Grades computacionais oportunistas utilizam recursos ociosos de máquinas compartilhadas para executar aplicações que necessitam de um alto poder computacional e/ou trabalham com grandes quantidades de dados. Mas a execução de aplicações paralelas computacionalmente intensivas em ambientes dinâmicos e heterogêneos, como grades computacionais oportunistas, é uma tarefa difícil. Máquinas podem falhar, ficar inacessíveis ou passar de ociosas para ocupadas inesperadamente, comprometendo a execução de aplicações. Um mecanismo de tolerância a falhas que dê suporte a arquiteturas heterogêneas é um importante requisito para estes sistemas. Neste trabalho, analisamos, implementamos e avaliamos um mecanismo de tolerância a falhas baseado em checkpointing para aplicações paralelas em grades computacionais oportunistas. Este mecanismo permite o monitoramento de execuções e a migração de aplicações entre nós heterogêneos da grade. Mas além da execução, é preciso gerenciar e armazenar os dados gerados e utilizados por estas aplicações. Desejamos uma infra-estrutura de armazenamento de dados de baixo custo e que utilize o espaço livre em disco de máquinas compartilhadas da grade. Devemos utilizar somente os ciclos ociosos destas máquinas para armazenar e recuperar dados, de modo que um sistema de armazenamento distribuído que as utilize deve ser redundante e tolerante a falhas. Para resolver o problema do armazenamento de dados em grades oportunistas, projetamos, implementamos e avaliamos o middleware OppStore. Este middleware provê armazenamento distribuído e confiável de dados, que podem ser acessados de qualquer máquina da grade. As máquinas são organizadas em aglomerados, que são conectados por uma rede peer-to-peer auto-organizável e tolerante a falhas. Dados são codificados em fragmentos redundantes antes de serem armazenados, de modo que arquivos podem ser reconstruídos utilizando apenas um subconjunto destes fragmentos. Finalmente, para lidar com a heterogeneidade dos recursos, desenvolvemos uma extensão ao protocolo de roteamento em redes peer-to-peer Pastry. Esta extensão adiciona balanceamento de carga e suporte à heterogeneidade de máquinas ao protocolo Pastry. / Opportunistic computational grids use idle resources from shared machines to execute applications that need large amounts of computational power and/or deal with large amounts of data. But executing computationally intensive parallel applications in dynamic and heterogeneous environments, such as opportunistic grids, is a daunting task. Machines may fail, become inaccessible, or change from idle to occupied unexpectedly, compromising the application execution. A fault tolerance mechanism that supports heterogeneous architectures is an important requisite for such systems. In this work, we analyze, implement and evaluate a checkpointing-based fault tolerance mechanism for parallel applications running on opportunistic grids. The mechanism monitors application execution and allows the migration of applications between heterogeneous nodes of the grid. But besides application execution, it is necessary to manage data generated and used by those applications. We want a low cost data storage infrastructure that utilizes the unused disk space of grid shared machines. The system should use the machines to store and recover data only during their idle periods, requiring the system to be redundant and fault-tolerant. To solve the data storage problem in opportunistic grids, we designed, implemented and evaluated the OppStore middleware. This middleware provides reliable distributed storage for application data, which can be accessed from any machine in the grid. The machines are organized in clusters, connected by a self-organizing and fault-tolerant peer-to-peer network. During storage, data is codified into redundant fragments, allowing the reconstruction of the original file using only a subset of those fragments. Finally, to deal with resource heterogeneity, we developed an extension to the Pastry peer-to-peer routing substrate, enabling heterogeneity-aware load-balancing message routing.

Storing personal information in a secure and reliable manner may be crucial for organizational as well as private users. Encryption protects the confidentiality of data against adversaries but if the cryptographic key is lost, the information will not be obtainable for authorized individuals either. Redundancy may protect information against availability issues or data loss, but also comes with greater storage overhead and cost. Cloud storage serves as an attractive alternative to traditional storage as one is released from maintenance responsibilities and does not have to invest in in-house IT-resources. However, cloud adoption is commonly hindered due to privacy concerns. Instead of relying on the security of a single cloud, this study aims to investigate the applicability of a multi-cloud solution based on Secret Sharing, and to identify suitable options and guidelines in a configuration user interface (UI). Interviews were conducted with technically skilled people representing prospective users, followed by walkthroughs of a UI prototype. Although the solution would (theoretically) allow for employment of less “trustworthy” clouds without compromising the data confidentiality, the research results indicate that trust factors such as compliance with EU laws may still be a crucial prerequisite in order for users to utilize cloud services. Users may worry about cloud storage providers colluding, and the solution may not be perceived as adequately secure without the use of encryption. The configuration of the Secret Sharing parameters are difficult to comprehend even for technically skilled individuals and default values could/should be recommended to the user. / PRISMACLOUD

In this modern rather interconnected era, an organization’s top priority is to protect itself from major security breaches occurring frequently within a communicational environment. But, it seems, as if they quite fail in doing so. Every week there are new headlines relating to information being forged, funds being stolen and corrupt usage of credit card and so on. Personal computers are turned into “zombie machines” by hackers to steal confidential and financial information from sources without disclosing hacker’s true identity. These identity thieves rob private data and ruin the very purpose of privacy. The purpose of this project is to identify suspicious user activity by analyzing a log file which then later can help an investigation agency like FBI to track and monitor anonymous user(s) who seek for weaknesses to attack vulnerable parts of a system to have access of it. The project also emphasizes the potential damage that a malicious activity could have on the system. This project uses Hadoop framework to search and store log files for logging activities and then performs a ‘Map Reduce’ programming code to finally compute and analyze the results.

Modern operating systems have been designed around the hypotheses that (a) memory is both byte-addressable and volatile and (b) storage is block addressable and persistent. The arrival of new Persistent Memory (PM) technologies, has made these assumptions obsolete. Despite much of the recent work in this space, the need for consistently sharing PM data across multiple applications remains an urgent, unsolved problem. Furthermore, the availability of simple yet powerful operating system support remains elusive. In this dissertation, we propose and build The Region System – a high-performance operating system stack for PM that implements usable consistency and persistence for application data. The region system provides support for consistently mapping and sharing data resident in PM across user application address spaces. The region system creates a novel IPI based PMSYNC operation, which ensures atomic persistence of mapped pages across multiple address spaces. This allows applications to consume PM using the well understood and much desired memory like model with an easy-to-use interface. Next, we propose a metadata structure without any redundant metadata to reduce CPU cache flushes. The high-performance design minimizes the expensive PM ordering and durability operations by embracing a minimalistic approach to metadata construction and management. To strengthen the case for the region system, in this dissertation, we analyze different types of applications to identify their dependence on memory mapped data usage, and propose user level libraries LIBPM-R and LIBPMEMOBJ-R to support shared persistent containers. The user level libraries along with the region system demonstrate a comprehensive end-to-end software stack for consuming the PM devices.

From the safety point of view, the bus stop is perhaps the most important part of the Bus Public Transport System, as it represents the point where bus passengers may interact directly with other road users and create conflicting situations leading to traffic accidents. For example, travellers could be struck walking to/from or boarding/alighting a bus. At these locations, passengers become pedestrians and at some stage crossing busy arterial roads at the bus stop in areas or at objects of main attraction usually outside of pedestrian designated facilities such as signal controlled intersections, zebra and pelican crossings. Pedestrian exposure to risk or risk-taking occurs when people want to cross the road in front of the stopped bus, at the rear of the bus or between the buses, particularly where bus stops are located on two-way roads (i.e. within the mid-block of the road with side streets, at non-signalised cross-section). However, it is necessary to have a better understanding of the pedestrian road-crossing risk exposure (pedestrian crossing distraction, obscurity and behaviour) within bus stop zones so that it can be incorporated into new design, bus stop placement, and evaluation of traffic management schemes where bus stop locations will play an increasingly important role. A full range of possible incidental interactions are presented in a tabular model that looks at the most common interacting traffic movements within bus stop zones. The thesis focused on pedestrian safety, discusses theoretical foundations of bus stops, and determines the types of accident risks between bus travellers as pedestrians and motor vehicles within the zones of the bus stop. Thus, the objectives of this thesis can be summarized as follows: (I) - Classification of bus stops, particularly according to objects of main attraction (pedestrian-generating activities); (II) - Analysis of traffic movement and interactions as an accident/risk exposure in the zone of bus stops with respect to that structure; (III) - Categorizing traffic accident in the vicinity of bus stops, and to analyse the interactions (interacting movements) that occur within bus stop zones in order to discover the nature of problems; (IV) - Formulation of tabular (pedestrian traffic accident prediction) models/forms (based on traffic interactions that creating and causing possibilities of accident conflict) for practical statistical methods of those accidents related to bus stop, and; (V) - Safety aspects related to the micro-location of bus stops to assist in the micro-location design, operations of bus stop safety facilities and safer pedestrian crossing for access between the bus stop and nearby objects of attraction. The scope of this thesis focuses on the theoretical foundation of bus stop microâ??location in areas of main attractions or at objects of main attraction, and traffic accident risk types as they occur between travellers as pedestrians and vehicle flow in the zone of the bus stop. The knowledge of possible interactions leads to the identification of potential conflict situations between motor vehicles and pedestrians. The problems discussed for each given conflict situation, has a great potential in increasing the knowledge needed to prevent accidents and minimise any pedestrian-vehicle conflict in this area and to aid in the development and planning of safer bus stops.

Image coding plays a key role in multimedia signal processing and communications. JPEG2000 is the latest image coding standard, it uses the EBCOT (Embedded Block Coding with Optimal Truncation) algorithm. The EBCOT exhibits excellent compression performance, but with high complexity. The need to reduce this complexity but maintain similar performance to EBCOT has inspired a significant amount of research activity in the image coding community. Within the development of image compression techniques based on wavelet transforms, the EZW (Embedded Zerotree Wavelet) and the SPIHT (Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees) have played an important role. The EZW algorithm was the first breakthrough in wavelet based image coding. The SPIHT algorithm achieves similar performance to EBCOT, but with fewer features. The other very important algorithm is SBHP (Sub-band Block Hierarchical Partitioning), which attracted significant investigation during the JPEG2000 development process. In this thesis, the history of the development of wavelet transform is reviewed, and a discussion is presented on the implementation issues for wavelet transforms. The above mentioned four main coding methods for image compression using wavelet transforms are studied in detail. More importantly the factors that affect coding efficiency are identified. The main contribution of this research is the introduction of a new low-complexity coding algorithm for image compression based on wavelet transforms. The algorithm is based on block dividing coding (BDC) with an optimised packet assembly. Our extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms JPEG2000 in lossless coding, even though it still leaves a narrow gap in lossy coding situations

<p>In the first part of this work, the influence of hydrogen on the structural and magnetic properties of Fe/V(001) superlattices was studied. The local structure of the vanadium-hydride layers was determined by extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) measurements. The magnetic ordering in a weakly coupled Fe/V(001) superlattice was investigated using the magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE). The interlayer exchange coupling is weakened upon alloying with hydrogen and a phase with short-range magnetic order was observed.</p><p>The second part is concerned with first-principles calculations of magnetic materials, with a focus on magnetic recording applications. The uniaxial magnetic anisotropy energy (MAE) of Fe, Co, and Ni was calculated for tetragonal and trigonal structures. Based on an analysis of the electronic states of tetragonal Fe and Co at the center of the Brillouin zone, tetragonal Fe-Co alloys were proposed as a material that combines a large uniaxial MAE with a large saturation magnetization. This was confirmed by experimental studies on (Fe,Co)/Pt superlattices. The large uniaxial MAE of L1₀ FePt is caused by the large spin-orbit interaction on the Pt sites in connection with a strong hybridization between Fe and Pt. Furthermore, it was shown that the uniaxial MAE can be increased by alloying the Fe sublattice with Mn. The combination of the high-moment rare-earth (RE) metals with the high-<i>T</i>_C 3<i>d</i> transition metals in RE/Cr/Fe multilayers (RE = Gd, Tb, Dy) gives rise to a strong ferromagnetic effective exchange interaction between the Fe layers and the RE layer. The MAE of hcp Gd was found to have two principal contributions, namely the dipole interaction of the large localized 4<i>f</i> spins and the band electron magnetic anisotropy due to the spin-orbit interaction. The peculiar temperature dependence of the easy axis of magnetization was reproduced on a qualitative level.</p>

Dans le cadre de la synthèse de haut niveau (SHN), qui permet d'extraire un modèle structural à partir d'un modèle algorithmique, nous proposons des solutions pour opti- miser l'accès et le transfert de données du matériel cible. Une méthodologie d'exploration de l'espace des architectures mémoire possibles a été mise au point. Cette méthodologie trouve un compromis entre la quantité de mémoire interne utilisée et les performances temporelles du matériel généré. Deux niveau d'optimisation existe : 1. Une optimisation architecturale, qui consiste à créer une hiérarchie mémoire, 2. Une optimisation algorithmique, qui consiste à partitionner la totalité des données manipulées pour stocker en interne seulement celles qui sont utiles dans l'immédiat. Pour chaque répartition possible, nous résolvons le problème de l'ordonnancement des calculs et de mapping des données. À la fin, nous choisissons la ou les solutions pareto. Nous proposons un outil, front-end de la SHN, qui est capable d'appliquer l'optimisation algorithmique du point 2 à un algorithme de traitement d'image spécifié par l'utilisateur. L'outil produit en sortie un modèle algorithmique optimisé pour la SHN, en customisant une architecture générique.

This dissertation considers several coding techniques based on Reed-Solomon (RS) and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. These two prominent families of error-correcting codes have attracted a great amount of interest from both theorists and practitioners and have been applied in many communication scenarios. In particular, data storage systems have greatly benefited from these codes in improving the reliability of the storage media. The first part of this dissertation presents a unified framework based on rate-distortion (RD) theory to analyze and optimize multiple decoding trials of RS codes. Finding the best set of candidate decoding patterns is shown to be equivalent to a covering problem which can be solved asymptotically by RD theory. The proposed approach helps understand the asymptotic performance-versus-complexity trade-off of these multiple-attempt decoding algorithms and can be applied to a wide range of decoders and error models. In the second part, we consider spatially-coupled (SC) codes, or terminated LDPC convolutional codes, over intersymbol-interference (ISI) channels under joint iterative decoding. We empirically observe the phenomenon of threshold saturation whereby the belief-propagation (BP) threshold of the SC ensemble is improved to the maximum a posteriori (MAP) threshold of the underlying ensemble. More specifically, we derive a generalized extrinsic information transfer (GEXIT) curve for the joint decoder that naturally obeys the area theorem and estimate the MAP and BP thresholds. We also conjecture that SC codes due to threshold saturation can universally approach the symmetric information rate of ISI channels. In the third part, a similar analysis is used to analyze the MAP thresholds of LDPC codes for several multiuser systems, namely a noisy Slepian-Wolf problem and a multiple access channel with erasures. We provide rigorous analysis and derive upper bounds on the MAP thresholds which are shown to be tight in some cases. This analysis is a first step towards proving threshold saturation for these systems which would imply SC codes with joint BP decoding can universally approach the entire capacity region of the corresponding systems.

The digital Bleek and Lloyd Collection is a rare collection that contains artwork, notebooks and dictionaries of the earliest habitants of Southern Africa. Previous attempts have been made to recognize the complex text in the notebooks using machine learning techniques, but due to the complexity of the manuscripts the recognition accuracy was low. In this research, a crowdsourcing based method is proposed to transcribe the historical handwritten manuscripts, where volunteers transcribe the notebooks online. An online crowdsourcing transcription tool was developed and deployed. Experiments were conducted to determine the quality of transcriptions and accuracy of the volunteers compared with a gold standard. The results show that volunteers are able to produce reliable transcriptions of high quality. The inter-transcriber agreement is 80% for |Xam text and 95% for English text. When the |Xam text transcriptions produced by the volunteers are compared with the gold standard, the volunteers achieve an average accuracy of 69.69%. Findings show that there exists a positive linear correlation between the inter-transcriber agreement and the accuracy of transcriptions. The user survey revealed that volunteers found the transcription process enjoyable, though it was difficult. Results indicate that volunteer thinking can be used to crowdsource intellectually-intensive tasks in digital libraries like transcription of handwritten manuscripts. Volunteer thinking outperforms machine learning techniques at the task of transcribing notebooks from the Bleek and Lloyd Collection.