Secure Concurrency Control in Firm Real-Time Database Systems

Many real-time database applications arise in electronic financial services, safety-critical installations and military systems where enforcing security is crucial to the success of the enterprise. For real-time database systems supporting applications with firm deadlines, we investigate here the performance implications, in terms of killed transactions, of guaranteeing multilevel secrecy. In particular, we focus on the concurrency control (CC) aspects of this issue. Our main contributions are the following: First, we identify which among the previously proposed real-time CC protocols are capable of providing covert-channel-free security. Second, using a detailed simulation model, we profile the real-time performance of a representative set of these secure CC protocols for a variety of security-classified workloads and system configurations. Our experiments show that a prioritized optimistic CC protocol, OPT-WAIT, provides the best overall performance. Third, we propose and evaluate a novel "dual-CC" approach that allows the real-time database system to simultaneously use different CC mechanisms for guaranteeing security and for improving real-time performance. By appropriately choosing these different mechanisms, concurrency control protocols that provide even better performance than OPT-WAIT are designed. Finally, we propose and evaluate GUARD, an adaptive admission-control policy designed to provide fairness with respect to the distribution of killed transactions across security levels. Our experiments show that GUARD efficiently provides close to ideal fairness for real-time applications that can tolerate covert channel bandwidths of upto one bit per second.

Integrated parallelization of computations and visualization for large-scale applications

Critical applications like cyclone tracking and earthquake modeling require simultaneous high-performance simulations and online visualization for timely analysis. Faster simulations and simultaneous visualization enable scientists provide real-time guidance to decision makers. In this work, we have developed an integrated user-driven and automated steering framework that simultaneously performs numerical simulations and efficient online remote visualization of critical weather applications in resource-constrained environments. It considers application dynamics like the criticality of the application and resource dynamics like the storage space, network bandwidth and available number of processors to adapt various application and resource parameters like simulation resolution, simulation rate and the frequency of visualization. We formulate the problem of finding an optimal set of simulation parameters as a linear programming problem. This leads to 30% higher simulation rate and 25-50% lesser storage consumption than a naive greedy approach. The framework also provides the user control over various application parameters like region of interest and simulation resolution. We have also devised an adaptive algorithm to reduce the lag between the simulation and visualization times. Using experiments with different network bandwidths, we find that our adaptive algorithm is able to reduce lag as well as visualize the most representative frames.

Perspectives on Titanium Science and Technology

The basic framework and - conceptual understanding of the metallurgy of Ti alloys is strong and this has enabled the use of titanium and its alloys in safety-critical structures such as those in aircraft and aircraft engines. Nevertheless, a focus on cost-effectiveness and the compression of product development time by effectively integrating design with manufacturing in these applications, as well as those emerging in bioengineering, has driven research in recent decades towards a greater predictive capability through the use of computational materials engineering tools. Therefore this paper focuses on the complexity and variety of fundamental phenomena in this material system with a focus on phase transformations and mechanical behaviour in order to delineate the challenges that lie ahead in achieving these goals. (C) 2012 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Stability analysis of aperiodic messages scheduled in the dynamic segment of flex ray protocol

In a cyber physical system like vehicles number of signals to be communicated in a network system has an increasing trend. More and more mechanical and hydraulic parts are replaced by electronic control units and infotainment and multimedia applications has increased in vehicles. Safety critical hard real time messages and aperiodic messages communicated between electronic control units have been increased in recent times. Flexray is a high bandwidth protocol consisting of static segment for supporting hard real time messages and a dynamic segment for transmitting soft and non real time messages. In this paper, a method to obtain the stability region for the random arrival of messages in each electronic control units which is scheduled in the dynamic segment of Flexray protocol is presented. Number of mini slots available in the dynamic segment of Flexray restricts the arrival rate of tasks to the micro controllers or the number of micro controllers connected to the Flexray bus. Stability region of mathematical model of the system is compared with the Flexray protocol simulation results.

Effect Of Electroslag Refining On Microstructure And Mechanical-Properties Of Is-7670 Alloy

The electroslag refining technique is one of the modern tools which is capable of imparting superior mechanical and chemical properties to metals and alloys. Refining usually results in the elimination of a number of casting or solidification defects, such as shrinkage porosity, gas porosity, pipe, micro- and macro segregation. Remelting also imparts a directional grain structure apart from refining the size of the inclusions, grains and precipitates. This technique has over the years been used widely and successfully to improve the mechanical and chemical properties of steels and alloy steels which are used in the nuclear, missile, aerospace and marine industries for certain critical applications. But the application of ESR to aluminium and its alloys is only recent. This paper investigates the response of an aluminium alloy (corresponding to the Indian Specification IS: 7670) to ESR. Based on theoretical considerations and microstructural evidence it elucidates how ESR of aluminium alloys differs from that of ferrous alloys. The improvement achieved in mechanical properties of the alloy is correlated with the microstructure.

Automatic verification of distributed logic specifications

Formal specification is vital to the development of distributed real-time systems as these systems are inherently complex and safety-critical. It is widely acknowledged that formal specification and automatic analysis of specifications can significantly increase system reliability. Although a number of specification techniques for real-time systems have been reported in the literature, most of these formalisms do not adequately address to the constraints that the aspects of 'distribution' and 'real-time' impose on specifications. Further, an automatic verification tool is necessary to reduce human errors in the reasoning process. In this regard, this paper is an attempt towards the development of a novel executable specification language for distributed real-time systems. First, we give a precise characterization of the syntax and semantics of DL. Subsequently, we discuss the problems of model checking, automatic verification of satisfiability of DL specifications, and testing conformance of event traces with DL specifications. Effective solutions to these problems are presented as extensions to the classical first-order tableau algorithm. The use of the proposed framework is illustrated by specifying a sample problem.

Fault-Tolerant Average Execution Time Optimization for General Purpose Multi-Processor System-on Chips

Fault-tolerance is due to the semiconductor technology development important, not only for safety-critical systems but also for general-purpose (non-safety critical) systems. However, instead of guaranteeing that deadlines always are met, it is for general-purpose systems important to minimize the average execution time (AET) while ensuring fault-tolerance. For a given job and a soft (transient) error probability, we define mathematical formulas for AET that includes bus communication overhead for both voting (active replication) and rollback-recovery with checkpointing (RRC). And, for a given multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC), we define integer linear programming (ILP) models that minimize AET including bus communication overhead when: (1) selecting the number of checkpoints when using RRC, (2) finding the number of processors and job-to-processor assignment when using voting, and (3) defining fault-tolerance scheme (voting or RRC) per job and defining its usage for each job. Experiments demonstrate significant savings in AET.

Derating Based Hardware Optimizations in Soft Error Tolerant Designs

Ensuring reliable operation over an extended period of time is one of the biggest challenges facing present day electronic systems. The increased vulnerability of the components to atmospheric particle strikes poses a big threat in attaining the reliability required for various mission critical applications. Various soft error mitigation methodologies exist to address this reliability challenge. A general solution to this problem is to arrive at a soft error mitigation methodology with an acceptable implementation overhead and error tolerance level. This implementation overhead can then be reduced by taking advantage of various derating effects like logical derating, electrical derating and timing window derating, and/or making use of application redundancy, e. g. redundancy in firmware/software executing on the so designed robust hardware. In this paper, we analyze the impact of various derating factors and show how they can be profitably employed to reduce the hardware overhead to implement a given level of soft error robustness. This analysis is performed on a set of benchmark circuits using the delayed capture methodology. Experimental results show upto 23% reduction in the hardware overhead when considering individual and combined derating factors.

PriDyn: Enabling Differentiated I/O Services in Cloud Using Dynamic Priorities

Virtualization is one of the key enabling technologies for Cloud computing. Although it facilitates improved utilization of resources, virtualization can lead to performance degradation due to the sharing of physical resources like CPU, memory, network interfaces, disk controllers, etc. Multi-tenancy can cause highly unpredictable performance for concurrent I/O applications running inside virtual machines that share local disk storage in Cloud. Disk I/O requests in a typical Cloud setup may have varied requirements in terms of latency and throughput as they arise from a range of heterogeneous applications having diverse performance goals. This necessitates providing differential performance services to different I/O applications. In this paper, we present PriDyn, a novel scheduling framework which is designed to consider I/O performance metrics of applications such as acceptable latency and convert them to an appropriate priority value for disk access based on the current system state. This framework aims to provide differentiated I/O service to various applications and ensures predictable performance for critical applications in multi-tenant Cloud environment. We demonstrate through experimental validations on real world I/O traces that this framework achieves appreciable enhancements in I/O performance, indicating that this approach is a promising step towards enabling QoS guarantees on Cloud storage.

Expediency of Penetration Ratio and Evaluation of Mean Throughput for Safety and Commercial Applications in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) applications are principally categorized into safety and commercial applications. Efficient traffic management for routing an emergency vehicle is of paramount importance in safety applications of VANETs. In the first case, a typical example of a high dense urban scenario is considered to demonstrate the role of penetration ratio for achieving reduced travel time between source and destination points. The major requirement for testing these VANET applications is a realistic simulation approach which would justify the results prior to actual deployment. A Traffic Simulator coupled with a Network Simulator using a feedback loop feature is apt for realistic simulation of VANETs. Thus, in this paper, we develop the safety application using traffic control interface (TraCI), which couples SUMO (traffic simulator) and NS2 (network simulator). Likewise, the mean throughput is one of the necessary performance measures for commercial applications of VANETs. In the next case, commercial applications have been considered wherein the data is transferred amongst vehicles (V2V) and between roadside infrastructure and vehicles (I2V), for which the throughput is assessed.

INST: An Integrated Steering Framework for Critical Weather Applications

Online remote visualization and steering of critical weather applications like cyclone tracking are essential for effective and timely analysis by geographically distributed climate science community. A steering framework for controlling the high-performance simulations of critical weather events needs to take into account both the steering inputs of the scientists and the criticality needs of the application including minimum progress rate of simulations and continuous visualization of significant events. In this work, we have developed an integrated user-driven and automated steering framework INST for simulations, online remote visualization, and analysis for critical weather applications. INST provides the user control over various application parameters including region of interest, resolution of simulation, and frequency of data for visualization. Unlike existing efforts, our framework considers both the steering inputs and the criticality of the application, namely, the minimum progress rate needed for the application, and various resource constraints including storage space and network bandwidth to decide the best possible parameter values for simulations and visualization.