In recent years, there has been considerable speculation about the possible effects of climate change on migration, especially in developing countries. Stern (2006) noted that 200 million people worldwide live in at-risk coastal flood plains, which would be threatened by changes in sea-level. Moreover climate change may lead to resource scarcity, drought, floods, and other environmental changes...

Virtualization has gained traction in a wide variety of contexts. The rise of Cloud Computing and the wide adoption of the OpenFlow API in computer networks are just a few examples of how virtualization has changed the foundations of computing. In general, the term ”virtualization” refers to the process of turning a hardware-bound entity into a software-based component. The end result of such p...

DBMSs powering cloud application platforms must serve large numbers of applications with unpredictable load patterns while minimizing the operating cost leveraging the underlying pay-per-use infrastructure. We have designed ElasTraS, an Elastic TranSactional relational database for cloud platforms. ElasTraS is a confluence of two major design philosophies: traditional relational database system...

Continuous imaging of live tissues provides clear temporal sequence of biological events. The Drosophila imaginal discs have been popular experimental subjects for the study of a wide variety of biological phenomena, but long term culture that allows normal development has not been satisfactory. Here we report a culture method that can sustain normal development for 18 hours and allows live ima...

Cloud IaaS services bring the novelty of elastic delivery of computational resources in a virtualized form and resource management through easy replication of virtual nodes and live migration. In such dynamic and volatile environments where resources are virtualized, availability and reliability are mandatory for assuring an accepted quality of service for end users. In this context specific fa...

Vertical elasticity, or scale-up of individual virtual machines is hard to perform in today’s cloud environments due to limitations in the amount of hardware resources available in single servers. We propose a novel approach that allows aggregation of memory, compute and I/O resources from multiple physical machines in resource pools which in turn are used to seamlessly provision virtual machin...