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COVER FEATURES
BIG DATA TOOLS
An Earnest Talk on Big Data Technology
Big data and clouds exposed the unpreparedness of IT industry to handle previously unheard of data amounts, the lion's share of which is stored in relational databases: the formerly dominant idea of converging all the diverse data into plain tables is out-of-date now. Meanwhile, the market has no comprehensive solutions for processing large unstructured data flows coming in real-time from a multitude of sources.
Leonid Chernyak (osmag@osp.ru), Associate Editor in Chief, Open Systems
Big Data for IT Management
Big data analysis brings value today not only to bankers, biomedical scientists and marketers, but also to IT managers. Meanwhile, existing IT management tools do not provide means to assess their efficiency or to predict performance dynamics. Moreover, the modern complexity of IT environments leaves no place for manual management approaches at all.
Natalya Dubova (osmag@osp.ru), Associate Editor in Chief, Special Features, Open Systems
Big Data in Broker's Hands
Algorithmic trade systems are used extensively by financial institutions for automated stock market bargaining. The analysis of large amounts of diverse data performed using corresponding systems, such as the solutions stack from IBM Corp., allows getting a stable income through discovering minute stock quote fluctuations.
Oleg Bolgarchuk (oleg.bolgarchuk@ru.ibm.com), IT Architect, IBM
PLATFORMS
Kaveri All-in-One: AMD Kaveri APU
To gain competitive advantage in the microprocessor market, vendors make significant effort to provide versatility of their products giving them self-regulation capabilities. AMD is no exception with its hybrid chips that could be equally well used in gaming, mobile, and server applications.
Leonid Chernyak (osmag@osp.ru), Associate Editor in Chief, Open Systems
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Testing Elastic Computing Systems
Elastic computing systems are a new breed of software system that arose with cloud computing and continue to gain increasing attention and adoption. They stretch and contract in response to external stimuli such as the input workload, aiming to balance resource use, costs, and quality of service. Here, the authors introduce novel ideas on testing for elastic computing systems.
Alessio Gambi (gambi@usi.ch), Waldemar Hummer (hummer@usi.ch), Hong-Linh Truong (truong@usi.ch), Schahram Dustdar (dustdar@usi.ch), Researchers, Vienna University of Technology
APPLICATIONS
Video Commercials Monitoring
The development of video data processing systems is traditionally thought of as a arduous task that could be accomplished only by large software vendors. In certain cases however, the solution can be quite simple, e.g., when the need to monitor the number of views of a video commercial is to be addressed.
Konstantin Seleznyov (skostik@relex.ru), Maksim Efremov (mefremov@relex.ru), Vadim Melnikov (vadim@relex.ru), Engineers, RELEX
SECURITY
Critical Control System Protection in the 21st Century
Critical control systems manage many of today’s critical infrastructures, whose continuous operation, maintenance, and protection are high national priorities. The authors present the fundamental architectural components of these systems, identify vulnerabilities and potential threats, and describe protection solutions that can be deployed to mitigate attacks.
Cristina Alcaraz (alcaraz@lcc.uma.es), Postdoctoral researcher, University of Malaga; Sherali Zeadally (szeadally@uky.edu), Associate professor, University of Kentucky
INTEGRATION
Integration for Airbus
Aircraft industry is among the most competitive ones, especially the niche of passenger narrowbody jet airliners. A stumbling block for the development in this area is the necessity to work with legacy computer systems used in aircraft models created decades ago. In some cases however, the existing information siloes may allow to recreate the model of such a legacy system to connect it to modern lifecycle management solutions.
Nikita Kalutsky (nikita.kalutsky@progresstech.ru), Engineer, Progresstech-Dubna
STANDARDS
Web Annotation as a First-Class Object
The W3C Open Annotation Data Model provides facilities for annotating content directly on the Web without changing the original content. Third-party semantic annotations of content are now emerging as first-class objects on the Web.
Paolo Ciccarese (ciccarese@gmail.com), Instructor in Neurology, Harvard Medical School; Stian Soiland-Reyes (soiland-reyes@cs.manchester.ac.uk), technical software architect, University of Manchester; Tim Clark (tim_clark@harvard.edu), Director of Informatics at the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease
OPINION
Big Data Solutions Stack
Everyone seems to talk about big data these days, but few know how to handle them. It looks like the necessary technologies have come of age, but still haven't matured yet while the solutions stack, whatever the leading market players say, is a rather amorphous even if dynamic entity.
Dmitry Semynin (dsemynin@amt.ru), Director, AMT Group
OS MUSEUM
Metcalfe’s Law after 40 Years of Ethernet
Critics have declared Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users, a gross overestimation of the network effect, but nobody has tested the law with real data. Using a generalization of the sigmoid function called the netoid, Ethernet’s inventor and the law’s originator models Facebook user growth over the past decade and fits his law to the associated revenue.
Bob Metcalfe (bob.metcalfe@utexas.edu), Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise, The University of Texas at Austin.
EXTREME TECHNOLOGY
Tools for Data «Cowboys»
The responsibility of experts in the new field of data wrangling is to prepare large data sets for subsequent analysis.
Leonid Chernyak (osmag@osp.ru), Associate Editor in Chief, Open Systems
OS ACADEMY. WORKSHOP
Automated Text Processing Systems
The current diversity of automated unstructured text processing systems creates a need for their systematization and categorization required to ease the choice of a solution optimally fit for a task at hand.
Dmitriy Ilvovsky (dilvovsky@hse.ru), Fellow; Yekaterina Chernyak (echernyak@hse.ru), Fellow, Higher School of Economics
OS ACADEMY. LIBRARY
Power in simplicity
The November issue of Computer Magazine (IEEE Computer Society, Vol. 46, No. 11, 2013) deals with the topic of simplicity in IT.
Sergey Kuznetsov (kuzloc@ispras.ru), Professor, Moscow State University
