Integrating security solutions to support nanoCMOS electronics research

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is developing a research infrastructure for collaborative electronics research across multiple institutions in the UK with especially strong industrial and commercial involvement. Unlike other domains, the electronics industry is driven by the necessity of protecting the intellectual property of the data, designs and software associated with next generation electronics devices and therefore requires fine-grained security. Similarly, the project also demands seamless access to large scale high performance compute resources for atomic scale device simulations and the capability to manage the hundreds of thousands of files and the metadata associated with these simulations. Within this context, the project has explored a wide range of authentication and authorization infrastructures facilitating compute resource access and providing fine-grained security over numerous distributed file stores and files. We conclude that no single security solution meets the needs of the project. This paper describes the experiences of applying X.509-based certificates and public key infrastructures, VOMS, PERMIS, Kerberos and the Internet2 Shibboleth technologies for nanoCMOS security. We outline how we are integrating these solutions to provide a complete end-end security framework meeting the demands of the nanoCMOS electronics domain

UNICORE and GRIP: experiences of grid middleware development

We describe our experiences with the UNICORE Grid environment. Several lessons of general applicability can be drawn in regard to user uptake and security. The principal lesson is that more effort should be taken to be made to meet the needs of the target user community of the middleware development. Novel workflow strategies, in particular, should not be imposed on an existing community

Grid infrastructures for the electronics domain: requirements and early prototypes from an EPSRC pilot project

The fundamental challenges facing future electronics design is to address the decreasing – atomistic - scale of transistor devices and to understand and predict the impact and statistical variability these have on design of circuits and systems. The EPSRC pilot project “Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics” (nanoCMOS) which began in October 2006 has been funded to explore this space. This paper outlines the key requirements that need to be addressed for Grid technology to support the various research strands in this domain, and shows early prototypes demonstrating how these requirements are being addressed

Regional surname affinity: a spatial network approach

OBJECTIVE We investigate surname affinities among areas of modern‐day China, by constructing a spatial network, and making community detection. It reports a geographical genealogy of the Chinese population that is result of population origins, historical migrations, and societal evolutions. MATERIALS AND METHODS We acquire data from the census records supplied by China's National Citizen Identity Information System, including the surname and regional information of 1.28 billion registered Chinese citizens. We propose a multilayer minimum spanning tree (MMST) to construct a spatial network based on the matrix of isonymic distances, which is often used to characterize the dissimilarity of surname structure among areas. We use the fast unfolding algorithm to detect network communities. RESULTS We obtain a 10‐layer MMST network of 362 prefecture nodes and 3,610 edges derived from the matrix of the Euclidean distances among these areas. These prefectures are divided into eight groups in the spatial network via community detection. We measure the partition by comparing the inter‐distances and intra‐distances of the communities and obtain meaningful regional ethnicity classification. DISCUSSION The visualization of the resulting communities on the map indicates that the prefectures in the same community are usually geographically adjacent. The formation of this partition is influenced by geographical factors, historic migrations, trade and economic factors, as well as isolation of culture and language. The MMST algorithm proves to be effective in geo‐genealogy and ethnicity classification for it retains essential information about surname affinity and highlights the geographical consanguinity of the population.National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Numbers: 61773069, 71731002; National Social Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Number: 14BSH024; Foundation of China of China Scholarships Council, Grant/Award Numbers: 201606045048, 201706040188, 201706040015; DOE, Grant/Award Number: DE-AC07-05Id14517; DTRA, Grant/Award Number: HDTRA1-14-1-0017; NSF, Grant/Award Numbers: CHE-1213217, CMMI-1125290, PHY-1505000 (61773069 - National Natural Science Foundation of China; 71731002 - National Natural Science Foundation of China; 14BSH024 - National Social Science Foundation of China; 201606045048 - Foundation of China of China Scholarships Council; 201706040188 - Foundation of China of China Scholarships Council; 201706040015 - Foundation of China of China Scholarships Council; DE-AC07-05Id14517 - DOE; HDTRA1-14-1-0017 - DTRA; CHE-1213217 - NSF; CMMI-1125290 - NSF; PHY-1505000 - NSF)Published versio

Reorganization in complex landscapes: causes and consequences of changes in meta-food-webs

We lack a thorough understanding of the ecological processes, like species interactions and dispersal, that mediate the ecological responses of whole ecosystems to global changes, and their variability in realistically complex ecosystems. These processes involve multiple interacting species that move freely about the landscapes and thus, understanding these processes demands measures that can account for this complexity, at both the local and landscape scale. I address this issue by combining the local population dynamics of complex food webs and their metacommunity dynamics (yielding so called meta-food-webs). This allows me to incorporate real-world complexity for both local and spatial processes to examine how food webs respond to global changes, focusing on land use changes that alter the spatial configuration of habitats. To delve into the underlying mechanisms governing the impacts of global changes on multitrophic communities in complex landscapes, and to explore variations in these responses among species, trophic groups, landscapes and global change drivers, I develop new theoretical frameworks in which I combine ecology and mathematics. I demonstrate that local and spatial processes mediate meta-food-web responses to global changes in complex landscapes. Specifically, I show that there is a strong trophic dependency in the response of species to land use changes and emphasize that especially (large-bodied) consumer species at high trophic positions have elevated extinction risks when habitat becomes increasingly isolated (research chapters 1 and 2). In research chapter 3, by jointly considering multiple aspects of global change (land use changes and biological invasions), I demonstrate the interdependence of different environmental stressors. Overall, this thesis presents a major step towards a clearer understanding of food web responses to global change impacts