I am a Leader of the Distributed Systems Group at the School of Computing and Management Sciences in this university. My research interests within the group include distributed object systems, performance evaluation, data modelling and hardware/software co-design.
For more information on these areas
Distributed Software
Engineering
A new area of research is Active Reading involving the Schools of Computing and Cultural Studies - I hope to be able to report shortly on progress in "The Exploration and Development of Tools for Active Reading and Electronic Texts".
Distributed Software Engineering
Along with collaborators in universities in UK, Europe and Australia I have been involved in the development of methods and tools to support the production of reliable software for parallel and distributed systems. Much of this work has been reported under the PARSE Project, and has involved regular exchange visits between Sheffield, Sydney and Naples, for senior colleagues research students and myself.
The research has focussed on the integration of techniques, formal and informal to support the software developer. Originally targeted mainly at parallel systems, our attention is now focussed on distributed software systems and distributed object technologies.
The PARSE Project has resulted in a large body of publications, and we have had significant impact in other respects. With Ian Gorton I helped to initiate and chair the First Workshop in Parallel and Distributed Software Engineering which was held in Berlin in 1996. I am still very closely connected with this event, now well established as a regular annual symposium.
A separate theme within my software engineering research is that of hardware/software co-design. In association with London Guildhall University we are working on object based approaches to the development of embedded components for wireless systems. Based on our experience on integrating design methods and techniques, the project has resulted in a new approach to the specification and design of these systems, which allows the developer to explore hardware/software trade-offs in an independent manner.
In association with Universities of Sheffield and Napier University in UK, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, research into database benchmarking, capacity planning and sizing has been undertaken.
Part of this work which started under the EU Large Parallel Databases Project in 1996 has involved the development of techniques and tools for modelling and generating realistic synthetic data. Not only does this data permit accurate performance measurement but also it allows users to analyse their results with respect to the semantic meaning of the data. The project has resulted in the development Data Generation Language System that is currently being tested out for a range of applications.
Performance of Parallel Systems
I have been involved in work on performance issues for parallel systems for a number of years. Currently in association with Josef Attila University, Szeged, we are looking at new methods for dynamic load balancing in distributed memory multi-processor systems. This work has been supported in part by EU technology transfer programmes and partially by the Hungarian Government.
In addition I have been interested in simulation methods for performance prediction in parallel systems. Since my doctoral studies into parallel architectures for logic programming (long time ago!), I have published papers on different simulation and emulation approaches.
Academic Collaborators
Professor Peter Croll, formerly of Sheffield University, now at University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, PARSE Project
Professor Ian Gorton, Adjunct Professor of Software Engineering, University of Sydney and Senior Manager, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia, PARSE Project
Dr David Lloyd of University of Manchester on co-design project.
Professor Stefano Russo of University of Naples, PARSE Project
Professor Paddy Nixon of University of Strathclyde on distributed software engineering.
Dr Lajos Schrettner of Josef Attila University, Szeged, Hungary on Dynamic Load Balancing Project.