18,891 research outputs found
Integrating security in a group oriented distributed system
A distributed security architecture is proposed for incorporation into group oriented distributed systems, and in particular, into the Isis distributed programming toolkit. The primary goal of the architecture is to make common group oriented abstractions robust in hostile settings, in order to facilitate the construction of high performance distributed applications that can tolerate both component failures and malicious attacks. These abstractions include process groups and causal group multicast. Moreover, a delegation and access control scheme is proposed for use in group oriented systems. The focus is the security architecture; particular cryptosystems and key exchange protocols are not emphasized
The ISIS project: Fault-tolerance in large distributed systems
The semi-annual status report covers activities of the ISIS project during the second half of 1989. The project had several independent objectives: (1) At the level of the ISIS Toolkit, ISIS release V2.0 was completed, containing bypass communication protocols. Performance of the system is greatly enhanced by this change, but the initial software release is limited in some respects. (2) The Meta project focused on the definition of the Lomita programming language for specifying rules that monitor sensors for conditions of interest and triggering appropriate reactions. This design was completed, and implementation of Lomita is underway on the Meta 2.0 platform. (3) The Deceit file system effort completed a prototype. It is planned to make Deceit available for use in two hospital information systems. (4) A long-haul communication subsystem project was completed and can be used as part of ISIS. This effort resulted in tools for linking ISIS systems on different LANs together over long-haul communications lines. (5) Magic Lantern, a graphical tool for building application monitoring and control interfaces, is included as part of the general ISIS releases
Maintaining consistency in distributed systems
In systems designed as assemblies of independently developed components, concurrent access to data or data structures normally arises within individual programs, and is controlled using mutual exclusion constructs, such as semaphores and monitors. Where data is persistent and/or sets of operation are related to one another, transactions or linearizability may be more appropriate. Systems that incorporate cooperative styles of distributed execution often replicate or distribute data within groups of components. In these cases, group oriented consistency properties must be maintained, and tools based on the virtual synchrony execution model greatly simplify the task confronting an application developer. All three styles of distributed computing are likely to be seen in future systems - often, within the same application. This leads us to propose an integrated approach that permits applications that use virtual synchrony with concurrent objects that respect a linearizability constraint, and vice versa. Transactional subsystems are treated as a special case of linearizability
Translating expert system rules into Ada code with validation and verification
The purpose of this ongoing research and development program is to develop software tools which enable the rapid development, upgrading, and maintenance of embedded real-time artificial intelligence systems. The goals of this phase of the research were to investigate the feasibility of developing software tools which automatically translate expert system rules into Ada code and develop methods for performing validation and verification testing of the resultant expert system. A prototype system was demonstrated which automatically translated rules from an Air Force expert system was demonstrated which detected errors in the execution of the resultant system. The method and prototype tools for converting AI representations into Ada code by converting the rules into Ada code modules and then linking them with an Activation Framework based run-time environment to form an executable load module are discussed. This method is based upon the use of Evidence Flow Graphs which are a data flow representation for intelligent systems. The development of prototype test generation and evaluation software which was used to test the resultant code is discussed. This testing was performed automatically using Monte-Carlo techniques based upon a constraint based description of the required performance for the system
Survey on the Event Orderings Semantics Used for Distributed System
Event ordering in distributed system (DS) is disputable and proactive subject
in DS particularly with the emergence of multimedia synchronization. According
to the literature, different type of event ordering is used for different DS
mode such as asynchronous or synchronous. Recently, there are several novel
implementation of these types introduced to fulfill the demand for establishing
a certain order according to a specific criterion in DS with lighter
complexity.Comment: 9 page
Causality Diagrams using Hybrid Vector Clocks
Causality in distributed systems is a concept that has long been explored and
numerous approaches have been made to use causality as a way to trace
distributed system execution. Traditional approaches usually used system
profiling and newer approaches profiled clocks of systems to detect failures
and construct timelines that caused those failures. Since the advent of logical
clocks, these profiles have become more and more accurate with ways to
characterize concurrency and distributions, with accurate diagrams for message
passing. Vector clocks addressed the shortcomings of using traditional logical
clocks, by storing information about other processes in the system as well.
Hybrid vector clocks are a novel approach to this concept where clocks need not
store all the process information. Rather, we store information of processes
within an acceptable skew of the focused process. This gives us an efficient
way of profiling with substantially reduced costs to the system. Building on
this idea, we propose the idea of building causal traces using information
generated from the hybrid vector clock. The hybrid vector clock would provide
us with a strong sense of concurrency and distribution, and we theorize that
all the information generated from the clock is sufficient to develop a causal
trace for debugging. We post-process and parse the clocks generated from an
execution trace to develop a swimlane on a web interface, that traces the
points of failure of a distributed system. We also provide an API to reuse this
concept for any generic distributed system framework
Issues in providing a reliable multicast facility
Issues involved in point-to-multipoint communication are presented and the literature for proposed solutions and approaches surveyed. Particular attention is focused on the ideas and implementations that align with the requirements of the environment of interest. The attributes of multicast receiver groups that might lead to useful classifications, what the functionality of a management scheme should be, and how the group management module can be implemented are examined. The services that multicasting facilities can offer are presented, followed by mechanisms within the communications protocol that implements these services. The metrics of interest when evaluating a reliable multicast facility are identified and applied to four transport layer protocols that incorporate reliable multicast
Communication Theoretic Data Analytics
Widespread use of the Internet and social networks invokes the generation of
big data, which is proving to be useful in a number of applications. To deal
with explosively growing amounts of data, data analytics has emerged as a
critical technology related to computing, signal processing, and information
networking. In this paper, a formalism is considered in which data is modeled
as a generalized social network and communication theory and information theory
are thereby extended to data analytics. First, the creation of an equalizer to
optimize information transfer between two data variables is considered, and
financial data is used to demonstrate the advantages. Then, an information
coupling approach based on information geometry is applied for dimensionality
reduction, with a pattern recognition example to illustrate the effectiveness.
These initial trials suggest the potential of communication theoretic data
analytics for a wide range of applications.Comment: Published in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Jan.
201
- …