SAC Research Group

Software System Architecture in Cloud Computing

SAC research group focuses on data intensive applications in various domains running in and for the cloud

Our research endeavours on designing adaptive software components, architecture framework and analysis method to scale data intensive distributed systems, through modeling software architecture; quantifying the system's characteristics using statistical models; predicting the system's quality attributes and devising system platforms.

Current projects investigate mechanisms to improve the scalability and reliability of MapReduce Framework and Stream Processing Middleware to process incremental data analysis.

SAC group is expanding steadily and actively recruiting research candidates at Postdoc, Doctoral and Master of Research levels.

Research Projects

Our research is currently funded by Concordia Start-up Program, Concordia SEED Program, and NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Discovery Grand (2014 - 2018).

Our research is vertically built upon the technology stack (from the bottom to top) of virtualized and newtworked resources, distributed management services and data processing frameworks. We create a layer of software frameworks and platforms that support adaptive optimization of load distribution; fine grained monitoring framework to capture resource demands for real-time and high available services; and interactive visualizaton APIs to correlates multisources of data. We investigate model-driven development methods and tools to enable architecture level configuration across software frameworks and platforms.

Our research aims to support a broad range of real-world applications in and for the cloud.

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News & Events

Capstone demo, Apr 4th 2014

The Capstone team presented at the ENCS demo day.


The 2nd SAC Workshop, Apr 3rd 2014

SAC workshop features research students' presentation, visiting scholars' seminar and demonstration of current research progress.

The next SAC workshop is scheduled in August 2014 at the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, EV Building.


Poster demo at Ericsson HQ, Stockholm, Sweden. Mar 31st 2014.

Mehran Khan (MASc student) submitted his poster on "Monitoring workload of indivdual high available services in the cloud" to A&T Demo Event, Mar 31st 2014. Ericsson HQ, Stockholm, Sweden

IEEE IC2E paper presentation, Mar 11th 2014

Xing Wu (MASc student) presented his research paper at IEEE IC2E International Workshop, Boston, USA

SAC group co-organized the IEEE Lecture from Dr. Ian Gorton on Feb 5th 2014

SAC group hosted Dr. Ian Gorton's visit and co-organized his IEEE Lecture on "Software Architecture for Big Data Systems". Dr. Hamou-Lhadj is the Chair of IEEE Montreal Section Computer Society Chapter, who co-organized this event.

The 1st SAC Workshop, Feb 5th 2014

SAC group hosted Dr. Ian Gorton's visit from Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, where he works on software architectures for big data systems.

LTTng-Tmf-hack Day, Dec 12th 2013

Mehran Khan (MASc student) worked in a team to instrument the VLC player (Video LAN Player) with LTTng UST trace pointers for tracing. École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada