Five Canadian institutions will share in a $1 million IT research fund announced last month by systems management software vendor CA.
Recipients of the grant, which will be spread out over three years, include the University of Toronto, Queen’s University, the Université du Québec en Outaouais, Carleton University, and the University of Waterloo.
The projects run under the grant will focus on management, security and governance issues, all of which are CA’s areas of interest, said Gabby Silberman, senior vice-president and director of the Islandia, New York-based CA Labs.
Silberman said CA looked to Canadian universities as a source of innovation. “There’s a lot of strength in Canadian universities in areas we’re interested in,” he said.
One of the areas that CA is currently focusing on is around service-oriented architecture (SOA). “SOA is a very hot area today… You need to bring together products that are fundamentally different, all in a much more efficient fashion,” Silberman said.
The University of Toronto has been collaborating with CA for about a year now on an enterprise services bus project, according to computer science and engineering professor Hans-Arno Jacobsen. The project aims to make application integration and business process execution more efficient, he said.
“We’re developing an enterprise services bus based on a content-based publish/subscribe paradigm. It will allow you to compare and more easily integrate applications,” he said.
The development project aims to make it easier to build SOA and to integrate it with event-driven architecture.
This type of middleware can be applied to many verticals, including manufacturing, transportation, and health care, the professor said.
“The Internet’s popularity and applications getting more spread out, along with a greater distribution of resources, were the inspiration for this project,” said Jacobsen.
The inspiration for the Queen’s University project, meanwhile, was the current emphasis on Web services, according to Pat Martin, a computer science professor, who is investigating how to use autonomic computing technology to provide a new management framework.
“With Web services, there is a need for dealing with complex things. With the dynamic nature of the Web, there are all sorts of different pieces that are too difficult to manage manually,” said Martin.
His project will concentrate on crafting a system that is able to manage itself and adapt to change without having to consult the user. For example, if a system was running really hard and was suffering from slowed response times, the system could detect that and reallocate resources, such as add another server or move the load to a different server.
The Université du Québec en Outaouais is working on creating consistency of policies in identity access management, according to CA’s Silberman.
He explained that within many identity systems, there are inherent conflicts that can result in the wrong people being given access because the system doesn’t know which rule to follow. Research in the Quebec university aims to resolve this issue.
Over at Carleton University, researchers will be studying querying inconsistencies, while University of Waterloo researchers will be working on diagnosis and logging in an effort to develop a more adaptive logging system that is both efficient and thorough, CA said.