Systems Architecture Commons^™

Virtualization-Based System Hardening Against Untrusted Kernels, Yueqiang Cheng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Applications are integral to our daily lives to help us processing sensitive I/O data, such as individual passwords and camera streams, and private application data, such as financial information and medical reports. However, applications and sensitive data all surfer from the attacks from kernel rootkits in the traditional architecture, where the commodity OS that is supposed to be the secure foothold of the system is routinely compromised due to the large code base and the broad attack surface. Fortunately, the virtualization technology has significantly reshaped the landscape of the modern computer system, and provides a variety of new opportunities for …

Design And Implementation Of E-Commerce Site For Online Shopping, Sidhartha Reddy Vatrapu

All Capstone Projects

In today’s fast-changing business environment, it’s extremely important to be able to respond to client needs in the most effective and timely manner. If your customers wish to see your business online and have instant access to your products or services.

Online Shopping is a lifestyle e-commerce web application, which retails various fashion and lifestyle products (Currently Men’s Wear). This project allows viewing various products available enables registered users to purchase desired products instantly using PayPal payment processor (Instant Pay) and also can place order by using Cash on Delivery (Pay Later) option. This project provides an easy access to …

Retrospective Case Study And Potential Solutions In Regard To The Object Oriented Design Of Charger Through Various Modeling And Analysis Techniques, Jesse Moore

Summer Community of Scholars Posters (RCEU and HCR Combined Programs)

No abstract provided.

Using Acl2 To Verify Loop Pipelining In Behavioral Synthesis, Disha Puri, Sandip Ray, Kecheng Hao, Fei Xie

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Behavioral synthesis involves compiling an Electronic System-Level (ESL) design into its RegisterTransfer Level (RTL) implementation. Loop pipelining is one of the most critical and complex transformations employed in behavioral synthesis. Certifying the loop pipelining algorithm is challenging because there is a huge semantic gap between the input sequential design and the output pipelined implementation making it infeasible to verify their equivalence with automated sequential equivalence checking techniques. We discuss our ongoing effort using ACL2 to certify loop pipelining transformation. The completion of the proof is work in progress. However, some of the insights developed so far may already be of …

Free-Space 120 Gb/S Reconfigurable Card-To-Card Optical Wireless Interconnects With 16-Cap Modulation, Ke Wang, Ampalavanapillai Nirmalathas, Christina Lim, Efstratios Skafidas, Kamal Alameh

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate reconfigurable card-to-card optical wireless interconnects architecture with 16-Carrierless-Amplitude/Phase modulation. Results show that 3×40 Gb/s interconnection is achieved with 2 mW transmission power.

Uos : A Resource Rerouting Middleware For Ubiquitous Games, Fabricio N. Buzeto, Miriam A M Capretz, Carla D. Castanho, Ricardo P. Jacobi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) relies on the computation distributed over the environment to simplify the tasks performed by its users. A smart space is an instance of a ubiquitous environment, composed of a dynamic and heterogeneous set of devices that interact to support the execution of distributed smart applications. In this context, mobile devices provide new resources when they join the environment, which disappear when they leave it. This introduces the challenge of self-adaptation, in which smart applications may either include new resources as they become available or replace them when they become unavailable. Ubiquitous games combine ubicomp and computer game …

A Solar-Powered And Multi-Tiered Mesh Node For A Portable In Situ Emergency Response System, Adam Matthews

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aftermath of a natural disaster is typically characterized by lack of a reliable medium for dissemination of information to survivors. Current state-of-the-art emergency response systems rely on satellite radio-enabled devices, but survivors, unlike first responders, do not have access to such devices. To mitigate this problem, we present PERPETUU a solar-powered portable GIS microserver. The microserver node can be deployed in a disaster scene, and can serve maps to survivors viewable on browsers of off-the-shelf mobile systems. A key innovation in the design of the PERPETUU node is a multi-tiered hardware architecture-the system combines a low-power micro-controller, a medium-power …

In Perfect Xen, A Performance Study Of The Emerging Xen Scheduler, Ryan Hnarakis

Master's Theses

Fifty percent of Fortune 500 companies trust Xen, an open-source bare-metal hypervisor, to virtualize their websites and mission critical services in the cloud. Providing superior fault tolerance, scalability, and migration, virtualization allows these companies to run several isolated operating systems simultaneously on the same physical server. These isolated operating systems, called virtual machines, require a virtual traffic guard to cooperate with one another. This guard known as the Credit2 scheduler along with the newest Xen hypervisor was recently developed to supersede the older schedulers. Since wasted CPU cycles can be costly, the Credit2 prototype must undergo significant performance validation before …

A Robust Rgbd Slam System For 3d Environment With Planar Surfaces, Po-Chang Su, Ju Shen, Sen-Ching S. Cheung

Computer Science Faculty Publications

With the increasing popularity of RGB-depth (RGB-D) sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect, there have been much research on capturing and reconstructing 3D environments using a movable RGB-D sensor. The key process behind these kinds of simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) systems is the iterative closest point or ICP algorithm, which is an iterative algorithm that can estimate the rigid movement of the camera based on the captured 3D point clouds. While ICP is a well-studied algorithm, it is problematic when it is used in scanning large planar regions such as wall surfaces in a room. The lack of depth …

Conferencesense: Monitoring Of Public Events Using Phone Sensors, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Amit Kumar, Vikrant Nandakumar, Sonali Batra, Salil Kanhere, Pradipta De, Vinayak Naik, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the use of a participatory sensing paradigm, where data generated from individual smartphones is used to extract and understand collective properties of temporary public gatherings and events (e.g., concerts & conferences). We focus on the use of this paradigm at a technical conference, and describe the design, implementation and deployment of ConferenceSense, an application that uses multiple sensor and human-generated inputs from attendees' smartphones to infer context, such as the start time of a session or the degree of interaction during a tea break. Based on data collected from multiple attendees at a 3-day conference, we explore how …

Spring­11: Pdc In Cs1/2 And A Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Software Design Course, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Recent changes in the environment of Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Computer Science include a better differentiation of our four undergraduate majors, growing interest in computing among science majors, and an increased demand for graduates with mobile and cloud skills. In our continued effort to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into the undergraduate curriculum, we are focusing on these three existing courses:

CS1: In response to a request from the physics department, we started to offer a CS1 section aimed at majors in physics and other hard sciences this spring semester. This section includes some material on numerical methods …

Building Capable, Energy-Efficient, Flexible Visualization And Sensing Clusters From Commodity Tablets, Thomas Delgado Dias, Xian Yan, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We explore the application of clusters of commodity tablet devices to problems spanning a “trilogy” of concerns: visualization, sensing, and computation. We conjecture that such clusters provide a low-cost, energy-efficient, flexible, and ultimately effective platform to tackle a wide range of problems within this trilogy. This is a work in progress, and we now elaborate our position and give a preliminary status report.

A wide range of Android tablet devices are available in terms of price and capabilities. “You get what you pay for” w.r.t. display resolution, sensors, and chipset---corresponding to the trilogy. $200 gets one a 1280x800-pixel touch display, …

Network Technologies Used To Aggregate Environmental Data, Paul Stasiuk, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The goal of the Loyola Weather Service (lws) project is to design and build a system of functioning environmental monitoring widgets that can intelligently and autonomously control the environment around them based on set thresholds and triggers. The widgets will also have the ability to aggregate their data and easily display this data in various ways: through a user interface in the room that the widget is placed, via a web application, and programmatically via a RESTful web service.

Ikriya: Simulating Software Quality Enhancement With Selected Replacement Policies, Sindhu Dharani Murthy

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The quality of information systems in any organization helps to determine the
efficiency of the organization. Many organizations maintain a custom software portfolio, whose quality is important to the organization. Management would like to optimize the portfolio’s quality. Decisions about software replacement or enhancement are made based on organizational needs and priorities. The development resources allocated help in determining the quality of new software, and should be put to optimal use. Enhancing existing software might sound cheap and easy but it is not always efficient. This thesis proposes a simulation model - iKriya - for this problem. It explores the …

A Hybrid Recommendation System Based On Association Rules, Ahmed Alsalama

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Recommendation systems are widely used in e-commerce applications. The
engine of a current recommendation system recommends items to a particular user based on user preferences and previous high ratings. Various recommendation schemes such as collaborative filtering and content-based approaches are used to build a recommendation system. Most of current recommendation systems were developed to fit a certain domain such as books, articles, and movies. We propose a hybrid framework recommendation system to be applied on two dimensional spaces (User × Item) with a large number of users and a small number of items. Moreover, our proposed framework makes use of …

Modeling And Architectural Simulations Of The Statistical Static Timing Analysis Of The Variation Sources For Vlsi Circuits, Abu M. Baker

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

As CMOS technology scales down, process variation introduces significant uncertainty in power and performance to VLSI circuits and significantly affects their reliability. Although Static-Timing Analysis (STA) remains an excellent tool, current trends in process scaling have imposed significant difficulties to STA. As one of the promising solutions, Statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) has become the frontier research topic in recent years in combating such variation effects. This poster will be focusing on two aspects of SSTA and its applications in VLSI designs: (1) Statistical timing modeling and analysis; and (2) Architectural implementations of the atomic operations (max and add) using …

Vsfs: A Versatile Searchable File System For Hpc Analytics, Lei Xu, Ziling Huang, Hong Jiang, Lei Tian, David Swanson

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Big-data/HPC analytics applications have urgent needs for file-search services to drastically reduce the scale of the input data to accelerate analytics. Unfortunately, the existing solutions either are poorly scalable for large-scale systems, or lack well-integrated interface to allow applications to easily use them. We propose a distributed searchable file system, VSFS, which provide a novel and flexible POSIX-compatible searchable file system namespace that can be seamlessly integrate with any legacy code without modification. Additionally, to provide real-time indexing and searching performance, VSFS uses DRAM-based distributed consistent hashing ring to manages all file-index. The results of our evaluation show that VSFS …

Project Writeup On Amethyst: A 3d Adventure Game For Tablets, Adam Hintz

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Amethyst is a point-and-click science fiction adventure game for tablets, developed over two quarters to demonstrate applied principles of computer graphics and software engineering discipline. Using a novel interaction system, players can engage in environmental puzzles. Development of Amethyst required non-trivial quality assurance measures and workflow enhancements. The end result is a functional technical demo showcasing a single level, with the ability to rapidly produce more content.

Senior Project Report - Doctest, Stephen Weessies

Computer Engineering

DocTest is a program that, simply put, allows a programmer or user to document STANAG 4586 (a standard for unmanned aerial vehicle interoperability) messages and test the vehicle system at Lockheed Martin [5]. The program is extensible to allow for further development aiding our software team to do what they do best and not get bogged down in tedious but necessary documentation. DocTest is also used to aid in testing, keeping track of the issues and bugs found and creating a document that captures each issue so an issue is not missed or forgotten. This program was made for use …

Centerline Extraction For Image Segmentation Using Gradient And Direction Vector Flow Active Contours, Shuqun Zhang, Jianyang Zhou

Publications and Research

In this paper, we propose a fast centerline extraction method to be used for gradient and direction vector flow of active contours. The gradient and direction vector flow is a recently reported active contour model capable of significantly improving the image segmentation performance especially for complex object shape, by seamlessly integrating gradient vector flow and prior directional information. Since the prior directional information is provided by manual line drawing, it can be inconvenient for inexperienced users who might have difficulty in finding the best place to draw the directional lines to achieve the best segmentation performance. This paper describes a …

On The Nonsymmetric Longer Queue Model: Joint Distribution, Asymptotic Properties, And Heavy Traffic Limits, Charles Knessl, Haishen Yao

Publications and Research

We consider two parallel queues, each with independent Poisson arrival rates, that are tended by a single server. The exponential server devotes all of its capacity to the longer of the queues. If both queues are of equal length, the server devotes of its capacity to the first queue and the remaining to the second. We obtain exact integral representations for the joint probability distribution of the number of customers in this two-node network. Then we evaluate this distribution in various asymptotic limits, such as large numbers of customers in either/both of the queues, light traffic where arrivals are infrequent, …

Accelerated Data Delivery Architecture, Michael L. Grecol

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This paper introduces the Accelerated Data Delivery Architecture (ADDA). ADDA establishes a framework to distribute transactional data and control consistency to achieve fast access to data, distributed scalability and non-blocking concurrency control by using a clean declarative interface. It is designed to be used with web-based business applications. This framework uses a combination of traditional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) combined with a distributed Not Only SQL (NoSQL) database and a browser-based database. It uses a single physical and conceptual database schema designed for a standard RDBMS driven application. The design allows the architect to assign consistency levels to entities …

The Internet And How The Government Has Impacted Its Usage Today, Jonathan Hulse

Senior Seminars

No abstract provided.

Hog: Distributed Hadoop Mapreduce On The Grid, Chen He, Derek J. Weitzel, David Swanson, Ying Lu

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

MapReduce is a powerful data processing platform for commercial and academic applications. In this paper, we build a novel Hadoop MapReduce framework executed on the Open Science Grid which spans multiple institutions across the United States – Hadoop On the Grid (HOG). It is different from previous MapReduce platforms that run on dedicated environments like clusters or clouds. HOG provides a free, elastic, and dynamic MapReduce environment on the opportunistic resources of the grid. In HOG, we improve Hadoop’s fault tolerance for wide area data analysis by mapping data centers across the U.S. to virtual racks and creating multi-institution failure …

[Accepted Article Manuscript Version (Postprint)] Track Me To Track Us: Leveraging Short Range Wireless Technologies For Enabling Energy Efficient Wi-Fi-Based Localization, Mohamed Abdellatif, Abderrahmen Mtibaa, Khaled Harras

Computer Science Faculty Works

Given the success of outdoor tracking via GPS and the rise of real-time context-aware services, users will soon rely on applications that require higher granularity indoor localization. This need is further manifested in countries like Qatar, where various social and business activities occur indoors. Wi-Fi-based indoor localization is one of the most researched techniques due to its ubiquitous deployment and acceptable accuracy for a wide range of applications. However, we do not witness such techniques widely deployed mainly due to their high demand on energy, which is a precious commodity in mobile devices. We propose an energy-efficient indoor localization system …

Model Checking Software Architecture Design, Jiexin Zhang, Yang Liu, Jing Sun, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software Architecture plays an essential role in the high level description of a system design. Despite its importance in the software engineering practice, the lack of formal description and verification support hinders the development of quality architectural models. In this paper, we present an automated approach to the modeling and verification of software architecture designs using the Process Analysis Toolkit (PAT). We present the formal syntax of the Wright# architecture description language together with its operational semantics in Labeled Transition System (LTS). A dedicated model checking module for Wright# is implemented in the PAT verification framework based on the proposed …

Beaglebone Webcam Server, Alexander Corcoran

Computer Engineering

The Beaglebone Webcam Server is a Linux based IP webcam, based on an inexpensive ARM development board, which hosts its own web server to display the webcam feed. The server has the ability to either connect to a wired router, or to act as a wireless access point in order for users to connect and control its functions via any Wi-Fi enabled device.

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 …

Flexrender: A Distributed Rendering Architecture For Ray Tracing Huge Scenes On Commodity Hardware., Robert Edward Somers

Master's Theses

As the quest for more realistic computer graphics marches steadily on, the demand for rich and detailed imagery is greater than ever. However, the current "sweet spot" in terms of price, power consumption, and performance is in commodity hardware. If we desire to render scenes with tens or hundreds of millions of polygons as cheaply as possible, we need a way of doing so that maximizes the use of the commodity hardware we already have at our disposal.

Techniques such as normal mapping and level of detail have attempted to address the problem by reducing the amount of geometry in …

Adaptive Security-Aware Scheduling For Packet Switched Networks Using Real-Time Multi-Agent Systems, Ma'en Saleh Saleh

Dissertations

Conventional real-time scheduling algorithms are in care of timing constraints; they don’t pay any attention to enhance or optimize the real-time packet’s security performance. In this work, we propose an adaptive security-aware scheduling with congestion control mechanism for packet switching networks using real-time agentbased systems. The proposed system combines the functionality of real-time scheduling with the security service enhancement, where the real-time scheduling unit uses the differentiated-earliest-deadline-first (Diff-EDF) scheduler, while the security service enhancement scheme adopts a congestion control mechanism based on a resource estimation methodology.

The security service enhancement unit was designed based on two models: singlelayer and weighted …