Availability and Preservation of Scholarly Digital Resources

The dynamic, decentralized world-wide-web has become an essential part of scientific research and communication, representing a relatively new medium for the conveyance of scientific thought and discovery. Researchers create thousands of web sites every year to share software, data and services. Unlike books and journals, however, the preservation systems are not yet mature. This carries implications that go to the core of science: the ability to examine another\u27s sources to understand and reproduce their work. These valuable resources have been documented as disappearing over time in several subject areas. This dissertation examines the problem by performing a crossdisciplinary investigation, testing the effectiveness of existing remedies and introducing new ones. As part of the investigation, 14,489 unique web pages found in the abstracts within Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science citation index were accessed. The median lifespan of these web pages was found to be 9.3 years with 62% of them being archived. Survival analysis and logistic regression identified significant predictors of URL lifespan and included the year a URL was published, the number of times it was cited, its depth as well as its domain. Statistical analysis revealed biases in current static web-page solutions

Moving in next door: Network flooding as a side channel in cloud environments

The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48965-0_56Co-locating multiple tenants' virtual machines (VMs) on the same host underpins public clouds' affordability, but sharing physical hardware also exposes consumer VMs to side channel attacks from adversarial co-residents. We demonstrate passive bandwidth measurement to perform traffic analysis attacks on co-located VMs. Our attacks do not assume a privileged position in the network or require any communication between adversarial and victim VMs. Using a single feature in the observed bandwidth data, our algorithm can identify which of 3 potential YouTube videos a co-resident VM streamed with 66% accuracy. We discuss defense from both a cloud provider's and a consumer's perspective, showing that effective defense is difficult to achieve without costly under-utilization on the part of the cloud provider or over-utilization on the part of the consumer.We would like to acknowledge the MIT PRIMES program and thank in particular Dr. Slava Gerovitch and Dr. Srini Devadas for their support. We are also grateful to Boston University, the Hariri Institute, and the Massachusetts Open Cloud. This paper is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 1414119 and 1413920

Using Open Stack for an Open Cloud Exchange(OCX)

We are developing a new public cloud, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) based on the model of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX). We discuss in this paper the vision of an OCX and how we intend to realize it using the OpenStack open-source cloud platform in the MOC. A limited form of an OCX can be achieved today by layering new services on top of OpenStack. We have performed an analysis of OpenStack to determine the changes needed in order to fully realize the OCX model. We describe these proposed changes, which although significant and requiring broad community involvement will provide functionality of value to both existing single-provider clouds as well as future multi-provider ones

Recursive Hardware-as-a-Service (rHaaS) and Fast Provisioning

Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is a new service being developed by the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) to allow physical servers to be allocated to clients in the same way that virtual servers are in existing IaaS clouds. This poster describes the new recursive HaaS project and the fast provisioning customization we are developing. Recursive HaaS allows a HaaS service to be layered on top of an existing one. It will allow testing of new features at performance and scale without affecting the production service. It will also allow clients to host their own HaaS on top of a base HaaS to provide, potentially customized, services to their users. An example customization we are developing is a fast provisioning service that can be used between tenants that have some degree of trust in each other. It will allow nodes to be moved between customers (and a service installed) in seconds, rather than the minutes required by base HaaS

Hardware as a service - enabling dynamic, user-level bare metal provisioning of pools of data center resources.

We describe a “Hardware as a Service (HaaS)” tool for isolating pools of compute, storage and networking resources. The goal of HaaS is to enable dynamic and flexible, user-level provisioning of pools of resources at the so-called “bare-metal” layer. It allows experimental or untrusted services to co-exist alongside trusted services. By functioning only as a resource isolation system, users are free to choose between different system scheduling and provisioning systems and to manage isolated resources as they see fit. We describe key HaaS use cases and features. We show how HaaS can provide a valuable, and somehwat overlooked, layer in the software architecture of modern data center management. Documentation and source code for HaaS software are available at: https://github.com/CCI-MOC/haasPartial support for this work was provided by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, National Science Foundation award #1347525 and several commercial partners of the Mass Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.org.http://www.ieee-hpec.org/2014/CD/index_htm_files/FinalPapers/116.pd

An Experiment on Bare-Metal BigData Provisioning

Many BigData customers use on-demand platforms in the cloud, where they can get a dedicated virtual cluster in a couple of minutes and pay only for the time they use. Increasingly, there is a demand for bare-metal bigdata solutions for applications that cannot tolerate the unpredictability and performance degradation of virtualized systems. Existing bare-metal solutions can introduce delays of 10s of minutes to provision a cluster by installing operating systems and applications on the local disks of servers. This has motivated recent research developing sophisticated mechanisms to optimize this installation. These approaches assume that using network mounted boot disks incur unacceptable run-time overhead. Our analysis suggest that while this assumption is true for application data, it is incorrect for operating systems and applications, and network mounting the boot disk and applications result in negligible run-time impact while leading to faster provisioning time.This research was supported in part by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, NSF awards 1347525 and 1414119 and several commercial partners of the Massachusetts Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.or

Potential Risks of Excess Iodine Ingestion and Exposure: Statement by the American Thyroid Association Public Health Committee

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140261/1/thy.2014.0331.pd