Computer Engineering Commons^™

On Problematic Robotic Thresholds, Adam K. Taylor

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Large configuration spaces present difficulties for developers validating large soft- ware systems and for users selecting the proper configuration to achieve the desired runtime behavior. Robot systems face the same challenges as they may have hundreds of configurable parameters. Our work focuses on co-robotic systems, those in which robots and humans work closely together to augment each other’s capabilities. We aim to leverage the user’s knowledge about a system to help determine configuration errors. To accomplish this, users mark runtime failures while observing the system in operation. A marked error indicates the robot “did something when it should not have” …

Transforming C Openmp Programs For Verification In Civl, Michael Rogers

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

There are numerous way to express parallelism which can make it challenging for developers to verify these programs. Many tools only target a single dialect but the Concurrency Intermediate Verification Language (CIVL) targets MPI, Pthreads, and CUDA. CIVL provides a general concurrency model that can represent pro- grams in a variety of concurrency dialects. CIVL includes a front-end that support all of the dialects mentioned above. The back-end is a verifier that uses model checking and symbolic execution to check standard properties.

In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a transformer that will take C OpenMP programs and transform …

Bandwidth Estimation For Virtual Networks, Ertong Zhang

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Cloud computing is transforming a large part of IT industry, as evidenced by the increasing popularity of public cloud computingservices, such as Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Windows Azure, and Rackspace Public Cloud. Manycloud computing applications are bandwidth-intensive, and thus the network bandwidth information of clouds is important for theirusers to manage and troubleshoot the application performance.

The current bandwidth estimation methods originally developed for the traditional Internet, however, face great challenges in clouds dueto virtualization that is the main enabling technique of cloud computing. First, virtual machine scheduling, which is an importantcomponent of computer virtualization for processor …

Using Software-Defined Networking To Improve Campus, Transport And Future Internet Architectures, Adrian Lara

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Software-defined Networking (SDN) promises to redefine the future of networking. Indeed, SDN-based networks have unique capabilities such as centralized control, flow abstraction, dynamic updating of forwarding rules and software-based traffic analysis. SDN-based networks decouple the data plane from the control plane, migrating the latter to a software controller. By adding a software layer between network devices and applications, features such as network virtualization and automated management are simpler to achieve.

In this dissertation, we show how SDN-based deployments simplify network management at multiple scales such as campus and transport networks, as well as future Internet architectures. First, we propose OpenSec, …

Enabling Distributed Scientific Computing On The Campus, Derek J. Weitzel

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Campus research computing has evolved from many small decentralized resources, such as individual desktops, to fewer, larger centralized resources, such as clusters. This change has been necessitated by the increasing size of researcher's workloads, but this change has harmed the researcher's user experience. We propose to improve the user experience on the computational resources by creating an overlay cluster they are able to control. This overlay should transparently scale to national cyberinfrastructure as the user's demands increase.

We explore methods for improving the user experience when submitting jobs on a campus grid. To this end, we created a remote submission …

Model-Based Condition Monitoring And Power Management For Rechargeable Electrochemical Batteries, Taesic Kim

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Rechargeable multicell batteries have been used in various electrical and electronic systems, e.g., renewable energy systems, electric-drive vehicles, commercial electronics, etc. However, there are still concerns about the reliability and performance degradation of rechargeable batteries caused by low thermal stability and the aging process. A properly designed battery management system (BMS) is required for condition monitoring and control of multicell batteries to ensure their safety, reliability, and optimal performance. The goal of this dissertation research was to develop a novel BMS for rechargeable multicell batteries.

First, this research developed high-fidelity battery models for online condition monitoring and power management of …

Visual Analytics For Large Communication Trace Data, Jieting Wu

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Executions of modern parallel programs often yield complex communications among compute nodes of large-scale clusters of workstations or supercomputers. Analyzing communication patterns is becoming increasingly critical to performance optimiza- tion. As the scale and complexity of parallel applications drastically increases, visu- alization has become a feasible means to conduct analysis of massive communication patterns. However, most visualization tools fall short in showing comprehensive dy- namic communication graph and addressing the scalability issue. Our solution for analyzing dynamic communication patterns is based on an analytics framework cou- pled with a new visualization technique, named CommGram [29], that provides a flexible solution …

Remote Mobile Screen (Rms): An Approach For Secure Byod Environments, Santiago Manuel Gimenez Ocano

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a policy where employees use their own personal mobile devices to perform work-related tasks. Enterprises reduce their costs since they do not have to purchase and provide support for the mobile devices. BYOD increases job satisfaction and productivity in the employees, as they can choose which device to use and do not need to carry two or more devices.

However, BYOD policies create an insecure environment, as the corporate network is extended and it becomes harder to protect it from attacks. In this scenario, the corporate information can be leaked, personal and corporate spaces …