Computer Engineering Commons^™

On The Interoperability Of Programming Languages Based On The Fork-Join Parallelism Model, Sushek Shekar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis describes the implementation of MetaFork, a meta-language for concurrency platforms targeting multicore architectures. First of all, MetaFork is a multithreaded language based on the fork-join model of concurrency: it allows the programmer to express parallel algorithms assuming that tasks are dynamically scheduled at run-time. While MetaFork makes no assumption about the run-time system, it formally defines the serial C-elision of a MetaFork program. In addition, MetaFork is a suite of source-to-source compilers permitting the automatic translation of multithreaded programs between programming languages based on the fork-join model. Currently, this compilation framework supports the OpenMP and CilkPlus concurrency platforms. …

Tascked: The Sanity Promoting Task Manager, Jake Tobin

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Personal task managers or various forms of to-do lists are abundant in our modern computing age. With the explosion of mobile computing technology, it is easier than ever to take notes digitally and make the data seemingly instantly available anywhere on the Internet. There is a fairly well defined core set of features in personal task managers available for public consumption, but it seems nothing that is publicly available provides feedback to the user or suggestions based on user history. Tascked is a task management solution, which records user history and solicits user feedback on progress. This allows the system …

A Privacy-Aware Distributed Storage And Replication Middleware For Heterogeneous Computing Platform, Jilong Liao

Masters Theses

Cloud computing is an emerging research area that has drawn considerable interest in recent years. However, the current infrastructure raises significant concerns about how to protect users' privacy, in part due to that users are storing their data in the cloud vendors' servers. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing and implementing a novel middleware, called Uno, which separates the storage of physical data and their associated metadata. In our design, users' physical data are stored locally on those devices under a user's full control, while their metadata can be uploaded to the commercial cloud. To ensure the …

On High-Performance Parallel Fixed-Point Decimal Multiplier Designs, Ming Zhu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

High-performance, area-efficient hardware implementation of decimal multiplication is preferred to slow software simulations in a number of key scientific and financial application areas, where errors caused by converting decimal numbers into their approximate binary representations are not acceptable.

Multi-digit parallel decimal multipliers involve two major stages: (i) the partial product generation (PPG) stage, where decimal partial products are determined by selecting the right versions of the pre-computed multiples of the multiplicand, followed by (ii) the partial product accumulation (PPA) stage, where all the partial products are shifted and then added together to obtain the final multiplication product. In this thesis, …

Efficient Arithmetic For The Implementation Of Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Ebrahim Abdulrahman Hasan Abdulrahman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The technology of elliptic curve cryptography is now an important branch in public-key based crypto-system. Cryptographic mechanisms based on elliptic curves depend on the arithmetic of points on the curve. The most important arithmetic is multiplying a point on the curve by an integer. This operation is known as elliptic curve scalar (or point) multiplication operation. A cryptographic device is supposed to perform this operation efficiently and securely. The elliptic curve scalar multiplication operation is performed by combining the elliptic curve point routines that are defined in terms of the underlying finite field arithmetic operations. This thesis focuses on hardware …

Collaborative Policy-Based Autonomic Management In Iaas Clouds, Omid Mola

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the increasing number of "machines" (either virtual or physical) in a computing environment, it is becoming harder to monitor and manage these resources. Relying on human administrators, even with tools, is expensive and the growing complexity makes management even harder. The alternative is to look for automated approaches that can monitor and manage computing resources in real time with no human intervention. One of the approaches to this problem is policy-based autonomic management. However, in large systems having one single autonomic manager to manage everything is almost impossible. Therefore, multiple autonomic managers will be needed and these will need …

A Free Exchange E-Marketplace For Digital Services, Wafa M. I. Ghonaim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The digital era is witnessing a remarkable evolution of digital services. While the prospects are countless, the e-marketplaces of digital services are encountering inherent game-theoretic and computational challenges that restrict the rational choices of bidders. Our work examines the limited bidding scope and the inefficiencies of present exchange e-marketplaces. To meet challenges, a free exchange e-marketplace is proposed that follows the free market economy. The free exchange model includes a new bidding language and a double auction mechanism. The rule-based bidding language enables the flexible expression of preferences and strategic conduct. The bidding message holds the attribute-valuations and bidding rules …

A Secure Reconfigurable System-On-Programmable-Chip Computer System, William Herbert Collins

Masters Theses

A System-on-Programmable-Chip (SoPC) architecture is designed to meet two goals: to provide a role-based secure computing environment and to allow for user reconfiguration. To accomplish this, a secure root of trust is derived from a fixed architectural subsystem, known as the Security Controller. It additionally provides a dynamically configurable single point of access between applications developed by users and the objects those applications use. The platform provides a model for secrecy such that physical recovery of any one component in isolation does not compromise the system. Dual-factor authentication is used to verify users. A model is also provided for tamper …

A Systematic Approach To Verify An Embedded Capacitive Touchscreen System, Jeffrey Lee Richardson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The conspicuously massive growth in the number of products utilizing capacitive touchscreen technology has raised awareness of the technology. The embedded system used to detect and report finger touches to the host is fairly complex and difficult to verify. An automated verification system is required to systematically test this type of system in a reasonable amount of time. This thesis describes the framework for an automated verification system for embedded capacitive touchscreen systems. The framework includes a Cartesian desktop robot, test instruments, communications bridge, and custom-built test management software. The criteria for selecting a Cartesian desktop robot rather than a …

High-Performance, Scalable Optical Network-On-Chip Architectures, Xianfang Tan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The rapid advance of technology enables a large number of processing cores to be integrated into a single chip which is called a Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) or a Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) design. The on-chip interconnection network, which is the communication infrastructure for these processing cores, plays a central role in a many-core system. With the continuously increasing complexity of many-core systems, traditional metallic wired electronic networks-on-chip (NoC) became a bottleneck because of the unbearable latency in data transmission and extremely high energy consumption on chip. Optical networks-on-chip (ONoC) has been proposed as a promising alternative paradigm for electronic NoC with …

Evaluation Of Cyber Sensors For Enhancing Situational Awareness In The Ics Environment, Jeremy R. Otis

Theses and Dissertations

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) monitor and control operations associated with the national critical infrastructure (e.g., electric power grid, oil and gas pipelines and water treatment facilities). These systems rely on technologies and architectures that were designed for system reliability and availability. Security associated with ICS was never an inherent concern, primarily due to the protections afforded by network isolation. However, a trend in ICS operations is to migrate to commercial networks via TCP/IP in order to leverage commodity benefits and cost savings. As a result, system vulnerabilities are now exposed to the online community. Indeed, recent research has demonstrated that …

Bluelock: A Secure Bluetooth Operated Padlock, Trever Mckee

Computer Engineering

For this project a secure, battery operated, Bluetooth operated padlock was created. The project included both the hardware to integrate with a padlock and an Android application used to interface with the hardware. In order to make the padlock secure both AES encryption and challenge response authentication were used for secure message passing between the device and the Android phone. The project also included power consumption and sustainability tuning including exploring Arduino sleep states and integrating the project with a solar charging unit.

Set-Top Box Simulator, Philip Tyler

Computer Engineering

This report presents a python-based Set-top box simulation program utilizing a Simulation library called SimPy (See Appendix 1) to simulate real-time operation of a Set-top Box, or DVR. A graphical user interface, designed with PyQt4, allows a user to customize many simulation parameters such as hard drive speeds, buffer sizes, length of simulation, etc. The GUI also shows the user any errors that occur during the simulation such as buffer overflows/underflows. The results of this simulator lie within 85%-95% accuracy depending on the user-input parameters. With this simulation program, a Set-top box hardware or firmware developer can interchange the scheduling …

Paris: A Parallel Rsa-Prime Inspection Tool, Joseph R. White

Master's Theses

Modern-day computer security relies heavily on cryptography as a means to protect the data that we have become increasingly reliant on. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, methods of security must be better than ever. Validation tools can be leveraged to help increase our confidence and accountability for methods we employ to secure our systems.

Security validation, however, can be difficult and time-consuming. As our computational ability increases, calculations that were once considered “hard” due to length of computation, can now be done in minutes. We are constantly increasing the size of our keys and attempting to make computations harder …

Cuda Enhanced Filtering In A Pipelined Video Processing Framework, Austin Aaron Dworaczyk Wiltshire

Master's Theses

The processing of digital video has long been a significant computational task for modern x86 processors. With every video frame composed of one to three planes, each consisting of a two-dimensional array of pixel data, and a video clip comprising of thousands of such frames, the sheer volume of data is significant. With the introduction of new high definition video formats such as 4K or stereoscopic 3D, the volume of uncompressed frame data is growing ever larger.

Modern CPUs offer performance enhancements for processing digital video through SIMD instructions such as SSE2 or AVX. However, even with these instruction sets, …

Towards A Filmic Look And Feel In Real Time Computer Graphics, Sherief Farouk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Film footage has a distinct look and feel that audience can instantly recognize, making its replication desirable for computer generated graphics. This thesis presents methods capable of replicating significant portions of the film look and feel while being able to fit within the constraints imposed by real-time computer generated graphics on consumer hardware.

Improving The Performance Of The Parallel Ice Sheet Model On A Large-Scale, Distributed Supercomputer, Timothy J. Morey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we describe our work to understand and improve the performance and scalability of the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM) on the Ranger supercomputer. PISM enables the simulation of large-scale ice sheets, such as those found in Greenland and Antarctica, which are of particular interest to climate scientists due to their potential to contribute to sea-level rise.

PISM has a unique parallel architecture that is designed to take advantage of the computational resources available on state-of-the-art supercomputers. The problem, however, is that even though PISM can run without modifcation on a supercomputer, it is generally unable to do …

Categorization Of Security Design Patterns, Jeremiah Y. Dangler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Strategies for software development often slight security-related considerations, due to the difficulty of developing realizable requirements, identifying and applying appropriate techniques, and teaching secure design. This work describes a three-part strategy for addressing these concerns. Part 1 provides detailed questions, derived from a two-level characterization of system security based on work by Chung et. al., to elicit precise requirements. Part 2 uses a novel framework for relating this characterization to previously published strategies, or patterns, for secure software development. Included case studies suggest the framework's effectiveness, involving the application of three patterns for secure design (Limited View, Role-Based Access Control, …

Programming Dense Linear Algebra Kernels On Vectorized Architectures, Jonathan Lawrence Peyton

Masters Theses

The high performance computing (HPC) community is obsessed over the general matrix-matrix multiply (GEMM) routine. This obsession is not without reason. Most, if not all, Level 3 Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS) can be written in terms of GEMM, and many of the higher level linear algebra solvers' (i.e., LU, Cholesky) performance depend on GEMM's performance. Getting high performance on GEMM is highly architecture dependent, and so for each new architecture that comes out, GEMM has to be programmed and tested to achieve maximal performance. Also, with emergent computer architectures featuring more vector-based and multi to many-core processors, GEMM performance …

Decentralized Resource Scheduling In Grid/Cloud Computing, Ra'afat O. Abu-Rukba

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the Grid/Cloud environment, applications or services and resources belong to different organizations with different objectives. Entities in the Grid/Cloud are autonomous and self-interested; however, they are willing to share their resources and services to achieve their individual and collective goals. In such open environment, the scheduling decision is a challenge given the decentralized nature of the environment. Each entity has specific requirements and objectives that need to achieve. In this thesis, we review the Grid/Cloud computing technologies, environment characteristics and structure and indicate the challenges within the resource scheduling. We capture the Grid/Cloud scheduling model based on the complete …

Estimating And Measuring Application Latency Of Typical Distributed Interactive Simulation (Dis) - Based Simulation Architecture, Ryan L. Drinkwater

Theses and Dissertations

One of the challenges in a distributed virtual environment stems from the requirement to simultaneously execute the simulations in realtime to support human interaction, in conjunction with maintaining a consistent view of the shared simulated environment. Maintaining a consistent set of simulation state data in the presence of network latency is difficult if individual data items are updated frequently. The principle application of DIS-based simulation environments has been in the domain of training where a consistent view or its correctness is often judged in subjective terms such as the simulation looking and feeling correct. New application areas for these systems …

Characterization And Dynamic Analysis Of Long-Cavity Multi-Section Gain-Levered Quantum-Dot Lasers, John R. Schmidt

Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the impact of different device architectures on the frequency response of long-cavity multi-section quantum-dot lasers. This work focused on a novel 8.3-mm multi-section quantum-dot device which possessed the flexibility to be configured either as a single- or multi-section device having gain-to-modulation section ratios of 14:2 and 15:1. The long-cavity device design facilitated the testing of increased gain-to-modulation section length ratios previously unexplored in the context of the gain-lever effect. The investigation of the gain-lever effect showed improvements to both the modulation efficiency and modulation bandwidth of the device under test. The modulation efficiency and modulation bandwidth were …

Machine Conscious Architecture For State Exploitation And Decision Making, Mark M. Derriso

Theses and Dissertations

This research addressed a critical limitation in the area of computational intelligence by developing a general purpose architecture for information processing and decision making. Traditional computational intelligence methods are best suited for well-defined problems with extensive, long-term knowledge of the environmental and operational conditions the system will encounter during operation. These traditional approaches typically generate quick answers (i.e., reflexive responses) using pattern recognition methods. Most pattern recognition techniques are static processes which consist of a predefined series of computations. For these pattern recognition approaches to be effective, training data is required from all anticipated environments and operating conditions. The proposed …

An Architecture For Coexistence With Multiple Users In Frequency Hopping Cognitive Radio Networks, Ryan K. Mclean

Theses and Dissertations

The radio frequency (RF) spectrum is a limited resource. Spectrum allotment disputes stem from this scarcity as many radio devices are con confined to a fixed frequency or frequency sequence. One alternative is to incorporate cognition within a configurable radio platform, therefore enabling the radio to adapt to dynamic RF spectrum environments. In this way, the radio is able to actively observe the RF spectrum, orient itself to the current RF environment, decide on a mode of operation, and act accordingly, thereby sharing the spectrum and operating in more flexible manner. This research presents a novel framework for incorporating several …

Implementing A Matlab Based Attitude Determination Algorithm In C Within The Polysat Software Architecture, Dominic Bertolino

Computer Engineering

This project focuses on one component within a complete attitude determination and control system (ADCS) for a small satellite. The component consists of porting the algorithm that determines the current attitude of the satellite developed by AERO students / team members. The original algorithm has been developed in MATLAB code. The actual algorithm will be simulated and tested in MATLAB by the AEROs. The porting consisted of integrating the pieces into the custom PolySat software environment in C. Testing was done to verify the ported component corresponded to the original MATLAB component as well as verify its runtime on the …

Personal Smart Assistant For Digital Media And Advertisement, Ali Hussain

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The expansion of the cyberspace and the enormous process in computing and software applications enabled technology to cover every aspect of our life, therefore, many of our goals are now technology driven. Consequently, the need of intelligent assistance to achieve these goals has increased. However, for this assistance to be beneficial for users, it should be targeted to them based on their needs and preferences. Intelligent software agents have been recognized as a promising approach for the development of user-centric, personalized, applications.

In this thesis a generic personal smart assistant agent is proposed that provides relevant assistance to the user …

The Use Of Complexity Theory And Strange Attractors To Understand And Explain Information System Development, Arthur P. Tomasino

2013

In spite of the best efforts of researchers and practitioners, Information Systems (IS) developers are having problems "getting it right". IS developments are challenged by the emergence of unanticipated IS characteristics undermining managers ability to predict and manage IS change. Because IS are complex, development formulas, best practices or development guides simply will not work. The difficulties in these system developments stem from the complexity of IS arising from the inter-relationship, interaction, and interconnectivity of the elements in the system and its environment. This research uses complexity concepts to help solve the problem with IS development and explain why so …

Performance Evaluation Of Linq To Hpc And Hadoop For Big Data, Ravishankar Sivasubramaniam

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is currently considerable enthusiasm around the MapReduce paradigm, and the distributed computing paradigm for analysis of large volumes of data. The Apache Hadoop is the most popular open source implementation of MapReduce model and LINQ to HPC is Microsoft's alternative to open source Hadoop. In this thesis, the performance of LINQ to HPC and Hadoop are compared using different benchmarks.

To this end, we identified four benchmarks (Grep, Word Count, Read and Write) that we have run on LINQ to HPC as well as on Hadoop. For each benchmark, we measured each system’s performance metrics (Execution Time, Average CPU …

Power-Efficient And Low-Latency Memory Access For Cmp Systems With Heterogeneous Scratchpad On-Chip Memory, Zhi Chen

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

The gradually widening speed disparity of between CPU and memory has become an overwhelming bottleneck for the development of Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) systems. In addition, increasing penalties caused by frequent on-chip memory accesses have raised critical challenges in delivering high memory access performance with tight power and latency budgets. To overcome the daunting memory wall and energy wall issues, this thesis focuses on proposing a new heterogeneous scratchpad memory architecture which is configured from SRAM, MRAM, and Z-RAM. Based on this architecture, we propose two algorithms, a dynamic programming and a genetic algorithm, to perform data allocation to different memory …

Fpga-Based Implementation Of Dual-Frequency Pattern Scheme For 3-D Shape Measurement, Brent Bondehagen

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Structured Light Illumination (SLI) is the process where spatially varied patterns are projected onto a 3-D surface and based on the distortion by the surface topology, phase information can be calculated and a 3D model constructed. Phase Measuring Profilometry (PMP) is a particular type of SLI that requires three or more patterns temporarily multiplexed. High speed PMP attempts to scan moving objects whose motion is small so as to have little impact on the 3-D model. Given that practically all machine vision cameras and high speed cameras employ a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) interface directly to the image sensors, …