Software Challenges For HL-LHC Data Analysis

The high energy physics community is discussing where investment is needed to prepare software for the HL-LHC and its unprecedented challenges. The ROOT project is one of the central software players in high energy physics since decades. From its experience and expectations, the ROOT team has distilled a comprehensive set of areas that should see research and development in the context of data analysis software, for making best use of HL-LHC's physics potential. This work shows what these areas could be, why the ROOT team believes investing in them is needed, which gains are expected, and where related work is ongoing. It can serve as an indication for future research proposals and cooperations

Preparing sparse solvers for exascale computing.

Sparse solvers provide essential functionality for a wide variety of scientific applications. Highly parallel sparse solvers are essential for continuing advances in high-fidelity, multi-physics and multi-scale simulations, especially as we target exascale platforms. This paper describes the challenges, strategies and progress of the US Department of Energy Exascale Computing project towards providing sparse solvers for exascale computing platforms. We address the demands of systems with thousands of high-performance node devices where exposing concurrency, hiding latency and creating alternative algorithms become essential. The efforts described here are works in progress, highlighting current success and upcoming challenges. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'

Achieving Obfuscation Through Self-Modifying Code: A Theoretical Model

With the extreme amount of data and software available on networks, the protection of online information is one of the most important tasks of this technological age. There is no such thing as safe computing, and it is inevitable that security breaches will occur. Thus, security professionals and practices focus on two areas: security, preventing a breach from occurring, and resiliency, minimizing the damages once a breach has occurred. One of the most important practices for adding resiliency to source code is through obfuscation, a method of re-writing the code to a form that is virtually unreadable. This makes the code incredibly hard to decipher by attackers, protecting intellectual property and reducing the amount of information gained by the malicious actor. Achieving obfuscation through the use of self-modifying code, code that mutates during runtime, is a complicated but impressive undertaking that creates an incredibly robust obfuscating system. While there is a great amount of research that is still ongoing, the preliminary results of this subject suggest that the application of self-modifying code to obfuscation may yield self-maintaining software capable of healing itself following an attack

Modularity in action.GNU/Linux and free/Open source sotfware development model unleashed.

Organizational and managerial theories of modularity applied to the design and production of complex artifacts are used to interpret the rise and success of Free/Open Source Software methodologies and practices in software engineeringmodularity; software project management; free/open source software; division of labor; coordination; information hiding

The "MIND" Scalable PIM Architecture

MIND (Memory, Intelligence, and Network Device) is an advanced parallel computer architecture for high performance computing and scalable embedded processing. It is a Processor-in-Memory (PIM) architecture integrating both DRAM bit cells and CMOS logic devices on the same silicon die. MIND is multicore with multiple memory/processor nodes on each chip and supports global shared memory across systems of MIND components. MIND is distinguished from other PIM architectures in that it incorporates mechanisms for efficient support of a global parallel execution model based on the semantics of message-driven multithreaded split-transaction processing. MIND is designed to operate either in conjunction with other conventional microprocessors or in standalone arrays of like devices. It also incorporates mechanisms for fault tolerance, real time execution, and active power management. This paper describes the major elements and operational methods of the MIND architecture

An Innovative Workspace for The Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is an initiative to build the next generation, ground-based gamma-ray observatories. We present a prototype workspace developed at INAF that aims at providing innovative solutions for the CTA community. The workspace leverages open source technologies providing web access to a set of tools widely used by the CTA community. Two different user interaction models, connected to an authentication and authorization infrastructure, have been implemented in this workspace. The first one is a workflow management system accessed via a science gateway (based on the Liferay platform) and the second one is an interactive virtual desktop environment. The integrated workflow system allows to run applications used in astronomy and physics researches into distributed computing infrastructures (ranging from clusters to grids and clouds). The interactive desktop environment allows to use many software packages without any installation on local desktops exploiting their native graphical user interfaces. The science gateway and the interactive desktop environment are connected to the authentication and authorization infrastructure composed by a Shibboleth identity provider and a Grouper authorization solution. The Grouper released attributes are consumed by the science gateway to authorize the access to specific web resources and the role management mechanism in Liferay provides the attribute-role mapping

FPGA based remote code integrity verification of programs in distributed embedded systems

The explosive growth of networked embedded systems has made ubiquitous and pervasive computing a reality. However, there are still a number of new challenges to its widespread adoption that include scalability, availability, and, especially, security of software. Among the different challenges in software security, the problem of remote-code integrity verification is still waiting for efficient solutions. This paper proposes the use of reconfigurable computing to build a consistent architecture for generation of attestations (proofs) of code integrity for an executing program as well as to deliver them to the designated verification entity. Remote dynamic update of reconfigurable devices is also exploited to increase the complexity of mounting attacks in a real-word environment. The proposed solution perfectly fits embedded devices that are nowadays commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware components that are exploited to solve different computational problems