Interfacing the hardware API with a feature-based operating system family

Multiprocessor systems on a chip (MPSoCs) are a popular class of course-grained parallel computer architectures, which are very useful, because they support re-use of legacy software components and application-specific tailoring of hardware structures at the same time. Furthermore, model-driven design frameworks for MPSoCs such as Xilinx’ EDK or our own LavA-framework facilitate very fast system development. However, in this paper we argue that these design frameworks are not ideal from the development process perspective. Instead, we propose a software-centric approach that is based on the hardware API concept. The API is a representation of hardware components on the software level, which is generated from a hardware meta-model. It allows us to automatically derive a hardware structure based on access patterns in software, revealed by a static code analysis. This trick reduces the number of hardware details the developer needs to deal with and avoids configuration inconsistencies between the hardware and software levels by design. Furthermore, we present how the development process can benefit from the hardware API, when the API is interfaced with a configurable operating system.     

Designing and implementing lightweight kernels for capability computing

In the early 1990s, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico began development of customized system software for massively parallel ‘capability’ computing platforms. These lightweight kernels have proven to be essential for delivering the full power of the underlying hardware to applications. This claim is underscored by the success of several supercomputers, including the Intel Paragon, Intel Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative Red, and the Cray XT series of systems, each having established a new standard for high‐performance computing upon introduction. In this paper, we describe our approach to lightweight compute node kernel design and discuss the design principles that have guided several generations of implementation and deployment. A broad strategy of operating system specialization has led to a focus on user‐level resource management, deterministic behavior, and scalable system services. The relative importance of each of these areas has changed over the years in response to changes in applications and hardware and system architecture. We detail our approach and the associated principles, describe how our application of these principles has changed over time, and provide design and performance comparisons to contemporaneous supercomputing operating systems. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The smart surface network: A bus-based approach to dense sensing

We present the Smart Surface Network (SSN), a hardware and software platform designed for dense sensing. Sensor nodes connected to the SSN communicate using a serial bus integrated within a mountable physical surface. The hardware architecture and bus access and communication mechanisms are implemented in a self-stabilizing manner, providing robust handling of unannounced arrivals and departures of network devices. An associated API supports a peer-to-peer communication paradigm, providing access to the physical, data link, and application layers of the bus. In this paper, we describe the SSN hardware architecture and present the bus access and peer discovery algorithms. We also discuss the design of the API and describe experimental results characterizing the fairness of the bus algorithm, the efficiency of the peer discovery algorithm, and the performance of the SSN system under varying load conditions.     

Applications of Conformal Computing techniques to problems in computational physics: the Fast Fourier Transform

The techniques of Conformal Computing are introduced with an application to the Fast Fourier Transform. Conformal Computing is a design methodology, based on a rigorous mathematical foundation, which provides a systematic approach to the most efficient organization of all levels of the software and hardware design hierarchy from high-level software constructs all the way down to the design of the integrated circuits. We show that using these general design principles, without any specialized optimization, leads to portable, scalable, code that is competitive with other well-tuned machine specific routines. Further improvements are straightforward within our formalism by taking into account specific hardware details (e.g., cache loops) in a portable parametric way. We also argue that the present theory constitutes a uniform way of reasoning about physics and the data structures that define physics on computers.     

一种针对可信计算平台的分布式可信验证机制

可信计算技术在提高系统安全性的同时,也给用户使用计算机带来了诸多限制。为了解决自由软件等未授权程序的可信验证问题,提出了一种基于可信计算的分布式可信验证机制（DTVMTC）。该机制以庞大的Internet用户群为基础,通过网络数据统计的方法,实现对应用程序的可信验证,从而解决了对无可信来源但实际可信的应用程序进行可信验证的问题,保障了用户使用可信计算平台的自由。在Windows平台实现了DTVMTC的原型,实验结果表明DTVMTC能够实现预定目标且具有良好的性能。     

An approach to introducing locality in remote attestation using near field communications

Remote Attestation, as devised by the Trusted Computing Group, is based on a secure hardware component—the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). It allows to reach trust decisions between different network hosts. However, attestation cannot be applied in an important field of application—the identification of physically encountered, public computer platforms. Unfortunately, such computer terminals are especially exposed and the software running on them cannot be assumed unaltered and secure.     

Chronicle of a Java Card death

Various attacks are designed to gain access to the assets of Java Card Platforms. These attacks use software, hardware or a combination of both. Manufacturers have improved their countermeasures to protect card assets from these attacks. In this paper, we attempt to gain access to assets of a recent Java Card Platform by combining various logical attacks. As we did not have any information about the internal structure of the targeted platform, we had to execute various attacks and analyze the results. Our investigation on the targeted Java Card Platform lead us to introduce two generic methods to gain access to the assets of Java Card Platforms. One of the new methods we present in this paper is based on the misuse of the Java Card API to build a type confusion and get access to the objects (including cryptographic keys) of a Java Card applet. The other method is a new approach to get access to the return address of the methods in Java Cards with Separate Stack countermeasure. We also propose a pattern that the targeted platform uses to store data and code of applets on the card plus the ability to read and write in the data and code area of the applets in different security contexts. These new attacks occur even in the presence of countermeasures such as Separate Stack for kernel and user data, indirect mapping for objects addressing and firewall mechanisms.     

Hybrid image‐based collision detection in Java 3D

Collision detection is highly important in computer graphics and virtual reality. Most collision detection methods are object‐based, relying on testing the geometrical interference of objects, and their performance therefore depends on the geometrical complexity of the objects. Recently, image‐based methods have gained increasing acceptance for their simplicity in implementation, robustness with respect to the object geometry, and the potential to distribute the computational burden onto graphics hardware. However, all existing image‐based methods require direct calls to OpenGL, but so far there is no direct way to access OpenGL through the Java 3D API. Although Java 3D provides its own built‐in collision detection classes, they are either incorrect or inefficient. In this paper, we present a hybrid image‐based collision detection method in Java 3D, which incorporates the Java 3D built‐in collision detection and the image‐based collision detection in our specially devised scene graph. In addition, we take advantage of the fact that the 3D position of successive offscreen views (i.e. virtual views perceived by the probing object) does not change significantly and thereby reduce the occurrences of offscreen rendering, so that the collision detection becomes even faster (up to 50% in our case). Experimental results prove the correctness and efficiency of our method. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Deadline scheduling in the Linux kernel

During the last decade, there has been a considerable interest in using Linux in real‐time systems, especially for industrial control. The simple and elegant design of Linux guarantees reliability and very good performance, while its open‐source license allows to modify and change the source code according to the user needs. However, Linux has been designed to be a general‐purpose operating system. Therefore, it presents some issues like unpredictable latencies and limited support for real‐time scheduling. In this paper, we present our experience in the design and implementation of the real‐time scheduler that has been recently included in the Linux kernel. The scheduler is based on the Resource Reservation paradigm, which allows to enforce temporal isolation between the running tasks. We describe the genesis of the project, the challenges we have encountered, the implementation details and the API offered to the programmers. Then, we show the experimental results measured on a real hardware. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developing platform specific model for MPSoC architecture from UML-based embedded software models

In this paper, we describe a technique to design UML-based software models for MPSoC architecture, which focuses on the development of the platform specific model of embedded software. To develop the platform specific model, we define a process for the design of UML-based software model and suggest an algorithm with precise actions to map the model to MPSoC architecture. In order to support our design process, we implemented our approach in an integrated tool. Using the tool, we applied our design technique to a target system. We believe that our technique provides several benefits such as improving parallelism of tasks and fast-and-valid mapping of software models to hardware architecture.     

A Survey of General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware

The rapid increase in the performance of graphics hardware, coupled with recent improvements in its programmability, have made graphics hardware a compelling platform for computationally demanding tasks in a wide variety of application domains. In this report, we describe, summarize, and analyze the latest research in mapping general‐purpose computation to graphics hardware. We begin with the technical motivations that underlie general‐purpose computation on graphics processors (GPGPU) and describe the hardware and software developments that have led to the recent interest in this field. We then aim the main body of this report at two separate audiences. First, we describe the techniques used in mapping general‐purpose computation to graphics hardware. We believe these techniques will be generally useful for researchers who plan to develop the next generation of GPGPU algorithms and techniques. Second, we survey and categorize the latest developments in general‐purpose application development on graphics hardware.     

Trusted Computing Platform Alliance

An industry consortium focused on ensuring that all PCs are secure for electronic business transactions has announced the release of its first version specification. The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), backed by founding members Compaq, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel, said that the specification will adopt the combination of a hardware and a software approach, which includes a security chip that encrypts data whether filed locally, or sent over the Internet by E-mail.     

Nested parallelism for multi-core HPC systems using Java

Since its introduction in 1993, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become a de facto standard for writing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications on clusters and Massively Parallel Processors (MPPs). The recent emergence of multi-core processor systems presents a new challenge for established parallel programming paradigms, including those based on MPI. This paper presents a new Java messaging system called MPJ Express. Using this system, we exploit multiple levels of parallelism–messaging and threading–to improve application performance on multi-core processors. We refer to our approach as nested parallelism. This MPI-like Java library can support nested parallelism by using Java or Java OpenMP (JOMP) threads within an MPJ Express process. Practicality of this approach is assessed by porting to Java a massively parallel structure formation code from Cosmology called Gadget-2. We introduce nested parallelism in the Java version of the simulation code and report good speed-ups. To the best of our knowledge it is the first time this kind of hybrid parallelism is demonstrated in a high performance Java application.     

JASMINE: A Java Tool for Multimedia Collaboration on the Internet

Although collaboration tools have existed for a long time [8], Internet-based multimedia collaboration has recently received a lot of attention mainly due to easy accessibility of the Internet by ordinary users. The Java platform and programming language has also introduced yet another level of easy access: platform-independent computing. As a result, it is very attractive to use Java to design multimedia collaboration systems for the Internet. Today there are many systems, which use Java for multimedia collaboration. However, most of these systems require the shared Java application to be re-written according to the collaboration system's Application Programming Interface (API)—a task which is sometimes difficult or even impossible. In this paper, we describe a practical approach for transparent collaboration with Java. Our approach is transparent in that the Java application can be shared as is with no modifications. The main idea behind our system is that user events occurring through the interactions with the application can be caught, distributed, and reconstructed, hence allowing Java applications to be shared transparently. Our architecture allows us to make the huge installed base of Java applications collaborative, without any modification to their original code. We also prove the feasibility of our architecture by implementation of the JASMINE¹ prototype.     

一种Java API文档对异常描述不一致的自动检测方法

应用程序编程接口(Application Programming Interface,API)在软件开发以及代码复用中有着重要作用。然而,API代码和文档存在的不一致情况会误导API的使用者并降低软件开发效率及其稳定性等。针对Java API异常代码及其文档描述不一致的情况,提出了一种基于静态分析代码语法树及方法之间的调用关系的自动检测方法,为验证方法的有效性,利用JDK中的API源代码包及其相应文档作为测试对象根据实验结果。本方法的检测结果能达到71.5%的准确率以及85.9%的召回率,能够较为准确地识别API文档对程序异常描述不一致问题,对API文档的编写和维护具有指导性意义。     

WYSIWIB: exploiting fine‐grained program structure in a scriptable API‐usage protocol‐finding process

Bug‐finding tools rely on specifications of what is correct or incorrect code. As it is difficult for a tool developer or user to anticipate all possible specifications, strategies for inferring specifications have been proposed. These strategies obtain probable specifications by observing common characteristics of code or execution traces, typically focusing on sequences of function calls. To counter the observed high rate of false positives, heuristics have been proposed for ranking or pruning the results. These heuristics, however, can result in false negatives, especially for rarely used functions. In this paper, we propose an alternate approach to specification inference, in which the user guides the inference process using patterns of code that reflect the user's understanding of the conventions and design of the targeted software project. We focus on specifications describing the correct usage of API functions, which we refer to as API protocols. Our approach builds on the Coccinelle program matching and transformation tool, which allows a user to construct patterns that reflect the structure of the code to be matched. We evaluate our approach on the source code of the Linux kernel, which defines a very large number of API functions with varying properties. Linux is also critical software, implying that fixing even bugs involving rarely used protocols is essential. In our experiments, we use our approach to find over 3000 potential API protocols, with an estimated false positive rate of under 15% and use these protocols to find over 360 bugs in the use of API functions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

一种类型化低级语言的设计与应用

介绍了以构造一个具有更小的需信任计算基础的Java虚拟机系统为目的的研究工作，将一种类型安全的低级语言TLL应用到Java虚拟机的即时编译器中．TLL的类型系统基于多态的类型化入演算，它具有丰富的表现力且能够编码各种高级语言的抽象．基于TLL的一个虚拟机原型系统已经实现，它可以作为实现一个具有微小的需信任计算基础的Java虚拟机的起点．