Past projects

A list of some of the past projects involving GSD members

NATIONAL PROJECTS

GINGER: Grid Infrastructure for Non-Grid EnviRonments

Funding: FCT (PTDC/EIA/73240/2006), Jan 2008 - Dec 2010
Coordinator: Luís Veiga
Web page: click here
Summary: In this proposal we present GINGER, a peer-to-peer Grid infrastructure that overcomes the existing barriers for widespread utilization of the Grid, by allowing users to cooperatively form a Grid infrastructure using each other's spare resources. GINGER's design was guided by several goals that are not met by current Grid infrastructures, such as ease of deployment and use, lack of centralized components, or the ability to run in an environment where nodes may not be willing to cooperate, and where failure is the norm, and not the exception.

Funding: FCT (PTDC/EIA/66589/2006), Jan 2008- Jun 2011
Coordinator: Paulo Ferreira
Web page: click here
Summary: The high-level overall goal of this project is to improve users’ productivity by supporting data access with high availability and performance. Optimistic replication is a well known technique to attain such goal but its usefulness strongly depends on the underlying consistency protocol to ensure fast and reliable replica consistency. This project will develop new algorithms, protocols, and system architectures running in prototypes that will ensure conflict minimization and rapid update convergence appropriate for resource-constrained devices. The contributions will be in the area of consistency of replicated data. In particular: i) a consistency protocol that decouples consistency information from data propagation, thus minimizing network bandwidth, ii) voting-based update protocols allowing rapid commitment in the presence of failures or partitions, and iii) content-based indexing for structuring the data allowing the use of similarities between data, thus reducing memory usage.

Funding: FCT (GRID/GRI/81752/2006), Jul 2007 - Dec 2010
Coordinator: Paulo Ferreira
Web page: click here
Summary: The main objective of this project is to design a platform that supports the definition, deployment and enforcement of distributed history-based policies in a scalable and effective manner. In addition, we will provide a prototype implementation that proves the feasibility of the concept and evaluate its performance based on the simulation of selected grid usage scenarios. To achieve the above mentioned goal there are several challenges that must be addressed. As a matter of fact, in spite of being used for a number of applications, grid platforms still present a number of limitations in what concerns the enforcement of advanced usage models.

Funding: FCT (PTDC/EIA/72405/2006), Jan 208- Dec 2010
Coordinator: João Cachopo (SE group)
Web page: http://pastramy.gsd.inesc-id.pt
Summary: This projects brings the FénixEDU team together with two research teams with a significant expertise on building replication solutions to relational and object oriented databases. This will allow the FénixEDU to get an insight on the pros and cons of existing replication techniques (both from a theoretical and a practical point of view). Reciprocally, the database replication experts will obtain an inside view of the singularities of the STM approach. The project will use these synergy to design, develop, implement and validate a Persistent and highly Available Software TRansactional MemorY.

Funding: FCT (PTDC/EIA/71752/2006), Jan 2008 - Dec 2010
Coordinator: Luís Rodrigues
Web page: http://redico.gsd.inesc-id.pt
Summary: The Redico project intends to leverage on the significant experience of the group with protocol composition frameworks to build a new framework tailored to support dynamic reconfiguration.

Funding: FCT (PTDC/EIA/74325/2006), Jan 2008 - Dec 2011
Coordinator: João Barreto (local coordinator)
Web page: click here
Summary: The central goal of this project is to build a replicated database system that tolerates Byzantine faults. The main challenge resides in the fact that Byzantine fault tolerance replication introduces a non-negligible performance overhead. This fact, combined with the necessity of the use of eager replication, has led to a low adoption of Byzantine fault tolerance in database replication. This project aims at developing novel techniques for improving the performance of Byzantine fault tolerant replicated databases.

Funding: FCT (PTDC/EIA-EIA/10xxxx/20xx), 2005- 2008
Coordinator: Paulo Ferreira
Web page: click here
Summary: The introduction of electronic voting (e-voting) in National Election Systems has recently received a significant interest in several countries (e.g. USA, Canada, UK, Portugal). The studies conducted until today clearly demonstrate that this type of system is perceived as having a high level of risk. As researchers in the complex systems, organization and software engineering fields, we are trying to analyze the problems associated to general e-voting systems, relating them with the system architecture and components, and finding new ways to deploy systems with reduced risk levels.

Funding: internal, 2008-
Coordinator: Luís Rodrigues
Web page: http://peervibes.gsd.inesc-id.pt
Summary: This project intents to provide a framework and tools to create a web based social network on top of a peer-to-peer architecture.