Subject-Oriented Business Process Management

Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Business Information Systems; Computer Appl. in Administrative Data Processing; Management of Computing and Information System

Best-Effort Communication Improves Performance and Scales Robustly on Conventional Hardware

Here, we test the performance and scalability of fully-asynchronous, best-effort communication on existing, commercially-available HPC hardware. A first set of experiments tested whether best-effort communication strategies can benefit performance compared to the traditional perfect communication model. At high CPU counts, best-effort communication improved both the number of computational steps executed per unit time and the solution quality achieved within a fixed-duration run window. Under the best-effort model, characterizing the distribution of quality of service across processing components and over time is critical to understanding the actual computation being performed. Additionally, a complete picture of scalability under the best-effort model requires analysis of how such quality of service fares at scale. To answer these questions, we designed and measured a suite of quality of service metrics: simulation update period, message latency, message delivery failure rate, and message delivery coagulation. Under a lower communication-intensivity benchmark parameterization, we found that median values for all quality of service metrics were stable when scaling from 64 to 256 process. Under maximal communication intensivity, we found only minor -- and, in most cases, nil -- degradation in median quality of service. In an additional set of experiments, we tested the effect of an apparently faulty compute node on performance and quality of service. Despite extreme quality of service degradation among that node and its clique, median performance and quality of service remained stable

Subject-Oriented Business Process Management

Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Business Information Systems; Computer Appl. in Administrative Data Processing; Management of Computing and Information System

An Adaptable Group Communication System

Existing group communication systems like ISIS, Spread, Jgroups etc., provide group communication in a synchronous environment. They are built on top of TCP/IP or UDP and guarantee virtual synchrony and consistency. However, wide area distributed systems are inherently asynchronous. Existing group communication systems are not suitable for wide area deployment. They do not provide persistent communication; i.e., if a node gets temporarily disconnected, all messages directed to that node during that period are lost. Hence such systems are not suitable for deployment in disadvantaged networks. While, according to Brewer’s CAP theorem, it is impossible for a distributed computer system to achieve the three objectives of consistency, availability and partition-tolerance simultaneously, especially in an asynchronous environment, we present the design and development a reliable group communication system over an asynchronous substrate, where we achieve the objectives of eventual consistency, availability and partition-tolerance. We say that distributed system is eventually consistent, over a long period of time, if no updates are sent and all updates will eventually propagate through the system and all the nodes will be consistent. By availability we mean that if a node failure does not prevent the system to operate continuously. We say that distributed system is partition-tolerant if in the event of network failure that splits the processing nodes which are communicating, then the system should allow the processing to continue in both subgroups

Eventual Consistency: Origin and Support

Eventual consistency is demanded nowadays in geo-replicated services that need to be highly scalable and available. According to the CAP constraints, when network partitions may arise, a distributed service should choose between being strongly consistent or being highly available. Since scalable services should be available, a relaxed consistency (while the network is partitioned) is the preferred choice. Eventual consistency is not a common data-centric consistency model, but only a state convergence condition to be added to a relaxed consistency model. There are still several aspects of eventual consistency that have not been analysed in depth in previous works: 1. which are the oldest replication proposals providing eventual consistency, 2. which replica consistency models provide the best basis for building eventually consistent services, 3. which mechanisms should be considered for implementing an eventually consistent service, and 4. which are the best combinations of those mechanisms for achieving different concrete goals. This paper provides some notes on these important topics

On Secure Bulletin Boards for E-Voting

Peaaegu iga elektroonilise hääletamise protokolli esimeseks etapiks on häälte kogumine ning nende talletamine. Seda teenust pakub teadetetahvlisüsteem (bulletin board). Paljud teadusartiklid eeldavad turvalise teadetetahvlisüsteemi olemasolu, kuid konkreetseid süsteeme on välja pakutud vähe. Tihti eeldatakse, et teadetetahvlisüsteem on tsentraalne usaldatav osapool, kuid hiljutistes töödes on tähelepanu juhitud tõrkekindla hajustalletuse olulisusele. Käesolevas töös pakume välja formaalse mudeli teadetetahvlisüsteemi funktsionaalsuse ning turvalisuse analüüsimisseks. Meie mudeli aluseks on Culnane ja Schneideri poolt konverentsil Computer Security Foundations Symposium 2014 väljapakutud teadetetahvlisüsteemi omadused. Me käsitleme turvalist teadetetahvlisüsteemi kui Garay ja teiste poolt konverentsil Eurocrypt 2015 tutvustatud avalikku tehingute pearaamatut, mis õnnestunud hääle talletamise korral väljastab kviitungi. Täpsemalt, me defineerime omadused (tõendatav) püsivus ning tõendatav elusus.Me analüüsime Culnane ja Schneideri väljapakutud teadetetahvlisüsteemi turvalisust ning näitame, et nende protokolli korral ei ole elususe omadus täidetud, kui mõni kogumisneel (item collection peer) on ebaaus. Nende süsteem saavutab tõendatava püsivuse kasutades triviaalset lävisignatuuri juhul, kui ebaausaid kogumisneele on <N/3, vastasel korral on tõke <N/4. Culnane ja Schneideri teadetetahvlisüsteemist motiveeritult pakume välja uue süsteemi, mille korral on tagatud nii tõendatav püsivus kui ka tõendatav elusus, kui ebaausaid kogumisneele on vastavalt <N/3 ning <N/2. Lisaks on meie protokoll lihtne suhtluskeerukuselt. Antud töö põhineb konverentsile esitatud artiklil „A Cryptographic Approach to Bulletin Boards“ („Krüptograafiline lähenemine teadetetahvlisüsteemidele“), mille kaasautoriteks on Aggelos Kiayas, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim ja Thomas Zacharias.Vote collection together with storage of collected votes is the first phase of practically any electronic voting (e-voting) protocol. This functionality is provided by a bulletin board system. Many research papers in e-voting require the existence of a secure bulletin board, but there are only a few concrete systems. In the literature it is common to assume that bulletin board is a centralized trusted party, but in recent works the importance of a distributed fault-tolerant bulletin board has been raised. In this thesis, we propose a formal model for analysis of security and functionality of a bulletin board system motivated by the security requirements Culnane and Schneider introduced in Computer Security Foundations Symposium 2014. We consider a secure bulletin board as a robust public transaction ledger presented by Garay et al. in Eurocrypt 2015 that additionally provides receipts for successful postings. More precisely, we introduce two properties: (Confirmable) Persistence and Confirmable Liveness. We study a bulletin board system proposed by Culnane and Schneider in our model, and show that their protocol does not achieve Confirmable Liveness if there exist corrupted item collection peers, but achieves Confirmable Persistence for <N/3 corrupted item collection peers using only our trivial threshold signature scheme, otherwise the bound is <N/4. Motivated by the security analysis of Culnane-Schneider bulletin board system, we propose a fully secure bulletin board system and prove that it tolerates <N/3 corrupted item collection peers for Confirmable Persistence and <N/2 corrupted item collection peers for Confirmable Liveness. This thesis is based on a submitted paper "A Cryptographic Approach to Bulletin Boards" with co-authors Aggelos Kiayas, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim and Thomas Zacharias