Model driven middleware: A new paradigm for developing distributed real-time and embedded systems

Distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems have become critical in domains such as avionics (e.g., flight mission computers), telecommunications (e.g., wireless phone services), tele-medicine (e.g., robotic surgery), and defense applications (e.g., total ship computing environments). These types of system are increasingly interconnected via wireless and wireline networks to form systems of systems. A challenging requirement for these DRE systems involves supporting a diverse set of quality of service (QoS) properties, such as predictable latency/jitter, throughput guarantees, scalability, 24x7 availability, dependability, and security that must be satisfied simultaneously in real-time. Although increasing portions of DRE systems are based on QoS-enabled commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software components, the complexity of managing long lifecycles (often ∼15-30 years) remains a key challenge for DRE developers and system integrators. For example, substantial time and effort is spent retrofitting DRE applications when the underlying COTS technology infrastructure changes.This paper provides two contributions that help improve the development, validation, and integration of DRE systems throughout their lifecycles. First, we illustrate the challenges in creating and deploying QoS-enabled component middleware-based DRE applications and describe our approach to resolving these challenges based on a new software paradigm called Model Driven Middleware (MDM), which combines model-based software development techniques with QoS-enabled component middleware to address key challenges faced by developers of DRE systems — particularly composition, integration, and assured QoS for end-to-end operations. Second, we describe the structure and functionality of CoSMIC (Component Synthesis using Model Integrated Computing), which is an MDM toolsuite that addresses key DRE application and middleware lifecycle challenges, including partitioning the components to use distributed resources effectively, validating software configurations, assuring multiple simultaneous QoS properties in real-time, and safeguarding against rapidly changing technology.     

Mössbauer and XRD studies on the effect of doping iron in KCaY(PO4)2

The effect of doping iron at the yttrium site in hexagonal KCaY(PO₄)₂ is studied for various concentrations ofx (0≤x≤1), of iron using Mössbauer and X-ray diffraction methods. For low iron concentrations, very little changes in structure are seen but atx≈0·1, onset of new peaks in the XRD pattern is observed. The Mössbauer study of the doped samples reveals that iron has a solubility of up to 2·5% in the parent phase with any excess iron precipitating out to form a new and unknown phase. From a detailed analysis of the X-ray diffraction pattern (corresponding tox=1) of the latter phase, it is found that this phase is rhombohedral with the possible space groupR3.     

Common coupling and pointer variables,with application to a Linux case study

Both common coupling and pointer variables can exert a deleterious effect on the quality of software. The situation is exacerbated when global variables are assigned to pointer variables, that is, when an alias to a global variable is created. When this occurs, the number of global variables increases, and it becomes considerably harder to compute quality metrics correctly. However, unless aliasing is taken into account, variables may incorrectly appear to be unreferenced (neither defined nor used), or to be used without being defined. These ideas are illustrated by means of a case study of common coupling in the Linux kernel.

Sparsity Enforcing Edge Detection Method for Blurred and Noisy Fourier data

We present a new method for estimating the edges in a piecewise smooth function from blurred and noisy Fourier data. The proposed method is constructed by combining the so called concentration factor edge detection method, which uses a finite number of Fourier coefficients to approximate the jump function of a piecewise smooth function, with compressed sensing ideas. Due to the global nature of the concentration factor method, Gibbs oscillations feature prominently near the jump discontinuities. This can cause the misidentification of edges when simple thresholding techniques are used. In fact, the true jump function is sparse, i.e. zero almost everywhere with non-zero values only at the edge locations. Hence we adopt an idea from compressed sensing and propose a method that uses a regularized deconvolution to remove the artifacts. Our new method is fast, in the sense that it only needs the solution of a single l ₁ minimization. Numerical examples demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the method in the presence of noise and blur.     

Compliant cryptologic protocols

Literally, the word compliance suggests conformity in fulfilling official requirements. This paper presents the results of the analysis and design of a class of protocols called compliant cryptologic protocols (CCPs). The paper presents a notion for compliance in cryptosystems that is conducive as a cryptologic goal. CCPs are employed in security systems used by at least two mutually mistrusting sets of entities. The individuals in the sets of entities only trust the design of the security system and any trusted third party the security system may include. Such a security system can be thought of as a broker between the mistrusting sets of entities. Published online: 15 November 2002     

Electrical conduction in evaporated terbium fluoride thin films

The current-voltage characteristics of thin-film capacitors with evaporated terbium fluoride dielectric have been studied as a function of temperature (in the range 300 to 418 K). For sufficiently high electric fields (> 10⁴ V cm^–1, the leakage current is found to increase exponentially with the square root of the applied electric field. Analysis of the data suggests an electrode-limited mechanism such as that suggested by Schottky. It is seen that the conduction mechanism is an activated process with the activation energy decreasing with increasing field. Dielectric break-down and its dependence on film thickness have also been investigated. Break-down field strength follows the Forlani-Minnaja relation.     

Energy-Efficient Thermal-Aware Autonomic Management of Virtualized HPC Cloud Infrastructure

Virtualized datacenters and clouds are being increasingly considered for traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads that have typically targeted Grids and conventional HPC platforms. However, maximizing energy efficiency and utilization of datacenter resources, and minimizing undesired thermal behavior while ensuring application performance and other Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for HPC applications requires careful consideration of important and extremely challenging tradeoffs. Virtual Machine (VM) migration is one of the most common techniques used to alleviate thermal anomalies (i.e., hotspots) in cloud datacenter servers as it reduces load and, hence, the server utilization. In this article, the benefits of using other techniques such as voltage scaling and pinning (traditionally used for reducing energy consumption) for thermal management over VM migrations are studied in detail. As no single technique is the most efficient to meet temperature/performance optimization goals in all situations, an autonomic approach that performs energy-efficient thermal management while ensuring the QoS delivered to the users is proposed. To address the problem of VM allocation that arises during VM migrations, an innovative application-centric energy-aware strategy for Virtual Machine (VM) allocation is proposed. The proposed strategy ensures high resource utilization and energy efficiency through VM consolidation while satisfying application QoS by exploiting knowledge obtained through application profiling along multiple dimensions (CPU, memory, and network bandwidth utilization). To support our arguments, we present the results obtained from an experimental evaluation on real hardware using HPC workloads under different scenarios.     

A new robust reference watermarking scheme based on DWT-SVD

This paper presents a new semi-blind reference watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform(DWT) and singular value decomposition(SVD) for copyright protection and authenticity. We are using a gray scale logo image as watermark instead of randomly generated Gaussian noise type watermark. For watermark embedding, the original image is transformed into wavelet domain and a reference sub-image is formed using directive contrast and wavelet coefficients. We embed watermark into reference image by modifying the singular values of reference image using the singular values of the watermark. A reliable watermark extraction scheme is developed for the extraction of watermark from distorted image. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is able to withstand a variety of attacks. We show that the proposed scheme also stands with the ambiguity attack also.     

Surface studies on activated and hydrided CaNi5 alloy

X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic studies on the activated pure CaNi₅ alloy as well as the hydride formed at 1 atm pressure and room temperature, CaNi₅H_4.8, showed that on activation calcium segregates to the surface and forms the oxide, whereas most of the nickel on the surface is present in the metallic form. This indicates that the coexistance of the oxide phase and the metal phase is essential for the facile hydriding behaviour of CaNi₅.