8,170 research outputs found
Contract-Based General-Purpose GPU Programming
Using GPUs as general-purpose processors has revolutionized parallel
computing by offering, for a large and growing set of algorithms, massive
data-parallelization on desktop machines. An obstacle to widespread adoption,
however, is the difficulty of programming them and the low-level control of the
hardware required to achieve good performance. This paper suggests a
programming library, SafeGPU, that aims at striking a balance between
programmer productivity and performance, by making GPU data-parallel operations
accessible from within a classical object-oriented programming language. The
solution is integrated with the design-by-contract approach, which increases
confidence in functional program correctness by embedding executable program
specifications into the program text. We show that our library leads to modular
and maintainable code that is accessible to GPGPU non-experts, while providing
performance that is comparable with hand-written CUDA code. Furthermore,
runtime contract checking turns out to be feasible, as the contracts can be
executed on the GPU
An Iterative and Toolchain-Based Approach to Automate Scanning and Mapping Computer Networks
As today's organizational computer networks are ever evolving and becoming
more and more complex, finding potential vulnerabilities and conducting
security audits has become a crucial element in securing these networks. The
first step in auditing a network is reconnaissance by mapping it to get a
comprehensive overview over its structure. The growing complexity, however,
makes this task increasingly effortful, even more as mapping (instead of plain
scanning), presently, still involves a lot of manual work. Therefore, the
concept proposed in this paper automates the scanning and mapping of unknown
and non-cooperative computer networks in order to find security weaknesses or
verify access controls. It further helps to conduct audits by allowing
comparing documented with actual networks and finding unauthorized network
devices, as well as evaluating access control methods by conducting delta
scans. It uses a novel approach of augmenting data from iteratively chained
existing scanning tools with context, using genuine analytics modules to allow
assessing a network's topology instead of just generating a list of scanned
devices. It further contains a visualization model that provides a clear, lucid
topology map and a special graph for comparative analysis. The goal is to
provide maximum insight with a minimum of a priori knowledge.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
TROUBLE 3: A fault diagnostic expert system for Space Station Freedom's power system
Designing Space Station Freedom has given NASA many opportunities to develop expert systems that automate onboard operations of space based systems. One such development, TROUBLE 3, an expert system that was designed to automate the fault diagnostics of Space Station Freedom's electric power system is described. TROUBLE 3's design is complicated by the fact that Space Station Freedom's power system is evolving and changing. TROUBLE 3 has to be made flexible enough to handle changes with minimal changes to the program. Three types of expert systems were studied: rule-based, set-covering, and model-based. A set-covering approach was selected for TROUBLE 3 because if offered the needed flexibility that was missing from the other approaches. With this flexibility, TROUBLE 3 is not limited to Space Station Freedom applications, it can easily be adapted to handle any diagnostic system
Algorithmic linear dimension reduction in the l_1 norm for sparse vectors
This paper develops a new method for recovering m-sparse signals that is
simultaneously uniform and quick. We present a reconstruction algorithm whose
run time, O(m log^2(m) log^2(d)), is sublinear in the length d of the signal.
The reconstruction error is within a logarithmic factor (in m) of the optimal
m-term approximation error in l_1. In particular, the algorithm recovers
m-sparse signals perfectly and noisy signals are recovered with polylogarithmic
distortion. Our algorithm makes O(m log^2 (d)) measurements, which is within a
logarithmic factor of optimal. We also present a small-space implementation of
the algorithm. These sketching techniques and the corresponding reconstruction
algorithms provide an algorithmic dimension reduction in the l_1 norm. In
particular, vectors of support m in dimension d can be linearly embedded into
O(m log^2 d) dimensions with polylogarithmic distortion. We can reconstruct a
vector from its low-dimensional sketch in time O(m log^2(m) log^2(d)).
Furthermore, this reconstruction is stable and robust under small
perturbations
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