Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Feedback-Driven Proportion Allocator For Real-Rate Scheduling, David Steere, Ashvin Goel, Joshua Gruenberg, Dylan Mcnamee, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we propose changing the decades-old practice of allocating CPU to threads based on priority to a scheme based on proportion and period. Our scheme allocates to each thread a percentage of CPU cycles over a period of time, and uses a feedback-based adaptive scheduler to assign automatically both proportion and period. Applications with known requirements, such as isochronous software devices, can bypass the adaptive scheduler by specifying their desired proportion and/or period. As a result, our scheme provides reservations to applications that need them, and the benefits of proportion and period to those that do not. Adaptive …

Synthetic Files: Enabling Low-Latency File I/O For Qos-Adaptive Applications, Dylan Mcnamee, Dan Revel, Calton Pu, David Steere, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Files are a tried and true operating system abstraction. They present a simple byte-stream model of I/O that has proven intuitive for application programmers and efficient for operating system builders. However, current file systems do not provide good support for adaptive continuous media (CM) applications - an increasingly important class of applications that exhibit complex access patterns and are particularly sensitive to variations in I/O performance. To address these problems we propose synthetic files. Synthetic files are specialized views of underlying regular files, and convert complex file access patterns into simple sequential synthetic file access patterns. Synthetic file construction can …

The Judging Process For Sym Bowl : A High School System Dynamics Modeling Competition, Wayne W. Wakeland

Wayne W. Wakeland

This “paper” describes the judging process used to determine the winners in SymBowl, a high school system dynamics modeling competition held in Portland, Oregon the past three years. SymBowl was created by Ed Gallaher, a medical researcher at the Portland VA Hospital and Associate Professor at Oregon Health Sciences University.
The judging criteria and judging process were developed by Wakeland, who has served as the judging coordinating for past three years, overseeing the process, compiling results, etc. Wakeland is an Adjunct Professor of System Science at Portland State University where he teaches graduate-level modeling and simulation classes.
For SymBowl 98, …

Quality Of Service Semantics For Multimedia Database Systems, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Krasic, Ling Liu, David Maier, Calton Pu, Dylan Mcnamee, David Steere

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Quality of service (QoS) support has been a hot research topic in multimedia databases, and multimedia systems in general, for the past several years. However, there remains little consensus on how QoS support should be provided. At the resource-management level, systems designers are still debating the suitability of reservation- based versus adaptive QoS management. The design of higher system layers is less clearly understood, and the specification of QoS requirements in domain-specific terms is still an open research topic. To address these issues, we propose a QoS model for multimedia databases. The model covers the specification of user-level QoS preferences …

Location Independent Names For Nomadic Computers, David Steere, Mark Morrissey, Peter Geib, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent advances in the Domain Name System (DNS) and the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) have enabled a new approach to supporting mobile users: location independent naming. In this approach, machines use the same hostname from any internet location, but use an IP address that corresponds to their current location. We describe a protocol that implements location independent naming for nomadic computers, i.e., machines that do not need transparent mobility. Our protocol allows hosts to move across security domains, uses existing protocols, and preserves existing trust relationships. Therefore, it preserves the performance and security of normal IP for nomadic computers …

Adaptation Space: Surviving Non-Maskable Failures, Crispin Cowan, Lois Delcambre, Anne-Francoise Le Meur, Ling Liu, David Maier, Dylan Mcnamee, Michael Miller, Calton Pu, Perry Wagle, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Some failures cannot be masked by redundancies, because an unanticipated situation occurred, because fault-tolerance measures were not adequate, or because there was a security breach (which is not amenable to replication). Applications that wish to continue to offer some service despite nonmaskable failure must adapt to the loss of resources. When numerous combinations of non-maskable failure modes are considered, the set of possible adaptations becomes complex. This paper presents adaptation spaces, a formalism for navigating among combinations of adaptations. An adaptation space describes a collection of possible adaptations of a software component or system, and provides a uniform way of …

Stackguard: Automatic Adaptive Detection And Prevention Of Buffer-Overflow Attacks, Crispin Cowan, Calton Pu, David Maier, Heather Hinton, Jonathan Walpole, Peat Bakke, Steve Beattie, Aaron Grier, Perry Wagle, Qian Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a systematic solution to the persistent problem of buffer overflow attacks. Buffer overflow attacks gained notoriety in 1988 as part of the Morris Worm incident on the Internet. While it is fairly simple to fix individual buffer overflow vulnerabilities, buffer overflow attacks continue to this day. Hundreds of attacks have been discovered, and while most of the obvious vulnerabilities have now been patched, more sophisticated buffer overflow attacks continue to emerge.

We describe StackGuard: a simple compiler technique that virtually eliminates buffer overflow vulnerabilities with only modest performance penalties. Privileged programs that are recompiled with the StackGuard …