Systems

The Systems Group do fundamental research in distributed systems, protocols, algorithms and middleware, and construct realistic systems and applications to demonstrate and evaluate the viability of our ideas. The research is driven by the challenges in creating large-scale Internet services (such as multi-organisation collaborative applications, distributed virtual environments and utility computing), and in enabling dynamic ubiquitous computing scenarios (such as ad hoc and mobile networks). They invent algorithms and build middleware that resolve the core research problems related to trust, security, fault tolerance, contract compliance, scalability, service composition, orchestration and performance evaluation in these large-scale highly dynamic settings.

 Security and Trust: Fake payment terminal.

The systems group has a rich and longstanding tradition. Work on distributed transactional objects carried out during late eighties to mid nineties led to the formation of the group's spin-off company Arjuna Technologies ltd. Arjuna transaction service software is now an integral part of JBoss application servervmiddleware from Redhat Inc, the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise. In the year 2000, the research group won the award for innovation in IT from the British Computing Society. They also won the 2006 IEEE Service Computing Contest, and the 2007 EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award for Nick Cook's thesis. Notable research milestones include the development of the group communication middleware Newtop, fundamental insights in queueing systems and interest management algorithms for distributed games. The group hosted the North East Regional e-Science Centre from 2001, running the £12M Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy Hub (SiDE) since 2009, and is hosting the Red Hat Cloud Research Centre. Early work on databases and grid computing led to the design and release of the widely adopted OGSA-DQP system for internet-scale distributed querying. Our work on cloud has led to the design of e-Science Central, which is used to underpin of £20M of research projects ranging from the UK X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy service (NEXU) to work on activity monitoring for older people (MOVEeCloud).

The work is funded from a variety of sources, including EC, EPSRC, HP, Unilever, TSB, BT, Red Hat, RCUK and Microsoft. We collaborate widely with industry and other Universities, including: Dundee, UCL, University of Cambridge, University of Warwick, INRIA, Universita di Bologna, Carnegie-Mellon University, British Telecom, SUN, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Red Hat, Arjuna Technologies Ltd.

Group members and areas of research:

Prof. Aad van Moorsel
Prof. Aad van Moorsel (Group leader for Systems)

Aad van Moorsel is a Professor in Distributed Systems and Head of School at the School of Computing Science in Newcastle University. His group conducts research in security, privacy and trust. Almost all of the group's research contains elements of quantification, be it through system measurement, predictive modelling or on-line adaptation.

Aad worked in industry from 1996 until 2003, first as a researcher at Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill and then as a research manager at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, both in the United States.

The group is subdivided in three more focussed subgroups, Security and Trust, Distributed Algorithms and Cloud Computing.

Security and Trust

The systems research in security and trust deals with all issues of protecting distributed computing and information systems against attacks, crime and malicious behaviour. We design software solutions for cloud and related service provision systems, in which multiple parties come together and must establish trustworthy interactions. We demonstrate that our goals can be achieved through implementations, as well as through model-based quantitative evaluation. The latter also provides us with a set of tools and techniques that assist in objective decision-making about computer and information security.

People working in Security and Trust:

Distributed Algorithms

At the heart of the systems and middleware we build, one typically finds newly invented algorithms, which are required to establish trust, security, reliability and other properties. The implementation of these system algorithms is usually extremely challenging, since the abstractions that proof the algorithms correct are often extremely hard to implement in real systems. We are continuously developing new algorithms and associated implementations, for instance establishing the following properties:

  • fair, non-repudiation algorithms in multi-party business transactions
  • families of replication algorithms, to tolerate Byzantine failures (malicious attacks) and to establish consensus and reliable dissemination in wireless environments
  • economics-inspired mechanisms to establish trust between service provider and customer
  • on-line load-balancing and resource allocation based on light-weight monitoring solutions
  • real-time interest management algorithms to avoid missing interactions in multi-player distributed virtual environments

People working in Distributed Algorithms:

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing has the potential to revolutionise the way computer systems are designed and delivered, and we carry out research to realise this potential. Methods for building scalable cloud-based applications are explored in a range of projects. Since 2007, this has been focused on e-Science Central, a portable cloud platform for storing, analysing and sharing data. e-Science Central is used to support a wide range of applications and users through the Digital Institute. It is also our main research vehicle for cloud research in areas including provenance, scalability, formal methods and federated clouds.

There is a strong focus on data as well as computation, especially in the area of e-Science. This includes work on highly-scalable cloud algorithms to build models of molecular activity (reducing time from years to hours), and on linked data (including the semantic web).

We also explore how advanced digital technologies can improve the lives of those from vulnerable groups, including older people, disabled people, and marginalised youth. The £12M Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy (SiDE) project aims to realise the potential of digital technologies to transform the lives of those who are excluded. This drives much of our work on cloud computing as SiDE makes heavy use of sensor-based systems which generate large amounts of data that must be analysed in order to understand human behaviour, often in real-time. Scalable processing of event data is a growing focus for our work, and is now being expanded to include both real-time and historic processing of social media data (e.g. from Twitter).

People working in Cloud Computing:

Further information: