visualization (V-Sim). He has been the recipient of various awards, including the IBM Eclipse Innovation Award, SCS Leadership Award, and various Best Paper awards. He has been awarded Carleton University's Research Achievement Award (2005, 2014), the First Bernard P. Zeigler DEVS Modeling and Simulation Award, the SCS Outstanding Professional Award (2011), Carleton University’s Mentorship Award (2013), the SCS Distinguished Professional Award (2013), and the SCS Distinguished Service Award (2015). He is a Fellow of SCS.