TC 10 - Computer Systems Technology - Aims
and Scopes
est. 1976,
revised 1987
AIMS
The Aims of the
Committee are the promotion of the State-of-the-Art and the coordination of
information exchange on concepts, methodologies, and tools in the stages in the
life cycle of computer systems.
SCOPE
system and component concepts, architecture and organisation;
specification, design and verification methodologies of computer
systems;
logical design and fabrication of components and systems;
evaluation of the parameters of computer systems and components;
reliability;
assessment of emerging technologies;
application specific computer systems and components including
peripherals.
WG10.2
– Embedded Systems
est. 2006
AIMS
The WG10.2 shall be constituted as a group under the sponsoring
organization with the following basic aims:
to be the internationally open reference group for all aspects of
embedded system design promoted and sponsored by the sponsoring organization of
the WG10.2:
to further the dissemination and exchange of information and
experience on research and applications in the area of embedded systems;
to address ES designers and researchers from both, industry and
academia;
to encourage education in all areas of embedded systems;
to further the interdisciplinary character of embedded systems,
that encompasses hardware (system on a chip), real-time software, real-time
operating systems, control theory, intelligent features, dependability issues.
SCOPE
Embedded
systems are gaining increasing importance in all aspects of engineering. It is
expected that in the near future roughly no technical artifact will exist
without embedded information technology. There is a tendency to software
oriented embedded and/or dependable systems, based on standardized
micro-controller cores. This implies that the design of embedded real-time
software and real-time operating systems will play a dominant role in this
field. As more and more networks of micro-controllers are applied, real-time
communication systems and in general the design of distributed embedded systems
will gain importance. As high-performance embedded computing components have
become available the challenges of designing embedded systems have become more
acute.
The scope of
WG10.2 comprises in detail to:
organize events in the area of ES (e.g. DIPES (Distributed and
Parallel Embedded Systems));
seek co-operation with user and interest groups as well as with
ES-oriented groups within IFIP and other societies;
discuss, disseminate and exchange information on ES-related
standardization activities;
study and encourage curricula on ES design;
initiate and organize new ES-related activities.
WG10.3
- Concurrent Systems
est. 1978, revised 1979, 1988, 2006
AIMS
The study of
computer systems, having several computing elements, with the goal of improving
the quality of attributes such as cost, performance, programmability,
extendability and functionality.
The study
includes the interrelation software/firmware/hardware in specification, design
and implementation.
SCOPE
Exploration of problem areas and solutions pertaining to the
interrelation between the hardware functions and the software functions in
systems such as supervisors, data management, language translators, I/O
systems, and user interfaces.
Evaluation of the implementation of trends in computer systems
technology on the interrelation of software, firmware and hardware.
Evaluation of the implication of this interrelation in the trends
in computer systems technology.
WG10.4
- Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance
est. 1980, revised 1988
AIMS
Increasingly,
individuals and organizations are developing or procuring sophisticated
computing systems on whose services they need to place great reliance. In
differing circumstances, the focus will be on differing properties of such
services - e.g. continuity, performance, real-time response, ability to avoid
catastrophic failures, prevention of deliberate privacy intrusions. The notion
of dependability, defined as that property of a computing system which allows
reliance to be justifiably placed on the serve it delivers, enables these
various concerns to be subsumed within a single conceptional framework.
Dependability thus includes as special cares such attributes as reliability,
availability, safety, security. The Working Group is aimed at identifying and
integrating approaches, methods and techniques for specifying, designing,
building, assessing, validating, operating and maintaining computer systems
which should exhibit some or all of these attributes.
SCOPE
Specifically,
the Working Group is concerned with progress in:
understanding of faults (accidental faults, be they physical,
design induced, originating from human interaction; intentional faults) and
their effect;
specification and design methods for dependability;
methods for error detection and processing, and for fault
treatment;
validation (testing, verification, evaluation) and design for
testability and verifiability;
assessing dependability through modelling and measurement.
WG10.4 SIG on Education in Resilient Computing
est. 2009
AIMS
The primary aims of the SIG are:
To acquire knowledge on
how Resilient Computing is taught today in different worldwide higher
educations institutions;
To compare the experiences
so to provide an incremental process towards the structuring of an educational
track in Resilient computing;
To promote the outcomes
of the SIG to update or change or start proper tracks in Resilient Computing in
higher educations institutions;
To interact
with\international bodies working on educational issues i.e. ACM, IFIP, etc.,
to present the outcomes of the SIG;
To collect and make
accessible, through the web, support material useful to cover the several
disciplines relevant to Resilient Computing
To build and maintain a
comprehensive database of material, available to the community of students,
scientists, industrial designers and regulatory bodies
SCOPE
The
adjective resilient has been in use for decades in the field of dependable
computing systems essentially as a synonym of fault-tolerant, thus generally
ignoring the unexpected aspect of the phenomena the systems may have to face.
These phenomena become of primary relevance when moving to systems like the
future large, networked, evolving systems constituting complex information
infrastructures – perhaps involving everything from super-computers and
huge server “farms” to myriads of small mobile computers and tiny
embedded devices, with humans being central part of the operation of such
systems. Such systems are in fact the emergence of the ubiquitous systems that
will support Ambient Intelligence.
From
an educational point of view, very few Universities, if any, are offering a
comprehensive and methodical curriculum that is able to provide students with a
multi-disciplinary preparation that makes them able to cope with the challenges
posed by the design of ubiquitous systems. Multi-disciplinarily spans over
dependability, security, usability, human factors, legal issues and ethics.
Thus, from the educational point of view there is the need to scale-up the
spectrum of topics offered, to identify the best curricular structure to make
successful both teaching and learning processes.
It
is thus relevant to have an open worldwide forum in which the different
educational approaches to teaching Resilient Computing are presented, compared
and discussed to reach an agreed approach to this issue.
In
addition it will be very valuable to collect together in a open and public
database all available support material (as lecture’s slides, textbooks,
relevant literature, links to useful sites, etc.) that covers the different
facets of multi-disciplinarily.
A
first attempt to offer to our community a proposal for an MSc curriculum in
Resilient Computing and gather extended support material has been done very
recently in a European Network of Excellence ReSIST; the material is accessible
at http://resist.isti.cnr.it/home.php.
WG10.4
SIG on Concepts and Ontologies
est. 2009
AIMS
1. To take part in the
development of the updated Computing Classification System (CCS) that is
undertaken by the ACM to assure that our domain of interest is properly
represented, since that was not the case in the two previous versions (1988 and
1998) of the CCS.
2. To develop a thesaurus
and an ontology that integrates the concepts of dependability, security,
resilience, robustness, trustworthiness, survivability, high confidence,
information assurance, self-healing (and possibly other related terms) and identifies their similarities and differences.
3. To employ document
clustering algorithms and other classification techniques in order to create a
methodology for automatic identification of related documents from all the
domains listed in Aim 2 above. To use
the methodology in developing automatic tools that assist researchers and
referees in creating and evaluating new research results.
4. To use advanced natural
language processing (NLP) tools and to collaborate with artificial intelligence
experts of the computational linguistics and knowledge representation
domains in the pursuit of the above Aims
2 and 3.
5. To use our experience in
order to promote the formation of an IFIP activity aimed to create a thesaurus,
an ontology and a classification system for the entire field of informatics (
computer science and engineering), possibly in collaboration with the ACM.
SCOPE
Dependability has naturally concerned most disciplines of computer
science and engineering (informatics) since the early days. As a consequence,
significantly different terminologies were developed by different communities
to describe the same aspects of dependability. The terminologies became
entrenched through usage at annual conferences, in books, journals, research
reports, standards, industrial handbooks and manuals, patents, etc.
As an illustration, we have the concepts of dependability,
security, trustworthiness, survivability, high confidence, resilience,
information assurance, robustness, self-healing, etc., whose definitions appear
to be identical or to overlap extensively. In many cases the definitions
themselves have multiple versions that depend on a given author’s
preference.
An example of a long-term effort to create a framework of dependability
and security concepts is the effort within IEEE CS TC/DCFT and IFIP WG 10.4
that since a special session at FTCS-12 in 1982 has resulted in a series of
papers, a six-language book, and in 2004 a “Taxonomy” paper in
vol.1, no.1 of the IEEE Transactions on
Dependable and Secure Computing. No other community has produced such a
taxonomy.
The description of a domain by several synonyms or near-synonyms
that lack well-defined distinctions is a source of continuing confusion that
leads to re-inventions and plagiarism, impairs the transfer of research results
to practical use in industry and impairs the recognition of related documents.
The orderly progress of dependability research and its practical
applications requires that past work as well as new results should be
classified on the basis of a single ontology and thus made accessible to the
entire profession. However, it is unreasonable to expect that a committee
formed by the different communities could by volunteer effort create a taxonomy
document from which a single consensus ontology could be generated.
It must be concluded that today the purely
“intellectual” (i.e., human) process of ontology building for
dependability concepts is reaching its limits. The complementary solution is to
augment the human effort by the use of automatic natural language processing
tools that have been developed by computer linguists. The next step must be
computer-aided building of a consensus ontology.
During the past decade much progress has been made in the
development of computer tools for human language processing. Such tools have
been developed for the extraction of term candidates from a corpus (set of
texts). A thesaurus (list of important terms with related terms for each entry)
is constructed from the term candidates. The ontology for a given domain is a
data model that represents those terms and their relationships. Automatic indexation of the texts is
carried out using the thesaurus, followed by clustering analysis using
statistical and linguistic techniques. A measure of similarity between texts is
computed that serves as a basis for automatic classification. The applicability
of the above listed techniques to texts in the dependability domain has been
part of research supported by the European Network of Excellence ReSIST
(Resilience for Survivability in Information Society Technologies) in
2006-2009.
The corpus is composed of the texts of nearly 2000 papers
presented at all 29 FTCS and 7 DSN conferences (1971-2006).The encouraging
results of the processing of texts from the FTCS/DSN community leads to the
conjecture that similar processing of texts from other conferences, journals,
books, industrial documents, etc., will produce other ontologies that can be
merged into a consensus ontology that covers the entire domain of dependability
and its near-synonyms.
A dependability ontology is an integral part of an (still
non-existent) ontology for all of computer science and engineering. The only existing and widely used taxonomy
that could be used to build it is the ACM Computing Classification System
(CCS). The CCS was created in 1988 and
was last revised in 1998. It has fallen far behind the evolution of CS&E
and information technology. The concepts of dependability are treated very
inadequately, and many significant dependability terms are altogether missing
in the 1998 ACM CCS taxonomy.
The coming update of the CCS is a
challenge to the dependability community: we must take part in the process of
creating an up-to-date and evolvable version of the CCS that adequately
incorporates dependability concepts. The new CCS would allow the computer-aided
construction of a thesaurus and an ontology for the entire CS&E profession.
However, a consensus dependability ontology with explicit synonymy relations
must be available to the CCS builders.
Finally, it is very appropriate for IFIP
to take part in the building of a CCS. The experience of the SIG can serve as a
starting point for such an effort within IFIP.
WG10.5
- Design and Engineering of Electronic Systems
est. 1981, revised 1988, merged with WG 10.2 in 1994, rev. 2003
AIMS
Electronic
system design demands a tight integration on a very large profile of knowledge
and skills ranging from hardware and software system architecture to
semiconductor physics.
Functionality of complex embedded or stand-alone systems, to be applied in
areas such as general-purpose computing, telecommunications, automotive,
entertainment, and multimedia, may be realized by various combinations of
analog and digital hardware and software parts.
Systems can be implemented by single or multiple integrated circuits and
software modules that can be either of special purpose, programmable or
reconfigurable.
The working group aims at providing a forum amongst creative experts to explore
problem areas and solutions for the design of such complex electronic systems
and also disseminating the solutions to a broader industrial and educational
sphere.
SCOPE
The Working
Group is interested in a broad range of topics related to the design and
engineering of heterogeneous systems, containing hardware, software, and even
mechanical parts.
System Design Methods
Embedded Systems
Modeling and Specification
Design Validation
Formal Methods in Design
Synthesis
Design Environments
Reconfigurable Computing
VLSI Systems and Applications
Physical Design
Test and Testability
Power-aware Design
Analog and Mixed-Signal Systems
Fundamental CAD Algorithms