Jie Xu, Professor of Computing

Inaugural lecture

‘Services and Clouds' – System-Level Science for the Real World

Recent advances in technological capabilities, including computational power, storage, and networking, and infrastructure innovations such as the Internet, Web services and Clouds, are providing exciting opportunities to make significant progress in understanding and solving complex real-world challenges. Such challenges typically require a system-level approach that models a complex system at different levels of abstraction, helps to develop sound architectures for addressing separate system requirements and concerns, and integrates diverse sources of knowledge on the system’s components and their interactions.

In his lecture Jie will cover three fundamental aspects of System-Level Science: infrastructure, supporting software, and real-world applications. He will start with a brief introduction to the White Rose Grid as the enabling infrastructure for conducting research into large-scale scientific and engineering problems. He will then discuss the software systems running on this infrastructure, developed to facilitate the use of infrastructure resources for System-Level Science, and explain their design principles and technical strengths by examples of CROWN-C, a service-oriented Grid system, and iVIC, a Cloud Computing platform. Jie will conclude his address through two real-world applications: firstly an engineering challenge for achieving network-enabled capability and competitive advantage; and secondly, an event-driven model which simulates discrete demographic processes, with the ability to project the UK population twenty-five years into the future.