Apr 15
2013
By Grace Lewis
Technical Lead
Edge-Enabled Tactical Systems Research
In 2009, a popular blogger published a post entitled “SOA is Dead,” which generated extensive commentary among those who work in the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Many practitioners in this field completely misinterpreted the post;
some read the title and just assumed that the content referenced the
demise of SOA. Quite the opposite, the post was inviting people to stop
thinking about SOA as a set of technologies and start embracing SOA as
an approach for designing, developing, and managing distributed systems
that goes beyond just the technology. Unfortunately, even though SOA is
still alive and widely adopted, a belief still persists that SOA can be
purchased off the shelf. This post highlights recent research aimed
at clarifying this misperception for architects, as well as identifying
the elements that constitute a service-oriented system and the
relationships between these elements.
Read more...
Mar 4
2013
By Grace Lewis
Technical Lead,
Edge-Enabled Tactical Systems Research
In
2011, Col. Timothy Hill, director of the Futures Directorate within the
Army Intelligence and Security Command, urged industry to take a more
open-standards approach to cloud computing. “Interoperability
between clouds, as well as the portability of files from one cloud to
another, has been a sticking point in general adoption of cloud
computing,” Hill said during a panel at the AFCEA International 2011 Joint Warfighting Conference.
Hill’s view has been echoed by many in the cloud computing community,
who believe that the absence of interoperability has become a barrier to
adoption. This posting reports on recent research exploring the role of standards in cloud computing and offers recommendations for future standardization efforts.
Read more...
Nov 14
2011
By Grace Lewis,
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Research Technology & System Solutions
Cloudlets,
which are lightweight servers running one or more virtual machines
(VMs), allow soldiers in the field to offload resource-consumptive and
battery-draining computations from their handheld devices to nearby
cloudlets. This architecture decreases latency by using a single-hop
network and potentially lowers battery consumption by using WiFi instead
of broadband wireless. This posting extends our original post
by describing how we are using cloudlets to help soldiers perform
various mission capabilities more effectively, including facial, speech,
and imaging recognition, as well as decision making and mission
planning.
Read more...
Jun 20
2011
By Grace Lewis,
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Research, Technology, and System Solutions Program
The Department of Defense (DoD) is increasingly interested in having soldiers carry handheld mobile computing devices
to support their mission needs. Soldiers can use handheld devices to
help with various tasks, such as speech and image recognition, natural
language processing, decision-making and mission planning. Three
challenges, however, present obstacles to achieving these capabilities.
The first challenge is that mobile devices offer less computational
power than a conventional desktop or server computer. A second challenge
is that computation-intensive tasks, such as image recognition or even
global positioning system (GPS), take a heavy toll on battery power. The
third challenge is dealing with unreliable networks and bandwidth. This
post explores our research to overcome these challenges by using
cloudlets, which are localized, lightweight servers running one or more
virtual machines (VMs) on which soldiers can offload expensive
computations from their handheld mobile devices, thereby providing
greater processing capacity and helping conserve battery power.
Read more...
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