Faculty of Engineering, Computer Science & Engineering

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item: Thesis-Abstract
3D Reconstruction of objects from RGB images and depth information using deep learning
(2022) Karunanayaka TD; Chithraranjan C
Object reconstruction is the manner of producing a computer model of the 3D appearance of an object from two-dimensional photos. It's the opposite procedure of obtaining 2D photos from 3D scenes. 3D reconstruction of objects from their digital pictures is a time-efficient and convenient manner of analysing the structural features of the item being modelled. Currently there may be an essential need for 3D content for computer graphics, virtual reality and communication, triggering an alternate emphasis for the requirements. Many present methods for constructing 3D objects are built round specialized hardware resulting in a high fee, information scanning barriers due to environment conditions which can't satisfy the requirement of its new programs. The art of three-dimensional reconstruction of objects and scenes has been a broadly researched topic. In this Master’s thesis, I proposed to address the above problems by developing a Deep Learning approach to reconstruct the object. This type of approach does not depend too much on the environment condition and the cost is low. However, the proposed method mostly targets the reconstruction of objects other than reconstruction of scenes. This research attempts to develop a Deep Learning based 3D reconstruction method for objects to avoid the limitations of the current 3D reconstruction approaches.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Benchmark for web services
Wickramage, N; Weerawarana, S; Dias, G
Even though there are several benchmarks developed to measure the performance of Web service frameworks, the general tendency of them is to simulate only theoretical scenarios such as streaming homogeneous data structures like arrays. On the other hand, the computer industry has an established culture of developing performance benchmarks imitating not only imaginary situations but also real world scenarios. This dissertation discusses whether it is quite necessary to test the performance of web service frameworks against such benchmarks that closely reproduce real world situations. This discussion is based on results obtained by running two benchmarks (namely one replicating 12 different real world scenarios that are optimum candidates for web service applications and another only simulating a theoretical situation) and concludes that the real world type Benchmark represents a reasonable subset of actual scenarios because the ranking of the leading Web services frameworks is consistent with Industry wide opinions [22] while statistically reaffirming the significance of using real world type benchmarks. Additionally, this dissertation identifies complexity of the SOAP messages involved in Web service transactions and size of the payloads those messages are carrying as two major factors that affect the round trip time of the SOAP messages and reveals that a framework that is good at handling complex SOAP messages may not deal with the messages that are carrying larger payloads equally well and provides statistical proof for that.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Critical evaluation of the e-government model implementation in Sri Lanka
Wackwella, GCDN; Weerawarana, S
For a successful e-government implementation, having a well-organized e- government model is a must for any country. It cannot be a model, which can be copied straight from a different country. It should significantly impact all sectors of the country's economy and its society and should be molded according to the unique characteristics of the country./ This research will critically evaluate the e-government model, adopted by the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka with its e-Sri Lanka Re-Engineering Government programmed. It will evaluate its strengths and weaknesses by analyzing factors that influence e- government projects currently being implemented. Based on this factor analysis, appropriate recommendations will be proposed to enhance and strengthen the Sri Lankan e-government model by considering all social/cultural/economical/technical aspects pertaining to Sri Lanka.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Focus group study on local language computing in SMES'
Perera, MWL; Dias, G
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are regarded as a powerful tool for gaining competitive advantage in any industry. Even though our population has high literacy level, many Sri Lankans are not fully-fledged computer users. Therefore the advantages of using these technologies are limited to a privileged few. Although most ICT related products and services are based on English language, the majority of the society who would benefit from these technologies is not English conversant./ This is a principal reason behind the digital divide in society where some social groups lack access to ICT. One social group that does not use computers and internet are individuals and organizations that can afford them but lack English language knowledge and also lack awareness of available local language ICTs./ The objective of this research is to find out whether the ICT penetration level in the country may be increased using local language ICT./ As the first part of the research we conducted a survey of the current state of Sinhala language computer applications in Sri Lanka. We have identified the major local language application vendors, and their products. We also obtained the views of the vendors on the issues facing the industry. In the second part of the research, we surveyed the use of local language computing by a number of small and medium-scale industries (SMEs) outside Colombo in several sectors. We also obtained their views on the obstacles to the greater use of LLC./ We then analyzed whether the lack of local language computing products is an obstacle to the greater use of ICTs in this country. Based on these surveys, we conducted a SWOT analysis and derived recommendations for strategies to be taken to improve local language computing in the country.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Framework for aligning ERP with corporate strategies : a case study in high-tech component manufacturing industry
Hemachandra, HMA; Jayawardane, V
It is empirically proved that the IS alignment with business strategies leads to peak organizational performance. This strategic alignment of information systems is an area that has been the subject of numerous research activities. The focus of the majority of these studies has been the relationship of business performances and the IS alignment and measuring the alignment of information systems. The present research introduces a comprehensive framework that can be used to align ERP, which is the ultimate existence of the current IS, with corporate level business strategies of an organization. The methodology for the present research is based on case study methodology and a leading high-tech component manufacturer is selected for qualitative analysis. A conceptual framework was developed on the basis of literature on previous studies and then the selected business case was profoundly studied to best match the framework for the selected industry. The case selected for the study was used to maintain the validity of the framework for the entire industry by obtaining the findings from multiple sources and aligning to industry standard practices. Then the framework is tested for the same business case proving the applicability and the validity of interpretations. The ultimate finding of the research is the framework that can be used for aligning ERP with corporate level business strategies i~ the high-tech component manufacturing industry. The researcher derives the most suitable competitive strategy dimensions (Corporate level) parallel to Potter" competitive forces, for the high-tech component manufacturing industry and models, each strategy that comes under each dimension and, the expected IS supportability for each strategy. Ultimately, the model calculates the alignments and visualizes the ways of improving the alignment while figuring out the business intensity of the investment. The present research contributes to the empirical literature by carrying the strategic alignment of information system phenomenon, a step forward. It derives a model and shows that alignment measuring can be used for more productive IS investment decisions. This study effectively contributes to the industry as the framework allows aligning the ERP with business strategies coping with peak performances. It drives the managers towards more effective decisions on investment, actualizing the intensity of the results. The model would be further used to fine-tune the ERP implementation processes making sure that the optimum business value could be achieved from the ERP rather than providing solutions for some current operational issues.
item: Thesis-Full-text
A Framework for evaluating the effectiveness of eGovernment initiatives
Waduge, LPH; weerawarana, S
The Government of Sri Lanka has embarked on the e-Sri Lanka Re-Engineering Government program, which is an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) road map, with the intention of providing efficient and effective services to its stakeholders, mainly, the citizens of the country. The implementation of e Government solutions necessitates organizational readiness in terms of structure and human capacity as conventional practices have failed to achieve institutional objectives desirable in today's context. E Government can transform the way the traditional public sector organizations work. However, the success of the program. is contingent upon 'several factors such as leadership commitment, competent staff, financial and other resources. In this backdrop, this research study presents an interesting Analytical Model that public-sector institutions may adopt, in evaluating the effectiveness of e Government implementations within government organizations in Sri Lanka. The objective of this research was to find critical factors that influence the effectiveness of e Government initiatives in the solution implementation stage as well as in the solution operation stage, and to then formulate an evaluation model to analyze those factors at the organizational level. The key e Government projects and initiatives under the Ministry of Public Administration and Home Affairs have been included as the sample space to test the effectiveness factors in the analytical model. The development of this analytical model was done after extensive literature review in related areas with respect to developing countries, and through a pilot study done in the Sri Lankan organizational context. The proposed analytical model can be used by any government agency to evaluate E Government projects prior to deployment and more importantly, during the operational stage. Based on this factor analysis, appropriate recommendations can be proposed to enhance and strengthen the e Government initiatives by considering all related factors in the implementation stage such as organizational ,surrounding environmental and other enabling factors pertaining to government organization in Sri Lanka. The model features built-in iterations and feedback loops which enables systematic analysis of operational effectiveness, thereby enabling the implementation of timely corrective measures leading to continuous improvement and enhanced positive operational impact of the e Governrnent solutions.Furthermore, since the model was conceptualized and designed with Sri Lankan government organizations as the focus , it is highly relevant in the local context in comparison to the existing evaluation models that are in use elsewhere in the world. Clearly, this model would also be useful in other developing countries with government organization and government process profiles that. Are similar to Sri Lanka, for the purpose of evaluating their e Govemment projects systematically in order to improve their solution effectiveness.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Framework for intrusion detection systems evaluation
Bandara, LRJ; Fernando, S
Information security plays a major role in today's IT enabled organizations. In this security stance, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) is a very important element if not the most. Therefore it is very important to select the most suitable product to deploy in any organization concerned. In order to select the suitable IDS it is necessary to evaluate at least short listed number of products or it is necessary to rely on some third party organizations who evaluate these products. But only very few organizations are involving in evaluating IDSes and therefore the cost of hiring such an organization is very high and hence only a very few organizations can bear it where as small organizations have to depend of there own methods. Therefore it is essential for the research community to help in evaluating these products. But the research community can not rely on the methods used by the organizations that do the evaluations since those methods are proprietary and not publicly available. This paper describes a method of using the existing freely available tools of generating a data set or a criterion check list and a framework that can be used to evaluate intrusion detection systems for a specific facility using the proposed method of generating data set./ Finally we discuss the lessons learned using this kind of a framework to evaluate intrusion detection systems and the opportunities for further improvement of this framework and in this area. The tool uses a check list or attack script list and a parser that passes parameters to an open source/free vulnerability scan engine according to the check list to attack the targets and then search the intrusion detection systems logs/database for any detection of those attacks. This will evaluate the quality of the signatures of the specific intrusion detection system. Then we use Snort IDS as the base line to benchmark other candidate Ides (and possibly will try to benchmark at least one more IDS, as a proof-of-concept, due to the time limitation).
item: Thesis-Abstract
A JDBC middle-ware for data replication
Dissanayake, A; Perera, AS
Data is an important part of today's IT infrastructure: both companies and state institutions rely on database systems to store most of their important data. As companies move toward systems that are distributed, research and development in data-replication is becoming increasingly important. In simple terms, replication is a form of distributing copies of data to other machines Data replication is a widely used approach for providing high availability, fault tolerance and better performance (w.r.t reads). With the data being redundantly available from more than one source user can be shielded from network failures, delays and data source failures. One of the major goals in replication is maintaining data consistency amongst the various replicas. However achieving consistency is a complex problem and it can adversely undermine its advantages. Therefore building an efficient, consistent replicated database is still an open research topic, though both the database community and the distributed systems community have been utilizing replication for nearly three decades. Moreover, if two updates happen concurrently, it is often also required each copy is updated in the same order. This is very expensive in practi can degrade performance of the end application. Hence the choic^vofthe consistency model mostly depends on the application using the replication scheme. For instance mission critical applications need high consistency while ni J mobile applications are willing to trade off consistency, for availability and performance. Most of the researches have therefore focused on a specific application domain and interns implement a particular consistency model, which does not suit everyone. Moreover both the industry and research community seem to favour relaxed consistency models like sequential consistency, because higher consistent models are more restrictive. In this research we propose a novel replication scheme that can be tuned to match varying degrees of consistency requirements, of a wider user community. We implement this replication scheme as a JDBC middleware. Our JDBC implementation can replicate update/insert requests across a large number of nodes (data sources/replicas). The JDBC interface hides the complexity of distribution and replication while providing a consistent and transparent view of the data store to the application developers. I
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Marked-based Web bandwidth management system
Disanayake, DABC; Dias, G
The World Wide Web (WWW) is the most popular service of the Internet, which is used by millions of people in almost every country for their day-to-day operations. Since the demand for WWW is increasing rapidly, the infrastructures for this service such as bandwidth need to be developed and upgraded regularly. This is not affordable for developing countries like Sri Lanka, because of the cost and the technological deficiencies. Providing a satisfactory service to users by 'managing the existing bandwidth' is the best alternative for this. But it is very difficult to achieve both with the available bandwidth management mechanisms. We have designed and implemented a proxy-based system, which allows each user to request, and obtain a desired amount of bandwidth for web access. The server allocates the bandwidth for users considering the available bandwidth and demand. Bandwidth is priced dynamically based on the demand at any given time. The user is charged based on the bandwidth level and the duration of usage. This allows users in a bandwidth-constrained environment to prioritize their web usage, and encourages them to carry out bandwidth-intensive applications during off-peak hours. This user involvement in bandwidth allocation is the main innovation of this system. This feature was implemented by adding new functions to the Squid web cache server. These functions allow adding or removing IP addresses of users to the relevant delay pool of squid according to the user requested bandwidth. Users login to the proxy server through an intermediate server, which keeps the users accounts and login details. In addition to the user requested bandwidth allocation, this system provides user management and billing functions. According to our experience, this new system is highly suitable for the Internet Service Provides (ISPs) to offer a better quality user satisfied service while managing their available bandwidth resources.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Model certificate authority for Sri Lanka
Lathsara, MPD; Fernando, S
Beginning with the widespread availability of Internet technologies, especially the World Wide Web, the trend has been for organizations to shift their operations online. There are many factors promoting this trend and the main ones among them are global reach, cost savings, and new business opportunities that organizations can achieve by operating in an online model. When moving from long established operating procedures and principles in the brick-and-mortar world, to the cyberspace, organizations are faced with a multitude of new requirements, which arc taken for granted in the conventional business model. Some of the principle requirements are in the domain of identity and trust, two concepts that are closely related, as the notion of trust is reposed in an identified entity./ An entirely new layer of online support infrastructure has been developed to provide services in the area of identity and trust. This technical service layer is supported in the real world activities by legislative and judicial mechanisms. In Sri Lanka, the main legislative support structures for online activities have been the Electronics Transaction Act No 19, 2006 of Sri Lanka and the Computer Crimes Act No 24. 2007 of Sri Lanka. The first act provides for a legal framework in which transactions can be conducted on the cyberspace with methods and procedures for establishing validity and enforcing compliance with agreements. The second act provides for a protective barrier against online acts that are of criminal nature and is intended to enhance the prospects of adaptation, of online activities, in every sphere of activity in Sri Lanka./ The main set of technologies that are used in providing identity and trust services, in the online world is based on digital certificates and its management is done through a certification authority (CA). The focus of the research work presented in the dissertation is to analyze the use of digital certificates to provide identity authentication services and study models for implementing a secure and efficient CA for Sri Lanka that is scalable in its user base and extensible in service offerings. The dissertation presents the outcome of a case study in implementing a CA as a pilot project and evaluates different cryptographic technologies, security protocols, and policies that can be used for efficient operation of a CA.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Near real time system to determine a cost-effective IDD traffic routing plan
Fernando, MAAC; Jayasena, S
International telecommunication has become a very important sector in the present day communication. IDD traffic is one of the main sources of revenue for national telecommunication service providers (Telcos). Hence, it has to be managed properly and driven effectively to gain maximum profit./ Telco’s usually deal with multiple international operators (carriers) e.g. SingTel, Telstra, in order to use latter's networks for international traffic. These carriers offer different charging structures which vary with the time, volume and the destination. Most Telcos incur high costs due to lack of a proper system to analyse and forecast an optimized IDD routing plan./ Therefore, a system which is capable of producing a cost-effective routing plan by analyzing the current IDD usage pattern and the traffic cost would be much beneficial for all Telco’s. The objective of this research work is to find a suitable methodology for Telcos to produce a cost-effective routing plan for the IDD traffic in near real time. In our approach, the main tasks are, • Forecasting the IDD traffic pattern to each destination • Determining the optimized routing plan. Forecasting the future traffic was based on past traffic, current IDD traffic trend and the subscriber growth rate of Telcos. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to obtain the optimized routing plan. Dynamic behavior of the problem domain was successfully addressed in the GA structure./ The GA parameters, population size, number of generations and the GA operations (crossover, mutation and reproduction) ratio were determined experimentally. Experimental results show that our solution is capable of producing a cost-effective routing plan in near-real-time which reduces the cost by 30% to 50% against the manual routing plan. Our solution could be used by national Telco’s to save significant costs in the international traffic and to pass some of that cost savings to their customers.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Policy to attract more software development investments to Sri Lanka
Gunaratna, NWPTD; Samarasinghe, ATLK
Abstract Software development is nothing new to Sri Lanka or for the other regional countries. Software development has become one of the major off shoring opportunity opportunities in the region over the years. India, China, and Philippines are leading the way with software development while software exports have become one of the main exports generating foreign currency to these nations. Many infrastructure developments have been done and are still being done to facilitate the changing demands of software development. Industry giants in software development operate from these countries creating a lot of economic benefits to these countries./ Sri Lanka on the other hand, is also considered a main location for software out sourcing. Over 170 software development companies operate in Sri Lanka. However, due to some issues, these companies face hardships in operating. These factors have also negatively influenced new software development investments to the country. Although software development could be a major export in the country, it still has not reached the expected levels of growth. It is the author's aim to find out the real problems faced by the Sri Lankan software companies. Additionally, new measures to attract new software development Investments and ways of eliminating the hardships faced by the companies will be looked in to. By analyzing these, the author's objective is to develop a Policy Document to attract and increase software development investments to the country
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Process oriented approach to alleviate service delivery issues in the Sri Lankan private sector hospitals : an information systems perspective
Pereira, NPDSS; Jayasena, S
The growth of the Sri Lankan healthcare sector is a necessity at this stage due to an increasingly ageing community and a significant increase in non-communicable diseases. Despite many regulations that given the sector, it continues to be inundated with many problems in relation to delivery of healthcare services./ Although the state is a prominent player in the industry, private sector healthcare facilities provide curative out patitent care to 60% of the population in the country. The World Health Organisation strategic agenda, Strategic Framework for Health Development in Sri Lanka as well as the Health Master Plan had highlighted the necessity of Information Systems for improved service delivery in the sector./ The existing Information Systems with it's administrative and financial bias has failed to add value in the interaction between the healthcare worker and the patient. The study investigates the possible evolution of the existing Healthcare Information Systems by analyzing the process orientation of the organization, IT investment ,IT infrastructure and the external environment of the healthcare institute./ This qualitative study provides a framework as well as a set of recommendations for a process oriented approach to alleviate service delivery issues in the Sri Lankan private sector hospitals.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Simple model for analysing software project maturity - SPM3
Perera, KPL; Gunawardene, ND
Quality of the processes followed in organisations is one of the main factors for their success. Organisations with proper project management processes and practices are considered as stable and the outcome is expected to be of high standards. According to Standish Group most project failures are due to project management related issues. This research looks into project management processes & practices being followed by the Sri Lankan software industry and goes onto find strengths & weakness in software organisations related to project management. The most important work carried out in this research was the building of SPM3 (Simple Project Management Maturity Model), a simple model for analysing software project maturity. SPM3 focuses on all forty four project management processes defined in PMBOK. The model was applied to software organisations to find how well they have followed project management processes. As a result of this research, many facts were uncovered related to project management processes being followed. Observations clearly show a relationship between the maturity of the processes being followed and criteria such as size of the organisations and the percentage 0t foreign projects handled. The positives as well as the weaknesses were analysed and these information can be used to improve the industry and sustain it's growth.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Study of employee perception of performance appraisal in software development organizations
Guhanathan, P; Gamage, C
Performance management of software professionals is very complex because they fall into the category of knowledge workers. Unlike performance appraisals of industrial workers, those of software professionals are more perceptual than factual due to the complexity of their work. The aim of this research is to examine the software professionals' perception about the performance appraisal systems used in software organizations and whether they help them to improve their work performance. The methodology employed for this study is a quantitative approach and a cross sectional survey. The population for this study is software professionals working in software development organizations in Sri Lanka, who are estimated to be around 14,956 (ICTA 2007).Therefore, for the purpose of the study, the data were collected from 101 software professionals, which is the desired sample size (number of completed surveys), for accuracy level of 10% at the 95% confidence level. A questionnaire was used to obtain the data and it was carefully designed to measure the effectiveness of the performance appraisal. For the analysis of the collected data through the survey, SPSS version 13.0 was used and the data analysis techniques used to prove the hypotheses were descriptive statistics, bivariate correlation coefficient (Pearson's r), causal effect analysis using standardized regression coefficient and Baron and Kenny testing mediation with regression analysis. The results agree with the previous research of performance appraisal. The sample of professionals used for this survey confirms that their supervisors use performance appraisal methods which contain the three elements: employee participation in the process, participatory goal setting and feedback that are collectively known as employee voice. For the employee-acceptance of the performance appraisal, she/he should perceive that the performance appraisal process is fair and unbiased. The results also confirm that the employee-acceptance is a key predicator for employee-satisfaction of performance appraisal. This would lead to several favourable outcomes such as work performance improvement, improved productivity and high levels of motivation. Baron and Kenny testing for mediation proves that the relationship between employee voice and employee satisfaction, and work performance improvement and outcome is mediated by employee acceptance of performance appraisal. Keywords: Performance appraisal, Performance management, Work performance, Knowledge works
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Study of professional ethical behaviour of Sri Lankan software engineers
Wijayasiri, PAIA; Weerasinghe, C; Gamage, C; Nanayakkara, V
Information systems have become an integral part of our lives supporting us in numerous ways, be it banking, accounting, medicine, education or any other discipline that could be complemented by the use of proper information systems. Among the group of personnel engaged in the management of information systems, software engineers in particular playa vital role as individuals who are directly involved in the creation of these systems. Consequently, software engineers could be considered as having a major accountability for the positive or negative impact of a system on its end users. Many cases have been observed in the past, of attempts at system implementations that have failed due to various reasons. Some failures have been directly attributed to flawed software engineering processes. Realizing the pivotal social role played by software engineers, the professional ethical behaviour of software engineers has become a widely discussed topic, internationally. The previous researches on professional ethical behaviour have focused on disciplines such as Accounting, Medicine, Information Technology and Sales. In these studies, age, gender, education, experience, culture and personal attributes have been considered important as factors affecting professional ethical behaviour. Interestingly, while some researchers have observed a relationship between these factors and professional ethical behaviour, others have concluded that there is no relationship between them with regard to certain factors. The present study analyses the impact of a selected set of factors on the professional ethical behaviuor of Sri Lankan software engineers. In addition, the level of awareness of Sri Lankan software engineers of international codes of conduct and the codes of conduct of th~ir respective organizations is also analysed. The analysis of the data collected through a questionnaire revealed that the organizational culture seemed to have a positive correlation with the professional ethical behaviour of the Sri Lankan software engineers while, age, gender, work experience, being a member of a professional body, having followed a course on professional ethics and the level of education had no impact on it. The awareness of the Sri Lankan software engineers of the international codes of ethics and the codes of ethics of their organizations was found to be at a low level. The results of this research are presented and discussed analyzing their implications further. Accordingly, recommendations are made to the management services with a view to helping them promote and encourage professional ethical behaviour of software engineers in Sri Lanka.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Study on the choice of free & open source software for government sector enterprise applications in Sri Lanka
Jayawardena, KMSP; Dias, G
This document presents a study on the selection of software for government sector enterprise applications. Many factors could influence the choice of software in government sector enterprise applications. The research is based on the following problem: what factors influence the choice of software for government sector enterprise applications, in the Sri Lankan context. Information systems (IS) projects in several selected government sector organizations have been studied in depth during the course of the research. Around 30% of the investigated government sector information systems projects have been found to have used FOSS. Several factors have been identified to have affected the choice of software for government sector enterprise IS. Out of these, technical compliance, cost, bidders/developers expertise and maintenance/support options were some of the most commonly indicated factors. Cost was highlighted as an important factor in a majority of the investigated IS. However, the analysis revealed that cost did not influence the choice between FOSS and proprietary software, when implementing the IS. This was quite unusual given the common perception that FOSS is used to lower costs. It was concluded from the analysis that certain other factors including bidders/developers expertise, technical compatibility with legacy proprietary systems and maintenance/support options override the cost factor, when selecting software. Based on the analysis and conclusions, several recommendations have been made to leverage on the benefits of FOSS in government sector enterprise. IS. These recommendations include ways to achieve cost advantages, especially in large scale replication. It is recommended to nurture a FOSS ecosystem and to develop internal FOSS expertise within government organizations, in order to leverage on the advantages of FOSS in government sector enterprise IS.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Tool to measure HTTP performance
Dasanayaka, RP; Dias, Gihan
The World Wide Web is one of the most popular services on the Internet today. Users of the Internet demand better performance for their web access. In order to meet this requirement, network administrators and engineers try their best to harness the maximum performance from the available resources. High performance for web services can be achieved by using cache-proxies, traffic shifting, mirroring or increasing the available bandwidth. We have identified a need to compare the effect of performance before and after changing different network parameters. The objective of this project is to develop a tool that measures and compares HTTP performance under different conditions. This tool also enables the network administrator to conduct the measurements without user involvement. TCPDUMP was used to capture IP packets transmitted over the broadcast LAN. This capturing process was transparent to users. The captured data was used to identify different web requests, relevant responses and other related statistics. Using these statistics, the tool can regenerate the same web requests, at a later time, under different network conditions and can measure the performance parameters of the network. The tool finally presents a comparison of the performance, so that an administrator can get a quantitative figure of the impact of the changes that he has done.
item: Thesis-Abstract
Accelerated complex event processing with graphics processing units
Rodrigo, PS; Bandara, HMND; Perera, S
As Big Data scenarios increasingly become common, a large number of distributed data processing systems require timely processing of high volumes of real-time data streams. Detecting complex correlations between incoming data streams in near real-time is at the heart of these data processing systems. Complex Event Processing (CEP) have been dominating in this domain since inception a decade back. But, growth of Big Data volumes demands for more performance and faster processing. CEP operators like stream join and event patterns require considerable processing power and have huge impact on the overall query processing performance. In some use cases these operators have to operate on lots of events simultaneously. Making parallel algorithms for these operators is a common approach for improving the individual operator performance. A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) provides a vast number of parallel computing cores and leverage new parallel algorithms which enables novel problem solving approaches for existing problems. But the challenge is combining complex event processing and GPUs in the right way to get the maximum performance out of the this parallel hardware. There had been attempts to use parallel hardware in improving CEP performance in both commercial and academic implementations, and most of them uses multi-core approach. Only a very few researches had used GPUs for CEP. We believe the lack of GPU related CEP researches is that they are not designed to bene t from parallel processing in GPUs. In this research we investigate how and when GPUs can be used to improve the query processing performance of a popular open source CEP implementation, Siddhi CEP. Siddhi, by design, supports for parallel query processing in multi-core CPUs. This work propose a novel approach for parallel event processing in GPUs with several GPU event processing algorithms. Performance evaluation on our implemented algorithms shows, for a mix of complex queries, parallel event processing on GPUs achieve more than ten times event processing throughput than the sequential processing in CPUs. Moreover, our approach helped to reduce event queuing at the incoming event queue when there are high frequent input event stream and several complex queries.
item: Thesis-Full-text
Accelerated SMPP decoder implementation based on GPU
(2017) Weerasinghe, PSA; Jayasena, S
Graphic processing unit (GPU) provides a low-cost but powerful hardware platform for implementing massively parallel high performance systems. The capabilities of GPUs have been used to provide fast and low cost solutions in areas such as machine learning, complex simulations such as global warming and genetic engineering and network traffic processing. Our research is focused on using GPUs to accelerate the decoding process of the Short Message Peer to Peer (SMPP) protocol. SMPP protocol is used to exchange Short Messages between Short Message Service Centers (SMSCs) and TCP/IP based applications. From the point of view of a user, a SMS taking few seconds is acceptable and therefore a SMSC is mostly focused on achieving a higher throughput than a low per packet latency. We have developed a SMPP decoder library in C with GPU support. It supports both CPU based and GPU based decoding. The library also includes two primary APIs. The first API is for general usage by any C based application and the second API could be used by Java Native Interface (JNI) based application. We have evaluated the performance of the library in both CPU and GPU modes and compared it with a SMPP server based on Cloudhopper, a Java implementation of SMPP protocol. The evaluation shows around five times throughput gain in GPU mode over both Java and C based CPU modes.