Management in distributed systems: A semi-formal approach

The reverse engineering of a skeleton based programming environment and redesign to distribute management activities of the system and thereby remove a potential single point of failure is considered. The Ore notation is used to facilitate abstraction of the design and analysis of its properties. It is argued that Ore is particularly suited to this role as this type of management is essentially an orchestration activity. The Ore specification of the original version of the system is modified via a series of semi-formally justified derivation steps to obtain a specification of the decentralized management version which is then used as a basis for its implementation. Analysis of the two specifications allows qualitative prediction of the expected performance of the derived version with respect to the original, and this prediction is borne out in practice.

Network Based Malware Detection in Virtualised Environment

While virtualisation can provide many benefits to a networks infrastructure, securing the virtualised environment is a big challenge. The security of a fully virtualised solution is dependent on the security of each of its underlying components, such as the hypervisor, guest operating systems and storage.

This paper presents a single security service running on the hypervisor that could potentially work to provide security service to all virtual machines running on the system. This paper presents a hypervisor hosted framework which performs specialised security tasks for all underlying virtual machines to protect against any malicious attacks by passively analysing the network traffic of VMs. This framework has been implemented using Xen Server and has been evaluated by detecting a Zeus Server setup and infected clients, distributed over a number of virtual machines. This framework is capable of detecting and identifying all infected VMs with no false positive or false negative detection.

GPU Acceleration of Partial Differential Equation Solvers

Differential equations are often directly solvable by analytical means only in their one dimensional version. Partial differential equations are generally not solvable by analytical means in two and three dimensions, with the exception of few special cases. In all other cases, numerical approximation methods need to be utilized. One of the most popular methods is the finite element method. The main areas of focus, here, are the Poisson heat equation and the plate bending equation. The purpose of this paper is to provide a quick walkthrough of the various approaches that the authors followed in pursuit of creating optimal solvers, accelerated with the use of graphical processing units, and comparing them in terms of accuracy and time efficiency with existing or self-made non-accelerated solvers.