Distributed Systems
We Make Services Valuable
The Distributed Systems (DSY) research group of the InIT focuses on scalable and reliable implementation of sophisticated IT-based services. We address questions such as:
- What architecture best suits your specific cloud application?
- Which service model (IaaS, CaaS, PaaS, FaaS, ...) ensures optimal implementation of an application?
- Which tools are needed for development, operation and monitoring of the services?
- How to offer applications "as a service" (SaaS)?
- How to monetize modern IT services?
- How to integrate the "physical world" into complex IT services?
The research group is engaged in international projects within the EU research framework and works closely with partners from the private sector on innovative products within Innosuisse funded or directly financed projects.
The knowledge gained from applied research and development is transferred to students of computer science courses in the following modules:
Cloud Computing
The Init Cloud Computing Lab (ICCLAB) is dedicated to the automated deployment, operation and usage of configurable, highly scalable and resilient IT resources on a pay-per-use basis. In addition to infrastructure virtualization, this includes platform services for automated application delivery, scalable back-end, and monitoring of services and applications.
Service Prototyping
The Service Prototyping Lab (SPLAB) addresses the implementation and validation of complex services in cloud or post-cloud environments. In addition to the migration of existing services to the cloud, the main focus is on modern application architectures (Cloud Native Applications, Microservices, Serverless), the provisioning of tools for optimal implementation, the experimental validation of concepts and their monetization (Cloud Accounting and Billing).
Cloud Robotics
The Init Cloud Comupting Lab (ICCLAB) also addresses the integration of robotic applications into complex networked services. The usage of elastic cloud services allows to extend the capabilities of robots (computing power, context information, artificial intelligence, ...) as well as to manage and coordinate them. Programming frameworks and automation services enable developers to integrate robots into services without having in-depth knowledge at device level.
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On-chain Microcredentials Architecture and Open Source Toolbox Prototype
Digital records of academic achievements, especially in the form of microcredentials, are becoming a strategic topic for universities and education-related government agencies. Moreover, private entities (employers, loan-granting banks) rely on trustworthy digital records with differentiated access levels ...
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Second-Generation Alptrackers with Hub-and-Spoke Signalling and Herd Awareness
Alptracker is the de-facto standard for tracking sheep and cow herds in the Swiss alps. This project advances communication and software support for wide-area herding. It contributes novel hub-spoke animal tracking, capturing movement and behaviour, deriving holistic herd models, and predicting predators and ...
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ThingsAtScale – Audit Logging, Robustness and Resilience in Large-Scale Cloud-Based IoT Event Processing
The objectives of the ThingsAtScale project encompass various advances beyond the state of technology in software stacks for IoT/LoRaWAN, in particular the The Things Stack (TTS) Cloud. It is comprised of research and development tasks around TTS, in particular related to the two main topics audit logging and ...
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Gkikopoulos, Panagiotis; Kropf, Peter; Schiavoni, Valerio; Spillner, Josef,
2022.
AVOC : history-aware data fusion for reliable IoT analytics [paper].
In:
Proceedings of the 23rd International Middleware Conference Industrial Track.
23rd ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware), Québec City, Canada, 7-11 November 2022.
ACM.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.1145/3564695.3564772
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Murphy, Seán; Militano, Leonardo; Toffetti Carughi, Giovanni; Maurer, Remo,
2022.
Efficient delivery of robotics programming educational content using cloud robotics [paper].
In:
2022 7th International Conference on Robotics and Automation Engineering (ICRAE 2022).
7th International Conference on Robotics and Automation Engineering (ICRAE), Singapore, 18-20 November 2022.
IEEE.
pp. 222-226.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRAE56463.2022.10056179
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Toffetti, Giovanni; Militano, Leonardo; Murphy, Seán; Maurer, Remo; Straub, Mark,
2022.
Cloud native robotic applications with GPU sharing on Kubernetes [paper].
In:
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Kyoto, Japan, 23-27 October 2022.
arXiv.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.03936
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Hass, Daniel; Spillner, Josef,
2022.
In:
2022 21st International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (ISPDC).
21st International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (ISPDC), Basel, Switzerland, 11-13 July 2022.
IEEE.
pp. 121-128.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPDC55340.2022.00026
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2022.
Tabular data insights and synthesis with the AutoTable approach [poster].
In:
Proceedings 2022 9th Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS).
9th Swiss Conference on Data Science (SDS), Lucerne, Switzerland, 22-23 June 2022.
IEEE.
pp. 69-70.
Available from: https://doi.org/10.1109/SDS54800.2022.00020