Abstract
The exponential growth of digital information is imposing increasing scale and efficiency demands on modern storage infrastructures. As infrastructure complexity increases, so does the difficulty in ensuring quality of service, maintainability, and resource fairness, raising unprecedented performance, scalability, and programmability challenges. Software-Defined Storage (SDS) addresses these challenges by cleanly disentangling control and data flows, easing management, and improving control functionality of conventional storage systems. Despite its momentum in the research community, many aspects of the paradigm are still unclear, undefined, and unexplored, leading to misunderstandings that hamper the research and development of novel SDS technologies. In this article, we present an in-depth study of SDS systems, providing a thorough description and categorization of each plane of functionality. Further, we propose a taxonomy and classification of existing SDS solutions according to different criteria. Finally, we provide key insights about the paradigm and discuss potential future research directions for the field.

Abstract
Fault-tolerance is a core feature in distributed database systems, particularly the ones deployed in cloud environments. The dependability of these systems often relies in middleware components that abstract the DBMS logic from the replication itself. The highly configurable nature of these systems makes their throughput very dependent on the correct tuning for a given workload. Given the high complexity involved, machine learning techniques are often considered to guide the tuning process and decompose the relations established between tuning variables. This paper presents a machine learning mechanism based on reinforcement learning that attaches to a hybrid replication middleware connected to a DBMS to dynamically live-tune the configuration of the middleware according to the workload being processed. Along with the vision for the system, we present a study conducted over a prototype of the self-tuned replication middleware, showcasing the achieved performance improvements and showing that we were able to achieve an improvement of 370.99% on some of the considered metrics. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2020.

Abstract
Low-code application development as proposed by the OutSystems Platform enables fast mobile and desktop application development and deployment. It hinges on visual development of the interface and business logic but also on easy integration with data stores and services while delivering robust applications that scale. Data integration increasingly means accessing a variety of NoSQL stores. Unfortunately, the diversity of data and processing models, that make them useful in the first place, is difficult to reconcile with the simplification of abstractions exposed to developers in a low-code platform. Moreover, NoSQL data stores also rely on a variety of general purpose and custom scripting languages as their main interfaces. In this paper we report on building a polyglot data access layer for the OutSystems Platform that uses SQL with optional embedded script snippets to bridge the gap between low-code and full access to NoSQL stores. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2020.

Abstract
HPC Shelf is a proposal of a cloud computing platform to provide component-oriented services for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. This paper presents a Verification-as-a-Service (VaaS) framework for component certification on HPC Shelf. Certification is aimed at providing higher confidence that components of parallel computing systems of HPC Shelf behave as expected according to one or more requirements expressed in their contracts. To this end, new abstractions are introduced, starting with certifier components. They are designed to inspect other components and verify them for different types of functional, non-functional and behavioral requirements. The certification framework is naturally based on parallel computing techniques to speed up verification tasks.

Abstract
This paper introduces a sort of automata and associated languages, often arising in modelling natural phenomena, in which both vagueness and simultaneity are taken as first class citizens. This requires a fuzzy semantics assigned to transitions and a precise notion of a synchronous product to enforce the simultaneous occurrence of actions. The expected relationships between automata and languages are revisited in this setting; in particular it is shown that any subset of a fuzzy synchronous language with the suitable signature forms a synchronous Kleene algebra.

Abstract