Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The Internet landscape is changing rapidly, from a completely decentralised paradigm where distinct services were offered by different providers in a fully distributed and decentralised way, to a unified ICT environment where data, storage, and processing resources are co-located in the Cloud, and offered alongside connectivity. Although Cloud services and the underlying communication infrastructures are built on top of commodity Internet mechanisms (transport protocols, IP switching, multipath routing, etc.), it becomes apparent that the performance-agnostic and slow-converging operational assumptions of today's data communications are challenged by the new unified technological and business model. Massive overprovisioning of fully distributed resources that are managed in distinct and often long timescales (e.g., traffic aggregates over backbone networks) is not sustainable in an environment where connectivity and system resources need to be managed by a single unified ICT provider over a centralised infrastructure and in very short timescales. Cloud providers need to maximise return-on-investment from their infrastructures through rapid provisioning and elastic resource management, offering predictable services while operating at higher utilisation thresholds. In order to achieve these goals, in this project we will design and develop an always-on Instrumentation, Measurement, and Control (IMC) framework that will dynamically and adaptively provision unified resources in a unified manner and in short timescales. Evidence has shown that distinct control loops typically employed to manage different resources in different timescales can themselves constitute factors of performance degradation over unified Cloud environments. For example, network-agnostic placement and migration of virtual machines can itself cause congestion in the underlying Data Centre topology. We will therefore revisit the one-dimensional, static or pseudo-random control loops that are typically employed over Cloud topologies, and develop an adaptive closed-loop system that will manage both server and network resources synergistically, in short timescales and based on temporal topology-wide performance. In doing so, we will exploit often controversial concepts such as non-shortest path routing for increasing load balancing while meeting flow completion deadlines, and network-aware dynamic virtual machine migration, to demonstrate the feasibility and also the benefits of combinatorial resource provisioning in achieving global performance optimisation and in increasing the usable capacity of future networks and services. One of the key aims of the proposed research is to investigate and to demonstrate the applicability of measurement-based processes to control and to admit resources in a unified manner and at appropriate, short timescales. Through the necessary system and network node instrumentation, we will devise a logically-centralised measurement and control closed-loop architecture that will be an integral part of the underlying infrastructure's data forwarding operation. The long-term impact of such endeavour will be to revisit the currently disjoint data and control planes in packet communications, and to transform next generation networked infrastructures from performance-agnostic to adaptive and self-managed, through synergy across the different layers and planes of the architecture. The proposed research will be carried out at the University of Glasgow, and experiments will be conducted over a purpose-built programmable Cloud services testbed infrastructure, partly supported by EPSRC's first grant scheme and partly through a generous contribution from the host institution. The research will be conducted in close collaboration with Onyx Group, Microsoft Research and JANET(UK).

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The ever-increasing demand in traffic and diversity of services, along with the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the infrastructure supporting their provision is presenting an important challenge to current approaches to the management of communication networks. In particular, it becomes increasingly difficult for network management systems to keep a complete and tractable picture of the state of computing/network resources and running services, and their interdependencies, which in turn makes it difficult to achieve optimal performance. This proposal aims to transform the way ICT networks are being conceptualised for management, by developing a data-driven characterisation of emerging dependencies between ICT components inspired by recent neuroscientific paradigms used to study the brain and allowing to capture and act upon the functional impact of complex and changing interactions across layers and processes. By releasing network operators from human intervention and/or manual application of domain expertise, this research paves the way for the development of automated processes that can scale up to the size, heterogeneity and complexity of future ICT infrastructures.

How do we better share the knowledge generated by artists, architects, curators and creative practitioners whose work addresses critical and urgent priority areas, ranging from cultural heritage, health and well-being to climate change and global security? How could a world-leading system for accessing knowledge developed using practice research transform ideas, engagement and innovation across sectors, academic disciplines and industry? Why are such voices missing an efficient platform that could transform academic, economic and cultural impacts? This project will develop ways to let the people that perform practice research capture details of their work and share it with others. It will be informed by a report that was published in the last few months based on discussions with a large number of the people working in the field of practice research. The report established that; 1) in all fields of research, by doing something, you are engaging in practice. Therefore, the field of research into practice covers almost every area of scientific endeavour, and 2) current software for distributing research was failing the practice research community. The report contained recommendations that we aim to implement as a piece of software called a repository. This online library will allow the people who engage in practice research to make their work available to all. The project provides value for money by using existing repositories and working with established practitioners to figure out how to make these more efficient for researchers, institutions and funders. We will be working with three repositories - one that is quite advanced in addressing the needs of practice researchers (University of Westminster/ Haplo), one that is currently working with museum and gallery content (British Library and V&A) and another that is currently good at working with "typical" written article content (Jisc). By testing across a range of repositories we will produce a report at the end of the project that contains recommendations to improve all of them. Key to the overall proposal is an equitable landscape for all research, in which non-STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) research is understood more clearly and talked about as of equal value to papers, publications and monographs. Moving beyond the reference to non-text outputs as "Other", such as Film, Databases, Archives and curated exhibitions, we highlight the technical issues and lack of parity for researchers working across Arts and Humanities. The project will build upon an existing community of practice researchers who are essential to the function, role and future of the University sector, contributing nationally and internationally to the broader discussion of practice research. This community, along with the research team, becomes a kernel from which to develop a rigorous academic and technical software solution that addresses how practice research is described, stored, discovered and further elaborated.