COLLOQUIUM
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina

Cloud-Based Service Workflows

Qianhui (Althea) Liang

HP Labs, Singapore

Date: April 4, 2012
Time: 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm)
Place: Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge)

Abstract

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and cloud computing are two
major technologies that have gained significant momentum in recent
years. The speaker will present her research at the intersection of
SOA and cloud computing and, in particular, to address one of the
hurdles in moving Web services to the Cloud. When Web services are
moved into a cloud-computing environment, each service can be scaled
over as many servers as needed to handle increases in demand. However,
there is still the problem that external applications using the
services must move control and data information in and out of the
cloud, and this does not scale, especially when there is a large
amount of data to be moved. The speaker will present a technique for
storing the data of concern within internal data storages instead of
flowing them across the cloud. Cloud data containers are such
transitional storage that are placed within the cloud to hold
intermediate process data, such that the data traffic to and from the
cloud can be reduced substantially. The assignment of the physical
data containers to individual services relies on service dependency
relationships modeled by a directed graph that is termed a weighted
service-dependency graph. Dependent services share one or more data
containers. The speaker will also describe a data container selection
scheme to identify the containers best able to transmit data from one
partner service to another. An enhancement to the data container
scheme is to plan service deployments such that the traffic between
services within the cloud is minimized.

Dr. Qianhui Liang is a researcher in the Cloud and Security Lab at HP
Labs, Singapore. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the
University of Florida Her research has been published in IEEE
Transactions on Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man
and Cybernetics, International Journal of Web Services Research, and
Knowledge and Information Systems. She has served as PC vice chair,
publicity chair, and PC member for a number of international
conferences. Currently, she is on the editorial board of the
International Journal of Cloud Computing. She is also an executive
member and the honorary treasurer of the Singapore Cloud Forum. Her
research interests are cloud computing and technologies in PaaS
(Platform as a Service) to support data intensive applications.