Large N-Tier applications running in data centers have complex
deployment requirements and dependencies that change frequently. The
increasing complexity and scalability requirements of such
applications demand automated design, testing, deployment and
monitoring of applications.  The goal of Elba project is creating
automated staging and testing of complex enterprise systems before
deployment to production.  Automating the staging process lowers the
cost of testing applications and improves its reliability.  Elba
software tools extract test parameters from production specifications,
such as SLAs, and deployment specifications, and via the Mulini
generator, create staging plans for the application.  A benchmark
application, the TPC-W, is used to validate the generated
configuration.  Simple learning tools identify system bottlenecks and
refine application deployments based on performance and cost.

Biography of Calton Pu
    Professor and John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair in Software
    College of Computing
    Georgia Institute of Technology

    Calton Pu was born in Taiwan and grew up in Brazil.  He received
    his PhD from University of Washington in 1986 and served on the
    faculty of Columbia University and Oregon Graduate Institute.
    Currently, he is holding the position of Professor and John
    P. Imlay, Jr. Chair in Software at the College of Computing,
    Georgia Institute of Technology.  He is currently working on three
    areas.  First, he is using automated code generation techniques to
    automate and ensure the correct deployment of large scale N-tier
    applications in the Elba project.  Second, he is investigating
    software and statistical techniques to defend against Denial of
    Information attacks in areas such as email and web spam.  Third,
    he is working on the application of specialization and other
    techniques to ensure the reliability, trust, and security of
    system and application software.  He has been the principal
    investigator of the Infosphere, Synthetix, and Immunix projects,
    with technical contributions such as Epsilon Serializability,
    Reflective Transaction Framework, and Continual Queries over the
    Internet.  His collaborations include applications of these
    techniques in scientific research on macromolecular structure
    data, weather data, and environmental data, as well as in
    industrial settings.  He has published more than 50 journal papers
    and book chapters, 150 conference and refereed workshop papers,
    and served on more than 100 program committees, including the
    co-PC chairs of SRDS'95, ICDE'99, COOPIS'02, SRDS'03, and
    co-general chair of ICDE'97, CIKM'01, ICDE'06.