Project name:
RESERVOIR, Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers
Principal investigators: Mauro Pezzè (USI)
Starting date: February 1, 2008
End: January 31, 2011
Abstract:
Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers is an European
Union FP7 funded project that will enable massive scale deployment and
management of complex IT services across different administrative
domains, IT platforms and geographies. The project will provide a
foundation for a service-based online economy, where - using
virtualization technologies - resources and services are transparently
provisioned and managed on an on-demand basis at competitive costs with
high quality of service.
Web 2.0 is rapidly taking hold,
offering "the web as a platform". In parallel, traditional
client-server computing is starting to lose ground as a new paradigm
emerges - the Cloud Computing paradigm. Cloud Computing allows data
centers to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across
a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, delivering
service based on demand over the web, reducing software complexity and
costs, expediting time-to-market, improving reliability and enhancing
accessibility of consumers to government and business services. Thus,
Cloud Computing represents a true materialization of Service-Oriented
Computing's visionary promise. In RESERVOIR, we are developing
breakthrough system and service technologies that will serve as the
infrastructure for Cloud Computing. We aim to achieve this goal by
creative coupling of virtualization, grid computing, and business
service management techniques.
Project name:
CollapSE: Virtual Collaborative Spaces for Software Evolution Analysis
Principal investigators: Prof. Philippe Dugerdil (HEG Geneva), Prof. Harald Gall (Uni Zurich), Prof. Michele Lanza (Uni Lugano).
Starting date: January 1, 2008
End: December 31, 2010
Abstract:
One of the great challenges in 3D software visualization is to identify a familiar visual metaphor so that the navigation in the software becomes natural and easy. In fact, the whole idea is not to invent an exotic virtual world in which the user is lost, hence not providing any improvement in system understanding over flat representations, but to exploit the user's common sense knowledge about familiar contexts. Indeed, the user is able to reason by analogy while navigating such a software representation. Our previious experiments in the context of the EvoSpaces project have demonstrated the power of the chosen "Software City" metaphor for a 3D representation of software. Moreover it adapts naturally to the representation of dynamic information (the actual behavior of the system while being executed). However, the true assessment can only come from its actual use for real maintenance tasks applied on large industrial software systems where comprehension is a key challenge.
Project name:
Swift-WAN: System Support for Distributed Dynamic Content Web Services
Principal investigators: Fernando Pedone (USI) and Willy Zwaenepoel (EPFL)
Starting date: March 1, 2009
End: February 29, 2012
Abstract:
Many current web services are based on dynamic content. Users connect
to a web site and receive customized information, for example,
depending on the request parameters as well as the users’ preferences
and access patterns. Typically, a dynamic content web site is located
at a single geographic site and the information is stored in a
database. There is a need to scale these systems and increase their
availability using replication across a geographically-distributed
wide-area network. In such a replicated system, requests execute on
“nearby” replicas, thereby avoiding long roundtrip delays, and
distributing the load over the replicas. Moreover, if the nearby site
becomes inaccessible, clients are transparently switched to other
replicas. The goal of Swift is to design and implement a scalable and
highly-available database replication middleware to be used as the
underlying infrastructure of modern dynamic content web services. The
project is a joint research effort between the University of Lugano
(USI) and the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).
Co-funded by SNSF.
Project name:
Virtual EZ-Grid
Principal investigators: Prof. Cesare Pautasso (at USI)
Starting date: November 1, 2008
End: May 31, 2010
Abstract:
Five technical goals are targeted by the /Virtual EZ-Grid/ project:
Project name:
Swiss Grid Portal
Principal investigators: Prof. Cesare Pautasso (at USI)
Starting date: January 1, 2009
End: April 30, 2010
Abstract:
The primary goal of this project is to select, enhance, deploy and test a fully functional Grid portal user interface. It will be fully integrated with the infrastructure provided through the Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid (SMSCG) project. The application driving the project will be the Proteomics Identification Toolbox (swissPIT) of the University of Geneva section of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. The swissPIT end-users require a high-level, easy-to-use interface in order to perform their research in the domain of life sciences.
There already exist several portals for end-user access to Grid resources in many other pro jects. However, most of these portals are specifically customized to the given application at hand and are not easily adaptable to new applications. Very few have integrated workflow ca pabilities, which is the prerequisite for most high-level applications. Most existing portals provide a web version of the command-line tools provided by the Grid middleware. We intend to make use of those existing low-level portal components available in the community and of the JOpera workflow engine, developed and maintained by USI. By building the portal with the strong in volvement of a user community (Life Sciences – Proteomics) we will be able to improve the usability concept of existing portals. The new swissPIT Swiss Grid Portal (an early prototype portal already exists) will be built with reusability in mind, such that the actual Proteomics specific parts are clearly separated and customizable for future applications, not only in Life Sciences but also from other scientific domains. Necessary new functionality like the integration with SWITCHaai will be identified and added by the project.
The existence of such an open portal framework is to the benefit of all of the Swiss Grid user community, who will be given an easy to use, customized access to their complex, computationally intensive applications. It will directly benefit the Grid application providers, who will be able to quickly assemble such a customized end-user portal for their user communities, without the need to deal with the intricacies of Grid user identity management, job management, monitoring as well as user data upload/download handling.
Partners: CSCS, University of Geneva, SIB
Project name:
Detection of Security Flaws and Vulnerabilities by Guided Model Checking
Principal investigators: Prof. Natasha Sharygina, Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano
Starting date: October 1, 2006
End: September 30, 2010
Abstract:
Information is an important strategic and operational corporate asset, and, therefore, there is a need to have adequate security measures which can safe-guard sensitive information. This project targets the development of techniques that are exhaustive and formally guarantee the correctness of security properties of the actual implementation given in a language such as ANSI-C. Model Checking, a perfect candidate to fulfill the task, exhaustively explores the entire state-space for violations of a property of interest. However, Model Checking suffers from the state-space explosion problem, i.e., the size of the state-space often exceeds the capacity of the Model Checking tool. The main research challenge when applying Model Checking to large-scale software therefore is to address the scalability problem. We propose to tailor state-space reduction algorithms to the code security domain, and thus, to develop specialized model checking algorithms for detecting security vulnerabilities. During the first half of the project we were able to show that focusing on low-level security properties results in a considerable performance gain in static analysis algorithms. In the second half of the project we are extending this work to model checking algorithms and subsequent refinement of abstract models. Among the methods we are investigating are: a) Performance and precision improvements in alias analysis, b) Abstract counterexample analysis and, based on that, guiding heuristics for model checking algorithms, c) Novel counterexample guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) algorithms based on new abstract transformers, and d) Extensions to modeling formalisms by introduction of quantified verification conditions and improvements in algorithms for quantified bit-vector arithmetic.
Project name:
VIA - Vertical Profiling and Optimization of Modern Interactive Applications
Principal investigators: Prof. Matthias Hauswirth
Starting date: April 1, 2007
End: September 30, 2010
Abstract:
Due to physical limitations, the growth of clock speed of
new computer hardware is slowing down, and hardware architects are forced to
realize performance gains by increasing the amount of parallelism, often by
increasing the number of cores or hardware threads in a processor. Thus, the
most promising approach to support the growing performance demand of
applications is to improve their utilization of this increasingly available
hardware parallelism.
However, this approach is particularly difficult for the large segment of interactive desktop applications. These applications handle a sequence of a single user's requests, where a request often depends on the applications' response to the prior request. Thus, their behavior is inherently sequential, and they do not directly benefit from the increasingly available hardware parallelism.
The goal of the proposed research is to enable the
performance improvement of such interactive applications. Since users judge the
performance of interactive applications by the perceived latency of their
responses, improving performance means reducing the number of responses with
perceptible latency. This project will develop means for understanding the
causes of perceptible latency and for reducing this latency by utilizing the
increasing thread-level parallelism in modern hardware. Specifically, we aim to
answer the following questions:
Project name:
DiCoSA - Distributed Collaborative Software Analysis
Principal investigators: rof. Harald Gall (Univ. of Zurich) & Prof. Michele Lanza (Univ. of Lugano)
Starting date: October 1, 2007
End: September 30, 2010
Abstract:
The goal of this pro ject is to devise a distributed and collaborative software analysis platform to allow for interoperability of software quality analysis tools across organisational boundaries. Such tools will adhere to specific meta- models and ontologies for their category of analysis and offer a common service interface that enables their composite use on the Internet. These distributed analysis services shall be widely accessible in an incrementally augmented software quality analysis portal, where organisations and research groups can share their tools.
Project name:
FERRARI: Framework for Efficient Rewriting and Reification Applying Runtime Instrumentation
Principal investigators: professor Walter Binder, Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano
Starting date: October 1, 2007
End: November 30, 2010
Abstract:
Java and the Java Virtual Machine are a preferred programming language and deployment platform for many application and middleware developers. However, there is a lack of efficient development tools that help analyzing and optimizing the runtime characteristics of complex Java-based systems, and of resource management mechanisms to monitor and control the resource consumption of software components in a dynamically changing environment. In particular, prevailing tools for profiling and monitoring focus exclusively on platform-specific metrics, such as the CPU time consumption on a particular machine. Such metrics are of limited use when software components are deployed dynamically and when resource consumption policies need to be expressed in a platform-independent way. The FERRARI project will fill this gap. It proposes generic techniques for platform-independent, transparent, customizable, dynamic instrumentation in virtual execution environments, which enables new, portable profiling tools, resource management mechanisms, and fine-grained monitoring of Java-based software component in a platform-independent way. The FERRARI project will advance the state-of-the-art in bytecode instrumentation and validate the novel instrumentation techniques in the area of profiling, monitoring, and resource management.
Project name:
XMI: Cross-Media Indexing for Multi-Media Information Retrieval
Principal investigators: Prof. Fabio Crestani
Starting date: November 1, 2007
End: October 31, 2010
Abstract:
This project will address the issue of Cross-Media indexing for
Multimedia Information Retrieval. Cross-Media indexing enables to
enrich and augment the indexing of multimedia information, such as
for example videos or web documents, by linking together all indexing
information obtained from the different single media that compose a
specific multimedia item (e.g. a video story segment or a web page).
Past research has shown that cross-media indexing can greatly augment
and enhance the value of single media indexing for multimedia
documents by cross linking information found in different media types
within an uncertain evidence framework. For example, a video segment
could contain speech, music, images, text (e.g. captions, subtitles),
faces, and so on, with different indexing information attempting to
characterise the content of the video segment can be extracted from
these media. So, speech can be translated into text and can be used
to partially identify the topical content of the video segment by
extracting index terms or facts, but can also be used, when possible,
to identify the speaker or, in some cases to discern the speaker's
emotions. Images can be used to characterise the scenes (e.g. indoor
vs. outdoor, urban landscape vs. countryside) or to identify specific
objects or buildings appearing in the video. Other media can provide
additional information. However, speech recognition, image or face
recognition and in general all of these single media analysis
technologies are far from perfect and often produce errors. The power
of cross-media indexing is in linking the information provided by the
analysis of the different single media so that errors produced by
specific different single media processors can be compensated by the
results of other analysers and a more precise and more comprehensive
indexing of the video segment can be obtained. Indexing features
extracted from the different single media processors can be combined
to boost each other or to compensate each other, so that detection or
recognition errors can be recovered from. This requires mathematical
models to combine multiple uncertain evidence that will have to be
evaluated within a proper evaluation framework.
This project aims at investigating different mathematical models of
cross-media indexing and to evaluate them using a purpose built test
collection of multimedia material (videos) where each single media
material as well as the multimedia material have been indexed and
assessed for relevance separately and independently.
Project name:
Architectural design and exploration of innovative coarse grained reconfigurable arrays
Principal investigators: Laura Pozzi (USI)
Starting date: October 1, 2008
End: August 31, 2011
Abstract:
Reconfigurable Arrays combine the benefit of spatial execution, typical of hardware solutions, with that of programmability, present in microprocessors. As such, they could represent an efficient alternative to hardwired logic for implementing embedded applications, since they can provide hw acceleration without making the engineer commit to a non-modifiable design. Unfortunately, other drawbacks have kept reconfigurable logic from becoming a largely adopted solution in the high performance embedded field; among different factors, the performance and area gap that still exists with hardwired logic is certainly one of the most important. The problem of bridging this gap has been the focus of much research in the last decades, and a number of advancements have been made; in particular, Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) have been proposed in order to overcome the shortcomings of fine grain solutions such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). CGRAs exhibit a larger cell granularity, therefore proving less flexible, but more efficient for arithmetic computations. This proposal aims at developing an innovative CGRA architecture that has the potential of providing an additional step in the direction of decreasing the above-mentioned gap further. There are two main reasons indicating that the proposed research has the potential of advancing the state of the art in CGRAs. The first point is that an innovative cell structure is envisioned, that is composed of a multiplicity of ALUs, flexibly connected, as opposed to a single ALU as is the case of most previous work. This feature enables the mapping of entire arithmetic/logic expressions, as opposed to single operations, onto one cell, and has the potential of providing enhanced area and delay results to the state of the art. The second important point is the presence of an exploration level in the proposed methodology. Having noticed that past works lack a systematic way of analysing and evaluating architectural choices, here, instead, architectural exploration of various parametric cell granularity and routing topologies is envisioned, enabled by retargetable compilation technology capable of mapping custom instructions onto different architectures. This makes it possible to study the effectiveness of different architectural choices in a systematic way. An initial study has been carried out by the proposer and by her PhD student - for whom this grant is requested - during the last 5 months, and has provided encouraging results.
Project name:
Design principles for cryptographic hash functions: foundations, primitives and transforms
Principal investigators: Arjen Lenstra (EPFL) and Thomas Shrimpton (USI)
Starting date: October 1, 2008
End: September 30, 2011
Abstract:
Cryptographic hash functions are arguably the most commonly used cryptographic object. They appear in nearly every security protocol, typically to prevent against en route manipulation of the data, to provide a measure of randomness, or to reduce a large data string to a short characteristic representation prior to applying another (often computationally expensive) cryptographic operation. Despite our heavy reliance on hash functions for security, we still know surprisingly little about their proper design and behavior under various adversarial situations. This project will examine these fundamental issues by 1) delving into the fundamental definitions of hash function security as well as the theoretical methods used to reason about them; 2) exploring new designs of primitive objects (like compression functions and blockciphers) used to build modern hash functions; and 3) researching methods to transform these primitives into hash functions that are fast and afford a wide range of inputs (from packets to the entire contents of a hard drive, say) and provide security over a range of output sizes.
Project name:
Swift-WAN: System Support for Distributed Dynamic Content Web Services
Principal investigators: Fernando Pedone (USI) and Willy Zwaenepoel (EPFL)
Starting date: February 1, 2009
End: January 31, 2011
Abstract:
Many current web services are based on dynamic content. Users connect to a web site and receive customized information, for example, depending on the request parameters as well as the users’ preferences and access patterns. Typically, a dynamic content web site is located at a single geographic site and the information is stored in a database. There is a need to scale these systems and increase their availability using replication across a geographically-distributed wide-area network. In such a replicated system, requests execute on “nearby” replicas, thereby avoiding long roundtrip delays, and distributing the load over the replicas. Moreover, if the nearby site becomes inaccessible, clients are transparently switched to other replicas. The goal of Swift is to design and implement a scalable and highly-available database replication middleware to be used as the underlying infrastructure of modern dynamic content web services. The project is a joint research effort between the University of Lugano (USI) and the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).
Co-funded by Hasler Foundation.