Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Modelling and Simulation (M&S) offer adequate abstractions to manage the complexity of analysing big data in scientific and engineering domains. Unfortunately, big data problems are often not easily amenable to efficient and effective use of High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities and technologies. Furthermore, M&S communities typically lack the detailed expertise required to exploit the full potential of HPC solutions while HPC specialists may not be fully aware of specific modelling and simulation requirements and applications.

The COST Action IC1406 has created a strategic framework to foster interaction between M&S experts from various application domains on the one hand and HPC experts on the other hand to develop effective solutions for big data applications. One of the tangible outcomes of the COST Action is a collection of case studies from various computing domains. Each case study brought together both HPC and M&S experts, giving witness of the effective cross-pollination facilitated by the COST Action.

In this introductory article we argue why joining forces between M&S and HPC communities is both timely in the big data era and crucial for success in many application domains. Moreover, we provide an overview on the state of the art in the various research areas concerned.

Numerical solution methods for electromagnetic scattering problems lead to large systems of equations with millions or even billions of unknown variables. The coefficient matrices are dense, leading to large computational costs and storage requirements if direct methods are used. A commonly used technique is to instead form a hierarchical representation for the parts of the matrix that corresponds to far-field interactions. The overall computational cost and storage requirements can then be reduced to . This still corresponds to a large-scale simulation that requires parallel implementation. The hierarchical algorithms are rather complex, both regarding data dependencies and communication patterns, making parallelization non-trivial. In this chapter, we describe two classes of algorithms in some detail, we provide a survey of existing solutions, we show results for a proof-of-concept implementation, and we provide various perspectives on different aspects of the problem.

Estimation of tail distributions and extreme quantiles is important in areas such as risk management in finance and insurance in relation to extreme or catastrophic events. The main difficulty from the statistical perspective is that the available data to base the estimates on is very sparse, which calls for tailored estimation methods. In this chapter, we provide a survey of currently used parametric and non-parametric methods, and provide some perspectives on how to move forward with non-parametric kernel-based estimation.

This chapter presents the authors’ work for the Case Study entitled “Delivering Social Media with Scalability” within the framework of High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet) COST Action 1406. We identify some core research areas and give an outline of the publications we came up within the framework of the aforementioned action. The ease of user content generation within social media platforms, e.g. check-in information, multimedia data, etc., along with the proliferation of Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled, always-connected capture devices lead to data streams of unprecedented amount and a radical change in information sharing. Social data streams raise a variety of practical challenges: derivation of real-time meaningful insights from effectively gathered social information, a paradigm shift for content distribution with the leverage of contextual data associated with user preferences, geographical characteristics and devices in general, etc. In this article we present the methodology we followed, the results of our work and the outline of a comprehensive survey, that depicts the state-of-the-art situation and organizes challenges concerning social media streams and the infrastructure of the data centers supporting the efficient access to data streams in terms of content distribution, data diffusion, data replication, energy efficiency and network infrastructure. The challenges of enabling better provisioning of social media data have been identified and they were based on the context of users accessing these resources. The existing literature has been systematized and the main research points and industrial efforts in the area were identified and analyzed. In our works, in the framework of the Action, we came up with potential solutions addressing the problems of the area and described how these fit in the general ecosystem.

Fifth generation mobile networks (5G) will rather supplement than replace current 4G networks by dramatically improving their bandwidth, capacity and reliability. This way, much more demanding use cases that simply are not achievable with today’s networks will become reality - from home entertainment, to product manufacturing and healthcare. However, many of them rely on Internet of Things (IoT) devices equipped with low-cost transmitters and sensors that generate enormous amount of data about their environment. Therefore, due to large scale of 5G systems, combined with their inherent complexity and heterogeneity, Big Data and analysis techniques are considered as one of the main enablers of future mobile networks. In this work, we recognize 5G use cases from various application domains and list the basic requirements for their development and realization.

When coupled with spatio-temporal context, location-based data collected in mobile cellular networks provide insights into patterns of human activity, interactions, and mobility. Whilst uncovered patterns have immense potential for improving services of telecom providers as well as for external applications related to social wellbeing, its inherent massive volume make such ‘Big Data’ sets complex to process. A significant number of studies involving such mobile phone data have been presented, but there still remain numerous open challenges to reach technology readiness. They include efficient access in privacy-preserving manner, high performance computing environments, scalable data analytics, innovative data fusion with other sources–all finally linked into the applications ready for operational mode. In this chapter, we provide a broad overview of the entire workflow from raw data access to the final applications and point out the critical challenges in each step that need to be addressed to unlock the value of data generated by mobile cellular networks.

Recent developments in sensor technology, wearable computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and wireless communication have given rise to research in ubiquitous healthcare and remote monitoring of human’s health and activities. Health monitoring systems involve processing and analysis of data retrieved from smartphones, smart watches, smart bracelets, as well as various sensors and wearable devices. Such systems enable continuous monitoring of patients psychological and health conditions by sensing and transmitting measurements such as heart rate, electrocardiogram, body temperature, respiratory rate, chest sounds, or blood pressure. Pervasive healthcare, as a relevant application domain in this context, aims at revolutionizing the delivery of medical services through a medical assistive environment and facilitates the independent living of patients. In this chapter, we discuss (1) data collection, fusion, ownership and privacy issues; (2) models, technologies and solutions for medical data processing and analysis; (3) big medical data analytics for remote health monitoring; (4) research challenges and opportunities in medical data analytics; (5) examples of case studies and practical solutions.

The faithful reproduction and accurate prediction of the phenotypes and emergent behaviors of complex cellular systems are among the most challenging goals in Systems Biology. Although mathematical models that describe the interactions among all biochemical processes in a cell are theoretically feasible, their simulation is generally hard because of a variety of reasons. For instance, many quantitative data (e.g., kinetic rates) are usually not available, a problem that hinders the execution of simulation algorithms as long as some parameter estimation methods are used. Though, even with a candidate parameterization, the simulation of mechanistic models could be challenging due to the extreme computational effort required. In this context, model reduction techniques and High-Performance Computing infrastructures could be leveraged to mitigate these issues. In addition, as cellular processes are characterized by multiple scales of temporal and spatial organization, novel hybrid simulators able to harmonize different modeling approaches (e.g., logic-based, constraint-based, continuous deterministic, discrete stochastic, spatial) should be designed. This chapter describes a putative unified approach to tackle these challenging tasks, hopefully paving the way to the definition of large-scale comprehensive models that aim at the comprehension of the cell behavior by means of computational tools.

Drug discovery and development requires the integration of multiple scientific and technological disciplines in chemistry, biology and extensive use of information technology. Computer Aided Drug Discovery (CADD) methods are being used in this work area with several different workflows. Virtual screening (VS) is one of the most often applied CADD methods used in rational drug design, which may be applied in early stages of drug discovery pipeline. The increasing number of modular and scalable cloud-based computational platforms can assist the needs in VS studies. Such platforms are being developed to try to help researchers with various types of applications to prepare and guide the drug discovery and development pipeline. They are designed to perform VS efficiently, aimed to identify commercially available lead-like and drug-like compounds to be acquired and tested. Chemical datasets can be built, libraries can be analyzed, and structure-based or ligand-based VS studies can be performed with cloud technologies. Such platforms could also be adapted to be included in different stages of the pharmaceutical R&D process to rationalize the needs, e.g. to repurpose drugs, with various computational scalability options. This chapter introduces basic concepts and tools by outlining the general workflows of VS, and their integration to the cloud platforms. This may be a seed for further inter-disciplinary development of VS to be applied by drug hunters.

Body Area Networks (BANs) connect together nodes attached to a human body and transfer the data to an external infrastructure. The wireless communication channel and a variety of miniature sensor devices have lead to many useful applications of BANs, such as healthcare monitoring, military and emergency coordination, rescue services, sports, and entertainment. The Ultra Wide Band (UWB) communication model is widely used in wireless body area networks. UWB Radio Frequency (RF) technology provides robust and energy efficient transmission of data and signals through wireless networks. This chapter surveys recent models, applications and research challenges for future generation UWB RF technology for BANs. The chapter also discusses the state-of-the art in the cloud-based support for data storage and analysis in mobile health monitoring. Security issues for BANs in general and mobile health monitoring are addressed as a key aspect of the recent developments in the domain.