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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
International Initiatives
Participation in Other International Programs
STIC Amsud
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Title: PaDMetBio - Parallel and Distributed Metaheuristics for Structural Bioinformatics
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International Partners (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):
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Structural bioinformatics deals with problems where the rules that govern the biochemical processes and relations are partially known which makes hard to design efficient computational strategies for these problems. There is a wide range of unanswered questions, which cannot be answered neither by experiments nor by classical modeling and simulation approaches. Specifically, there are several problems that still do not have a computational method that can guarantee a minimum quality of solution. Two of the main challenging problems in Structural Bioinformatics are (1) the three-dimensional (3D) protein structure prediction problem (PSP) and (2) the molecular docking problem for drug design. Predicting the folded structure of a protein only from its amino acid sequence is a challenging problem in mathematical optimization. The challenge arises due to the combinatorial explosion of plausible shapes, where a long amino acid chain ends up in one out of a vast number of 3D conformations. The problem becomes harder when we have proteins with complex topologies, in this case, their predictions may be only possible with significant increases in high-performance computing power. In the case of the molecular docking problem for drug design, we need to predict the preferred orientation of a small drug candidate against a protein molecule. With the increasing availability of molecular biological structures, smarter docking approaches have become necessary. These two problems are classified as NP-Complete or NP-Hard, so there is no current computational approach that can guarantee the best solution for them in a polynomial time. Because of the above, there is the need to build smarter approaches that can deliver good solutions to the problem. In this project, we plan to explore a collaborative work for the design and implementation of population based metaheuristics, like genetic and memetic algorithms. Metaheuristics are one of the most common and powerful techniques used in this case. The main goal of this project is to gather the expertise and current work of researchers in the areas of structural bioinformatics, metaheuristics and parallel and distributed computing, in order to build novel and high quality solutions for these hot research area.
Capes-Cofecub
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Title: CHOOSING - Cooperation on Hybrid cOmputing clOuds for energy SavING
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International Partners (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):
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The cloud computing is an important factor for environmentally sustainable development. If, in the one hand, the increasing demand of users drive the creation of large datacenters, in the other hand, cloud computing's “multitenancy” trait allows the reduction of physical hardware and, therefore, the saving of energy. Thus, it is imperative to optimize the energy consumption corresponding to the datacenter's activities. Three elements are crucial on energy consumption of a cloud platform: computation (processing), storage and network infrastructure. Therefore, the aim of this project is to provide different techniques to reduce energy consumption regarding these three elements. Our work mainly focuses on energy saving aspects based on virtualization, i.e., pursuing the idea of the intensive migration of classical storage/processing systems to virtual ones. We will study how different organizations (whose resources are combined as hybrid clouds) can cooperate with each other in order to minimize the energy consumption without the detriment of client requirements or quality of service. Then, we intend to propose efficient algorithmic solutions and design new coordination mechanisms that incentive cloud providers to collaborate.
Spanish research ministry project
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Title: BFT-DYNASTIE - Byzantine Fault Tolerance: Dynamic Adaptive Services for Partitionable Systems
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International Partners (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):
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The project BFT-DYNASTIE is aimed at extending the model based on the alternation of periods of stable and unstable behavior to all aspects of fault-tolerant distributed systems, including synchrony models, process and communication channel failure models, system membership, node mobility, and network partitioning. The two main and new challenges of this project are: the consideration of the most general and complex to address failure model, known as Byzantine, arbitrary or malicious, which requires qualified majorities and the use of techniques form the security area; and the operation of the system in partitioned mode, which requires adequate reconciliation mechanisms when two partitions merge.