Computer and Systems Architecture Commons^™

Gpu Accelerated On-The-Fly Reachability Checking, Zhimin Wu, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jianqi Shi, Shengchao Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking suffers from the infamous state space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose an approach, named GPURC, to utilize the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to speed up the reachability verification. The key idea is to achieve a dynamic load balancing so that the many cores in GPUs are fully utilized during the state space exploration.To this end, we firstly construct a compact data encoding of the input transition systems to reduce the memory cost and fit the calculation in GPUs. To support a large number of concurrent components, we propose a multi-integer encoding with conflict-release accessing approach. We …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Engineering Analytics: Research Into The Governance Structure Needed To Integrate The Dominant Design Methodologies, Teddy Steven Cotter

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In the ASEM-IAC 2014, Cotter (2014) explored the current state of engineering design, identified the dominate approaches to engineering design, discussed potential contributions from the new field of data analytics to engineering design, and proposed an Engineering Analytics framework that integrates the dominate engineering design approaches and data analytics within a human-intelligence/machine-intelligence (HI-MI) design architecture. This paper reports research applying ontological engineering to integrate the dominate engineering design methodologies into a systemic engineering design decision governance architecture.

Testing Data Vault-Based Data Warehouse, Connard N. Williams

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Data warehouse (DW) projects are undertakings that require integration of disparate sources of data, a well-defined mapping of the source data to the reconciled data, and effective Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) processes. Owing to the complexity of data warehouse projects, great emphasis must be placed on an agile-based approach with properly developed and executed test plans throughout the various stages of designing, developing, and implementing the data warehouse to mitigate against budget overruns, missed deadlines, low customer satisfaction, and outright project failures. Yet, there are often attempts to test the data warehouse exactly like traditional back-end databases and legacy …

Cama: Efficient Modeling Of The Capture Effect For Low Power Wireless Networks, Behnam Dezfouli, Marjan Radi, Kamin Whitehouse, Shukor Abd Razak, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Network simulation is an essential tool for the design and evaluation of wireless network protocols, and realistic channel modeling is essential for meaningful analysis. Recently, several network protocols have demonstrated substantial network performance improvements by exploiting the capture effect, but existing models of the capture effect are still not adequate for protocol simulation and analysis. Physical-level models that calculate the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for every incoming bit are too slow to be used for large-scale or long-term networking experiments, and link-level models such as those currently used by the NS2 simulator do not accurately predict protocol performance. In this article, …

Design Of Cpu Simulation Software For Armv7 Instruction Set Architecture, Dillon Tellier

Computer Engineering

Simulations have long been a part of the engineering process in both the professional and academic domain. From a pedagogic standpoint, simulations allow students to explore the dynamics of engineering scenarios by controlling variables, taking measurements, and observing behavior which would be difficult or impossible without simulation. One such tool is a CPU simulator used in Cal Poly’s Computer Architecture classes; this software simulates an instruction accurate operation of a computer processor and reports statistics regarding the execution of the supplied compiled machine code. For the last several years Cal Poly’s computer architecture classes have used a previous version of …

Los And Nlos Classification For Underwater Acoustic Localization, Roee Diamant, Hwee-Pink Tan, Lutz Lampe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The low sound speed in water makes propagation delay (PD)-based range estimation attractive for underwater acoustic localization (UWAL). However, due to the long channel impulse response and the existence of reflectors, PD-based UWAL suffers from significant degradation when PD measurements of nonline-of-sight (NLOS) communication links are falsely identified as line-of-sight (LOS). In this paper, we utilize expected variation of PD measurements due to mobility of nodes and present an algorithm to classify the former into LOS and NLOS links. First, by comparing signal strength-based and PD-based range measurements, we identify object-related NLOS (ONLOS) links, where signals are reflected from objects …

Measuring And Modelling The Thermal Performance Of The Tamar Suspension Bridge Using A Wireless Sensor Network, Nicholas De Battista, James M. W. Brownjohn, Hwee-Pink Tan, Ki Young Koo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A study on the thermal performance of the Tamar Suspension Bridge deck in Plymouth, UK, is presented in this paper. Ambient air, suspension cable, deck and truss temperatures were acquired using a wired sensor system. Deck extension data were acquired using a two-hop wireless sensor network. Empirical models relating the deck extension to various combinations of temperatures were derived and compared. The most accurate model, which used all the four temperature variables, predicted the deck extension with an accuracy of 99.4%. Time delays ranging from 10 to 66 min were identified between the daily cycles of the air temperature and …

Using Software-Based Decision Procedures To Control Instruction-Level Execution, William B. Kimball

AFIT Patents

An apparatus, method and program product are provided for securing a computer system. A digital signature of an application is checked, which is loaded into a memory of the computer system configured to contain memory pages. In response to finding a valid digital signature, memory pages containing instructions of the application are set as executable and memory pages other than those containing instructions of the application are set as non-executable. Instructions in executable memory pages are executed. Instructions in non-executable memory pages are prevented from being executed. A page fault is generated in response to an attempt to execute an …

An Experimental Study For Inter-User Interference Mitigation In Wireless Body Sensor Networks, Bin Cao, Yu Ge, Chee Wee Kim, Gang Feng, Hwee-Pink Tan, Yun Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inter-user interference degrades the reliability of data delivery in wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in dense deployments when multiple users wearing WBSNs are in close proximity to one another. The impact of such interference in realistic WBSN systems is significant but is not well explored. To this end, we investigate and analyze the impact of inter-user interference on packet delivery ratio (PDR) and throughput. We conduct extensive experiments based on the TelosB WBSN platform, considering unslotted carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) with collision avoidance (CA) and slotted CSMA/CA modes in IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, respectively. In order to mitigate interuser interference, …

Clustering Algorithms For Maximizing The Lifetime Of Wireless Sensor Networks With Energy-Harvesting Sensors, Pengfei Zhang, Gaoxi Xiao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivated by recent developments in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), we present several efficient clustering algorithms for maximizing the lifetime of WSNs, i.e., the duration till a certain percentage of the nodes die. Specifically, an optimization algorithm is proposed for maximizing the lifetime of a single-cluster network, followed by an extension to handle multi-cluster networks. Then we study the joint problem of prolonging network lifetime by introducing energy-harvesting (EH) nodes. An algorithm is proposed for maximizing the network lifetime where EH nodes serve as dedicated relay nodes for cluster heads (CHs). Theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results show that the proposed …

Energy-Neutral Scheduling And Forwarding In Environmentally-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Weng Seng Soh, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In environmentally-powered wireless sensor networks (EPWSNs), low latency wakeup scheduling and packet forwarding is challenging due to dynamic duty cycling, posing time-varying sleep latencies and necessitating the use of dynamic wakeup schedules. We show that the variance of the intervals between receiving wakeup slots affects the expected sleep latency: when the variance of the intervals is low (high), the expected latency is low (high). We therefore propose a novel scheduling scheme that uses the bit-reversal permutation sequence (BRPS) – a finite integer sequence that positions receiving wakeup slots as evenly as possible to reduce the expected sleep latency. At the …

Sensor Openflow: Enabling Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks, Tie Luo, Hwee-Pink Tan, Tony Q. S. Quek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While it has been a belief for over a decade that wireless sensor networks (WSN) are application-specific, we argue that it can lead to resource underutilization and counter-productivity. We also identify two other main problems with WSN: rigidity to policy changes and difficulty to manage. In this paper, we take a radical, yet backward and peer compatible, approach to tackle these problems inherent to WSN. We propose a Software-Defined WSN architecture and address key technical challenges for its core component, Sensor OpenFlow. This work represents the first effort that synergizes software-defined networking and WSN.

Cuda Web Api Remote Execution Of Cuda Kernels Using Web Services, Massimo J. Becker

Master's Theses

Massively parallel programming is an increasingly growing field with the recent introduction of general purpose GPU computing. Modern graphics processors from NVIDIA and AMD have massively parallel architectures that can be used for such applications as 3D rendering, financial analysis, physics simulations, and biomedical analysis. These massively parallel systems are exposed to programmers through in- terfaces such as NVIDIAs CUDA, OpenCL, and Microsofts C++ AMP. These frame- works expose functionality using primarily either C or C++. In order to use these massively parallel frameworks, programs being implemented must be run on machines equipped with massively parallel hardware. These requirements limit …

A Hybrid Agent Architecture Integrating Desire, Intention And Reinforcement Learning, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yew-Soon Ong, Akejariyawong Tapanuj

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a hybrid agent architecture that integrates the behaviours of BDI agents, specifically desire and intention, with a neural network based reinforcement learner known as Temporal DifferenceFusion Architecture for Learning and COgNition (TD-FALCON). With the explicit maintenance of goals, the agent performs reinforcement learning with the awareness of its objectives instead of relying on external reinforcement signals. More importantly, the intention module equips the hybrid architecture with deliberative planning capabilities, enabling the agent to purposefully maintain an agenda of actions to perform and reducing the need of constantly sensing the environment. Through reinforcement learning, plans can also be …

Resizable, Scalable, Concurrent Hash Tables Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Paul E. Mckenney, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Presentation focusing on software synchronization, thread locking, transactional memory, and relativistic programming. Hash table algorithms are presented with examples of relativistic list insertion and removal, and related data structures. Existing approaches are compared to new methodologies and future work with relativistic data structures.

A Relativistic Enhancement To Software Transactional Memory, Philip William Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Relativistic Programming is a technique that allows low overhead, linearly-scalable concurrent reads. It also allows joint access parallelism between readers and a writer. Unfortunately, it has so far been limited to a single writer so it does not scale on the write side. Software Transactional Memory (STM) is a technique that allows programs to take advantage of disjoint access parallelism on both the read-side and write-side. Unfortunately, STM systems have a higher overhead than many other synchronization mechanisms so although STM scales, STM starts from a lower baseline. We propose combining relativistic programming and software transactional memory in a way …

Design And Performance Analysis Of Mac Schemes For Wireless Sensor Networks Powered By Ambient Energy Harvesting, Zhi Ang Eu, Hwee-Pink Tan, Winston K. G. Seah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy consumption is a perennial issue in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which typically rely on portable sources like batteries for power. Recent advances in ambient energy harvesting technology have made it a potential and promising alternative source of energy for powering WSNs. By using energy harvesters with supercapacitors, WSNs are able to operate perpetually until hardware failure and in places where batteries are hard or impossible to replace. In this paper, we study the performance of different medium access control (MAC) schemes based on CSMA and polling techniques for WSNs which are solely powered by ambient energy …

Interactivity-Constrained Server Provisioning In Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Thang Nguyen, Suiping Zhou, Xueyan Tang, Wentong Cai, Rassul Ayani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Maintaining interactivity is one of the key challenges in distributed virtual environments (DVE), e.g., online games, distributed simulations, etc., due to the large, heterogeneous Internet latencies; and the fact that clients in a DVE are usually geographically separated. In this paper, we consider a new problem, termed the interactivity-constrained server provisioning problem, whose goal is to minimize the number of distributed servers needed to achieve a pre-determined level of interactivity. We identify and formulate two variants of this new problem and show that they are both NP-hard via reductions to the set covering problem. We then propose several computationally efficient …

Wireless Sensing Without Sensors: An Experimental Study Of Motion/Intrusion Detection Using Rf Irregularity, Wei Qi Lee, Winston K. G. Seah, Hwee-Pink Tan, Zexi Yao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motion and intrusion detection are often cited as wireless sensor network (WSN) applications with typical configurations comprising clusters of wireless nodes equipped with motion sensors to detect human motion. Currently, WSN performance is subjected to several constraints, namely radio irregularity and finite on-board computation/energy resources. Radio irregularity in radio frequency (RF) propagation rises to a higher level in the presence of human activity due to the absorption effect of the human body. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of monitoring RF transmission for the purpose of intrusion detection through experimentation. With empirical data obtained from the Crossbow TelosB platform …

Pretty Lights, Nicholas (Nick) Delmas, Matthew (Matt) Maniaci

Computer Engineering

Digital media players often include a visualization component that allows a user to watch a visualization synchronized to their music or videos. This project uses the visualization plugin API of an existing media playback program (WinAmp) but it displays its visuals using physical LED lights. Instead of outputting visuals to the computer screen, data is sent over USB to a micro controller that runs the LED lights. This project aims to give users a more visceral visual experience than traditional visualizations on the computer screen.

Architecture And Usability Aspects Of Environmental Data Portals, Michael Mcmahon, Jr.

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

12 PowerPoint slides Session 2: Infrastructure Convener: Sergiu Dascalu, UNR Abstract: -Web Portal: A web site that acts as a starting point or gateway to Internet content, services, and information. Portals expose this information via a consistent set of visual elements and organizational constructs that improve the user experience and may relate, unify, or otherwise enhance the content. -Data Portal: A web site that acts as a starting point or gateway to Internet content, web/data services, and related information. Portals expose this information via a consistent set of visual elements and organizational constructs that improve the user experience and relate, …

Analysis Of Tradeoffs Between Buffer And Qos Requirements In Wireless Networks, Raphael Rom, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we consider the scheduling problem where data packets from K input-flows need to be delivered to K corresponding wireless receivers over a heterogeneous wireless channel. Our objective is to design a wireless scheduler that achieves good throughput and fairness performance while minimizing the buffer requirement at each wireless receiver. This is a challenging problem due to the unique characteristics of the wireless channel. We propose a novel idea of exploiting both the long-term and short-term error behavior of the wireless channel in the scheduler design. In addition to typical first-order Quality of Service (QoS) metrics such as …

Admission Control For Differentiated Services In Future Generation Cdma Networks, Hwee-Pink Tan, Rudesindo Núñez-Queija, Adriana F. Gabor, Onno J. Boxma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Future Generation CDMA wireless systems, e.g., 3G, can simultaneously accommodate flow transmissions of users with widely heterogeneous applications. As radio resources are limited, we propose an admission control rule that protects users with stringent transmission bit-rate requirements (“streaming traffic”) while offering sufficient capacity over longer time intervals to delay-tolerant users (“elastic traffic”). While our strategy may not satisfy classical notions of fairness, we aim to reduce congestion and increase overall throughput of elastic users. Using time-scale decomposition, we develop approximations to evaluate the performance of our differentiated admission control strategy to support integrated services with transmission bit-rate requirements in a …

A Two-Phase Approach To Interactivity Enhancement For Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Suiping Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) are distributed systems that allow multiple geographically distributed clients (users) to interact simultaneously in a computer-generated, shared virtual world. Applications of DVEs can be seen in many areas nowadays, such as online games, military simulations, collaborative designs, etc. To support large-scale DVEs with real-time interactions among thousands or even more distributed clients, a geographically distributed server architecture (GDSA) is generally needed, and the virtual world can be partitioned into many distinct zones to distribute the load among the servers. Due to the geographic distributions of clients and servers in such architectures, it is essential to efficiently …

Personal Information Management. A Framework For Development Of Personalisable Web Based Services, Christopher Fuchs

Theses

The thesis research proposed herein will model, analyse and implement strategies for the development of personalised services. The goal of the research work is to design and implement a framework which supports developers by minimising the effort required in implementing personalised services. This includes the ability to react to localisation changes and to present proper information. An overall design goal is the independency of most components from each other which will be attained through the use of standard technologies and protocols and the consistent use of a component model. The result will include the proposed framework and the analyses of …

Creating Software [Sic] Environments On An M-Node Beowulf Cluster To Execute Discrete-Event Simulations, Jermaine Fitz-Gerald Headley

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This thesis describes the development of a software tool that facilitates the creation of software environments that make a simulation tool execute k replications of an application program on several nodes of an M-node Beowulf cluster. It is assumed that each cluster-node consists of p processors. The p processors that are contained in the master cluster-node are termed master processors, and the p processors that are contained in a slave cluster-node are termed slave processors. The slave processors are used to execute the replications, while the master processors are dedicated to schedule the replications and process other housekeeping chores. For …

Common Data Administration, Data Management, And Data Alignment As A Necessary Requirement For Coupling C4isr Systems And M&S Systems, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Within the application domain of military simulation systems, training and exercises as well as support to real operations require the coupling of the simulation system delivering the needed functionality with the Command, Control, Computing, Communications, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) system providing the necessary data. The solution to this challenge is to build appropriate interfaces. Although in long term a more integrated approach will be necessary, in short and mid term, gateways and interfaces are likely to remain the standard. However, in order to succeed with the respective efforts, at least on the data level of interoperability, a common solution …

Jsb Composability And Web Services Interoperability Via Extensible Modeling & Simulation Framework (Xmsf), Model Driven Architecture (Mda), Component Repositories, And Web-Based Visualization, Don Brutzman, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

"Study Report prepared for the U. S. Air Force, Joint Synthetic Battlespace Analysis of Technical Approaches (ATA) Studies & Prototyping"

Overview: This paper summarizes research work conducted by organizations concerned with interoperable distributed information technology (IT) applications, in particular the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and Old Dominion University (ODU). Although the application focus is distributed modeling & simulation (M&S) the results and findings are in general easily applicable to other distributed concepts as well, in particular the support of operations by M&S applications, such as distributed mission operations. The core idea of this work is to show the necessity of …

Pc-Based Atm Network Simulator, Weei Shan Lai

Student Works (2000-2009)

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has emerged as a very high-speed transmission technology. The barrage of technological advancements has continuously enhanced the network performance. There is an increasing dependence on the network. Thus, there is a need to accurately predict the impact of network and applications changes in the dynamic network environment. The project is divided into two parts: Part one: Study the concept of ATM and the important issues regarding it. Various existing simulators and applications on A TM are studied to plan for an up to date simulator. Part two: Develop a PC Based simulator. This is motivated by …