O.F.Rana: Research Page

"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion."
- Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BC)

Changes frequently -- see Publications for more articles.

Market Models for Federated Clouds, I. Petri, J. Diaz-Montes, M. Zou, T. Beach, O. Rana and M. Parashar, IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing 3 (3), pp. 398-410, 2015. DoI: 10.1109/TCC.2015.2415792
This paper describes how resource exchange within federated clouds can be supported through multiple market models. The models are evaluated using two real-world applications: (i) cancer image analysis; (ii) energy simulation in buildings. These are demonstrated using a Cloud infrastructure implemented across sites at Cardiff (UK) and Rutgers (USA) using the CometCloud system. The work demonstrates how application constraints influence choice of provider in a federated cloud deployment.

Coordinating Data Analysis and Management in Multi-Layered Clouds, Ioan Petri, Javier Diaz-Montes, Omer Rana, Yacine Rezgui, Manish Parashar, and Luiz F. Bittencourt, Proceedings of Clouds, Networking for Internet of Things Systems (CN4IoT) conference, Rome, Italy, October 2015
This paper describes how sensors, intermediate gateways and data centers can be combined together into multi-layered Cloud systems. The intention in this work is to demonstrate how analysis carried out in Cloud systems could be pushed to the "edges" of the network. This limits the size of data that needs to be transferred from edge devices to Cloud systems for analysis. A variety of different analysis approaches, such as "in-situ" and "in-transit" are proposed for such an architecture.

Modelling and implementing social community clouds, I. Petri, J. Diaz-Montes, O. F. Rana, M. Punceva, I. Rodero, and M. Parashar, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 2015. DoI: 10.1109/TSC.2015.2470258
As the number of people who interact on social networks increases, and coupled with the greater capability made available within our computational devices, there is the potential to establish "Social Clouds" -- a resource sharing infrastructure that enable people who have trust relationships to come together to share computational/ data services within a community. Social clouds can also provide the means to enhance multi-user collaboration and greatly stimulate the exchange of resources among participants. This paper describes how resource sharing can be supported through revenue-based models between participants in a Social Cloud. This is first investigated using a simulation using PeerSim, and sequently implemented using the CometCloud system.

News coverage:

Cardiff University News: Citizen Science in Rural Brazil covering our collaboration with the Responsible Innovation Network (Cardiff Business School) , FGV (Sao Paulo), Brazil and University of Campinas, Brazil

Cardiff University News: Cyber risk research recognised by world-leading insurers covering our "Science of Risk" runners up prize from Lloyd's Insurance

EPSRC newsletter: Scientists stop and search malware hidden in shortened URLs on Twitter and in EurekAlert (AAAS)

IEEE Spectrum: Cybersecurity System IDs Malware Hidden in Short Twitter Links

Times of India: Tool to check malware in Twitter URLs and The Economic Times, New Kerala, Calcutta News

The Daily Free Press: U.K. researchers work to combat social media malware

BBC News -- covering the Lost Visions project.

Costain News: Cloud Computing Offers Data Breakthrough -- C4C project coverage

Building for Change: Research into cloud computing for construction shares in 5 million funding win -- C4C project coverage

Research Focus

My research interests lie in the overlap between Intelligent/Complex Systems and High Performance Distributed Computing.

I am particularly interested in how techniques from intelligent systems could be used to support resource management and performance enhancement in parallel and distributed systems. This interest has led me to consider a number of possible aspects over recent years, which include:

Improving performance and coordination within particular applications in science and engineering. This has involved collaboration with computational and social scientists who need to scale their applications or need access to specialist computational capability to improve accuracy and response time within their applications.

Integrating intelligent resource management mechanisms within existing high performance distributed computing infrastructures. This has involved collaboration with infrastructure vendors and administrators to: (i) evaluate where such resource management strategies could be most suitable; (ii) investigate techniques for undertaking such integration in practice.

Understanding theoretical foundations that better enable the two aspects outlined above, in order to formally assess how scale, performance or coordination could be supported when such applications or infrastructure change. My focus has particularly been on the use of dynamic systems models centered on Petri nets for undertaking such formal modelling.

Understanding how requirements of emerging applications -- such as streaming and "Big Data" impact the aspects above -- and validate these with realistic end user applications.

I am a steering committee member of:

Data Innovation Research Institute at Cardiff University
Energy Systems Research Institute at Cardiff University

Formerly Deputy Director of the Welsh eScience Centre at Cardiff University.

Other Research Networks:

Autonomic Road Transport Support Systems -- EU COST Action
Space for Sharing project -- advisory board
MOSAIC Cloud: Open Source API and Platform for Multiple Clouds -- advisory board
Cyber Physical Cloud Systems Technical Committee -- part of IEEE System, Man and Cybernetics Society
Social Clouds -- founding member

Current and Past Projects

Problem Solving Environments

Digital Libraries and Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-Agent Scalability

High Performance Java

I am part of the European GridLab project

GridOne-D

Grid Service Specification and Brokering

LEAF: A FIPA-Compliant Toolkit for Learning Agents

UDDIe: -- an extended version of the UDDI registry for Web Services

COVITE: Collaborative Virtual Teams project

QoS Management in Service-Oriented Grids

e-HTPX: High Throughput Protein Crystallography BBSRC-funded project

DIPSO: Distributed Problem Solving -- with Ian Parmee (University of West of England), AvantisWorld, EVOTEC and SEA Group, funded by EPSRC/DTI

CAPS (Modelling the Coordinated Activities of Players in High-Dimensional, High-Volume Sports Data Sets) with Ahmed Shihab (Kingston University) -- EPSRC-funded

PASOA (Provenance Aware Service Oriented Architecture) with Luc Moreau (University of Southampton) -- EPSRC-funded

GENSS: Grid Enabled Numerical and Symbolic Services -- with Julian Padget (Bath University) -- EPSRC-funded

WOSE (Workflow Optimisation Services), with Imperial College and Daresbury Laboratory -- EPSRC-funded

CATNETS EU project (funded under the "Future and Emerging Technologies" Programme by the European Commission)

Grid Provenance EU project (funded under the "Grid for Complex Problem Solving" Programme by the European Commission)

MeMeTIC (Meeting Memory Technologies Informing Collaboration) JISC VRE Project (Cardiff is an end user)

FAEHIM Data Mining Toolkit

Healthcare@Home project with the Diabetes Research Unit (Cardiff), Zarlink Semiconductors, Smart Holograms, and IBM Hursley (DTI "Interenterprise Computing" Programme)

KREATE: Knowledge Reuse and Extraction for Travel, with COMTEC Europe (KTP Programme)

Self-Organising ICT Resource Management (SORMA), led by Univ. of Karlsruhe -- EU FP6

KNOOGLE: Matchmaking and Brokering for eScience, with Julian Padget (Bath University), funded by OMII, UK

EDGES -- with Ian Taylor (Cardiff) -- led by Peter Kacsuk, EU FP7

ADAGE -- led by Fethi Rabhi (University of New South Wales, Australia)

Collaborative On-line Social Media Observatory (COSMOS) ESRC/Google/Airbus Group/NCRM/JISC funded

Lost Visions (AHRC funded) -- in collaboration with British Library

Clouds for Coordination (C4C): Cloud-based Project Coordination in the AEC Sector (EPSRC/InnovateUK funded) -- in collaboration with Building Research Establishment (BRE), Costain, IBM UK, AEC3, Lee Wakemans, RIBA Enterprises

Ebbs and Flows of Energy Systems (EFES) -- initially a feasibility study -- funded by EPSRC/InnovateUK, in collaboration with Cenex, Moixa Tech., Potenza Tech., Energy Saving Trust, KAM Futures

Identifying and modelling victim, business, regulatory and malware behaviours in a changing cyberthreat landscape -- funded by EPSRC/ESRC -- in collaboration with Royal Holloway (U. London), City University (London), University of Plymouth, University of Durham, University of Leeds

Mas2tering -- funded by European Commission -- in collaboration with Telecom. Italia, GDF Suez/Engie, CEA (France), Smart Metering Systems (SMS), R2M Solution, Cassidian Cybersecurity (Airbus Group), Waterford Institute of Technology, Laborelec

Editorial Boards and Special Issues

Associate Editor:
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (IEEE Computer Society Press)
Associate Editor:
ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (ACM Press)
Associate Editor:
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (ToIT) (ACM Press)
Editorial Board:
Journal of Cloud Computing (Springer)
Editorial Board:
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (Wiley)
Editorial Board:
IEEE Cloud Computing magazine (IEEE Computer Society Press)
(Former) Associate Editor: (until 2017)
IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (IEEE Computer Society Press)
Autonomic Systems Book Series Co-Editor (Birkhauser/Springer) -- and Facebook page for book series
Editorial Board:
International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications (Emerald Insight)
Editorial Board:
International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems (IJAACS) (Inderscience)

Write an on-line review Tom Wagner and Omer Rana (Ed)	Special Issue (High Performance Agent Systems) Omer F. Rana and David Kotz (Ed)	Special Issue (Infrastructure + Scalability) Tom Wagner and Omer Rana (Ed)

Special Issue (Agent based Computer Vision) Paul Rosin and Omer Rana (Ed)	Engineering Self-Organising Systems (Nature-Inspired Approaches to Software Engineering) Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo et al. (Ed)	Special Issue Self-Organization in Distributed Systems Engineering Franco Zambonelli and Omer Rana (Ed)

Publications

From the ORCA Repository:

1999

The Software Architecture of a Distributed Problem Solving Environment, David W. Walker, Maozhen Li, Omer F. Rana, Matthew S. Shields and Yan Huang, Oak Ridge Laboratory Technical Report, Computer Science and Mathematics Division, December 1999

Architecture of an Intelligent Resource Management System, Omer F. Rana, David W. Walker and Yan Huang, 18th UK Planning and Scheduling Workshop, Manchester, December 1999

Software Performance Prediction extracted from Designs, Omer F. Rana and Dave Jennings, Software Performance Prediction Workshop, Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, November 1999

Performance Analysis and Mapping Strategies for Automating Neural System Development, Omer F. Rana, Antonia J. Jones and Peter G. Harrison, Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems, MIT, November 1999. IASTED Press.

HPJava based Parallel Data Mining Framework, Omer F. Rana and Donald Fisk, IRI99, Atlanta, Georgia USA, November 1999

Component-Based Software Development in PSEs, Maozhen Li, Omer F. Rana and David W. Walker, IRI99, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, November 1999

A Design and Management Framework for Mobile Agent Systems, Omer F. Rana, 7th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), USA October 1999. IEEE Computer Society Press.

An XML Based Component Model For Generating Scientific Applications and Performing Large Scale Simulations in a Meta-Computing Environment, Omer F. Rana, Maozhen Li, David W. Walker and Matthew Shields, Generative Component Based Software Engineering Conference, Erfert, Germany, September 1999. In Postscript format.

Automating Performance Analysis of Neural Algorithms, Omer F. Rana, Antonia J. Jones and Peter G. Harrison, Fifteenth Annual UK Performance Engineering Workshop, Bristol, UK, July 1999

A Distributed Framework for Parallel Data Mining using HPJava O Rana and D Fisk, BT Technical Journal, Vol 17 Issue 3, pp 146-154, July 1999. Kluwer Academic/Springer.

A Java/CORBA Based Visual Program Composition Environment, Matthew Shields, David Walker, Omer Rana and David Golby, (poster), ACM JavaGrande Conference, San Francisco, California, USA, June 1999

A Model of the Meeting Design Pattern for Distributed Agent Systems, Omer F. Rana and Chiara Biancheri, Application of Petri Nets to Intelligent System Development, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA, Springer Verlag, June 1999

Bringing together Mobile Agents and Data Analysis in Problem Solving Environments, Omer F. Rana and David W. Walker , PDPTA, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, Springer Verlag, June 1999.

The Use of Java in High Performance Computing: A Data Mining Example David Walker and Omer F. Rana, High Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN), Amsterdam, Springer Verlag, February 1999. Springer Verlag. Available in postscript format

A Petri Net Model of the Meeting Design Pattern for Mobile-Stationary Agent Interaction Omer F. Rana and Chiara Biancheri , HICSS-32, Maui, Hawaii, January 1999. IEEE Computer Society Press. Available via Research Gate

Making Java work for High End Computing G. Thiruvathukal et al., SuperComputing98, Orlando, Florida, November 1998 (contribution to edited work)

High Performance Java, David W. Walker and Omer F. Rana , JTAP/JISC Report, August 1998. Downloads as a PS/GZIP document.

1998

From Neural Learning Algorithms to Parallel Architectures: A Practical Design Methodology, PhD Thesis, Imperial College, 1998. Supervisors: Professor Antonia Jones, Professor Peter Harrison