Information Services and Process Innovation Lab

Tuscany is an umbrella name for a group of projects in the area of service oriented architectures, with an emphasis on using economic pressures to drive automated management decisions. Prato is a service provider that offers dbms's-on-demand, setting them up in minutes, and automatically handling design for, and execution of, failure recovery.

Selected publications:

• Utilification redux. John Wilkes. Invited keynote for Middleware 2006, Nov. 2006, Melbourne, Australia.

  Explores how the widespread adoption of SOA has changed the view of what it takes to bring applications into a utility computing world. Includes a brief introduction to Tuscany and Prato.

• Service contracts and aggregate utility functions. Alvin AuYoung, Laura Grit, Janet Wiener, and John Wilkes. 15th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-15), pp. 119-131, June 2006, Paris, France.

  What if you want to persuade a service provider to do the right thing with collections of jobs, not just singletons. This paper explores how economic rewards (as aggregate utility functions) help achieve this goal.

• Profitable services in an uncertain world. Florentina I. Popovici and John Wilkes. Supercomputing'05 (SC|05), November 2005, Seattle, WA.

  Most prior work on job-execution services assume that the service owns its computers. What if it rents them instead? And what if the estimates it's given of how many computers will be available in the future is imprecise? This paper answers both questions.