Luís Rodrigues - Böcker

The distributed systems architect assembles pieces of hardware that are at least as large as a computer or a network router, and assigns pieces of software that are self-contained, such as Java applets, to those hardware components. As system complexity, size and diversity grow, the probability of inconsistency, unreliability, non-responsiveness and insecurity, increases. It is necessary for distributed systems architects to understand the management of such complex systems. This book addresses these issues.

The primary audience for this book are advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Computer architecture, as it happened in other fields such as electronics, evolved from the small to the large, that is, it left the realm of low-level hardware constructs, and gained new dimensions, as distributed systems became the keyword for system implementation. As such, the system architect, today, assembles pieces of hardware that are at least as large as a computer or a network router or a LAN hub, and assigns pieces of software that are self-contained, such as client or server programs, Java applets or pro­ tocol modules, to those hardware components. The freedom she/he now has, is tremendously challenging. The problems alas, have increased too. What was before mastered and tested carefully before a fully-fledged mainframe or a closely-coupled computer cluster came out on the market, is today left to the responsibility of computer engineers and scientists invested in the role of system architects, who fulfil this role on behalf of software vendors and in­ tegrators, add-value system developers, R&D institutes, and final users. As system complexity, size and diversity grow, so increases the probability of in­ consistency, unreliability, non responsiveness and insecurity, not to mention the management overhead. What System Architects Need to Know The insight such an architect must have includes but goes well beyond, the functional properties of distributed systems.

Engineering systems operate through actuators, most of which will exhibit phenomena such as saturation or zones of no operation, commonly known as dead zones. These are examples of piecewise-affine characteristics, and they can have a considerable impact on the stability and performance of engineering systems. This book targets controller design for piecewise affine systems, fulfilling both stability and performance requirements.The authors present a unified computational methodology for the analysis and synthesis of piecewise affine controllers, taking an approach that is capable of handling sliding modes, sampled-data, and networked systems. They introduce algorithms that will be applicable to nonlinear systems approximated by piecewise affine systems, and they feature several examples from areas such as switching electronic circuits, autonomous vehicles, neural networks, and aerospace applications.Piecewise Affine Control: Continuous-Time, Sampled-Data, and Networked Systems is intended for graduate students, advanced senior undergraduate students, and researchers in academia and industry. It is also appropriate for engineers working on applications where switched linear and affine models are important.

Middleware is a critical foundation needed to leverage the development of a wide range of mobile and ubiquitous applications. Intrinsic challenges when building such middleware require the combination of expertise from areas like distributed systems, networking, software engineering, and application development.This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the main fundamental problems, technologies, paradigms, and solutions of concern to developers of middleware for mobile environments. The contributions are grouped into four parts, on networking and programming issues, communication models, middleware issues, and application issues. Each chapter is structured as a self-contained tutorial, presenting an overview of a specific topic and the state-of-the-art solutions for the related problems. In addition, the book also includes an authoritative reference list. The material has been successfully used in several thematic training schools organized by the ESF MiNEMA (Middleware for Network Eccentric and Mobile Applications) program, and the book's organization and presentation is ideal for an advanced course on middleware.

Middleware is a critical foundation needed to leverage the development of a wide range of mobile and ubiquitous applications. Intrinsic challenges when building such middleware require the combination of expertise from areas like distributed systems, networking, software engineering, and application development.This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the main fundamental problems, technologies, paradigms, and solutions of concern to developers of middleware for mobile environments. The contributions are grouped into four parts, on networking and programming issues, communication models, middleware issues, and application issues. Each chapter is structured as a self-contained tutorial, presenting an overview of a specific topic and the state-of-the-art solutions for the related problems. In addition, the book also includes an authoritative reference list. The material has been successfully used in several thematic training schools organized by the ESF MiNEMA (Middleware for Network Eccentric and Mobile Applications) program, and the book's organization and presentation is ideal for an advanced course on middleware.

Failures may range from crashes to adversarial attacks by malicious processes.Cachin, Guerraoui, and Rodrigues present an introductory description of fundamental distributed programming abstractions together with algorithms to implement them in distributed systems, where processes are subject to crashes and malicious attacks.