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Using 3D printing to visualize social media big data

July 23, 2014
  |
Journal Article
Author:
Zachary J. Weber
…
Published in:
HPEC 2014: IEEE Conf. on High Performance Extreme Computing, 9-11 September 2014.
Topic:
3D printing
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Big data volume continues to grow at unprecedented rates. One of the key features that makes big data valuable is the promise to find unknown patterns or correlations that may be able to improve the quality of processes or systems. Unfortunately, with the exponential growth in data, users often have difficulty in visualizing the often-unstructured, non-homogeneous data coming from a variety of sources. The recent growth in popularity of 3D printing has ushered in a revolutionary way to interact with big data. Using a 3D printed mockup up a physical or notional environment, one can display data on the mockup to show real-time data patterns. In this poster and demonstration, we describe the process of 3D printing and demonstrate an application of displaying Twitter data on a 3D mockup of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus, known as LuminoCity.
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Summary

Big data volume continues to grow at unprecedented rates. One of the key features that makes big data valuable is the promise to find unknown patterns or correlations that may be able to improve the quality of processes or systems. Unfortunately, with the exponential growth in data, users often have...

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Using 3D printing to visualize social media big data

Finding focus in the blur of moving-target techniques

April 1, 2014
  |
Journal Article
Author:
Hamed Okhravi
…
Published in:
IEEE Security and Privacy, Vol. 12, No. 2, March/April 2014, pp. 16-26.
Topic:
systems architecture
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Moving-target (MT) techniques seek to randomize system components to reduce the likelihood of a successful attack, add dynamics to a system to reduce the lifetime of an attack, and diversify otherwise homogeneous collections of systems to limit the damage of a large-scale attack. In this article, we review the five dominant domains of MT techniques, consider the advantages and weaknesses of each, and make recommendations for future research.
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Summary

Moving-target (MT) techniques seek to randomize system components to reduce the likelihood of a successful attack, add dynamics to a system to reduce the lifetime of an attack, and diversify otherwise homogeneous collections of systems to limit the damage of a large-scale attack. In this article, we review the five...

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Finding focus in the blur of moving-target techniques

Authenticated broadcast with a partially compromised public-key infrastructure

February 1, 2014
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Journal Article
Author:
S. Dov Gordon
…
Published in:
Info. and Comput., Vol. 234, February 2014, pp. 17-25.
Topic:
cryptography
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Given a public-key infrastructure (PKI) and digital signatures, it is possible to construct broadcast protocols tolerating any number of corrupted parties. Existing protocols, however, do not distinguish between corrupted parties who do not follow the protocol, and honest parties whose secret (signing) keys have been compromised but continue to behave honestly. We explore conditions under which it is possible to construct broadcast protocols that still provide the usual guarantees (i.e., validity/agreement) to the latter. Consider a network of n parties, where an adversary has compromised the secret keys of up to tc honest parties, where an adversary has compromised the secret keys of up to tc honest parties and, in addition, fully controls the behavior of up to ta other parties. We show that for any fixed tc>0 and any fixed ta, there exists an efficient protocol for broadcast if and only if 2 ta + min (ta, tc) < n. (When tc = 0, standard results imply feasibility for all ta < n.) We also show that if tc, ta are not fixed, but are only guaranteed to satisfy the above bound, then broadcast is impossible to achieve except for a few specific values of n; for these "exceptional" values of n, we demonstrate broadcast protocols. Taken together, our results give a complete characterization of this problem.
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Summary

Given a public-key infrastructure (PKI) and digital signatures, it is possible to construct broadcast protocols tolerating any number of corrupted parties. Existing protocols, however, do not distinguish between corrupted parties who do not follow the protocol, and honest parties whose secret (signing) keys have been compromised but continue to behave...

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Authenticated broadcast with a partially compromised public-key infrastructure

Systematic analysis of defenses against return-oriented programming

October 23, 2013
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Richard W. Skowyra
…
Published in:
RAID 2013: 16th Int. Symp. on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses, LNCS 8145, 23-25 October 2013.
Topic:
systems analysis
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Since the introduction of return-oriented programming, increasingly compiles defenses and subtle attacks that bypass them have been proposed. Unfortunately the lack of a unifying threat model among code reuse security papers makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of defenses, and answer critical questions about the interoperability, composability, and efficacy of existing defensive techniques. For example, what combination of defenses protect against every known avenue of code reuse? What is the smallest set of such defenses? In this work, we study the space of code reuse attacks by building a formal model of attacks and their requirements, and defenses and their assumptions. We use a SAT solver to perform scenario analysis on our model in two ways. First, we analyze the defense configurations of a real-world system. Second, we reason about hypothetical defense bypasses. We prove by construction that attack extensions implementing the hypothesized functionality are possible even if a 'perfect' version of the defense is implemented. Our approach can be used to formalize the process of threat model definition, analyze defense configurations, reason about composability and efficacy, and hypothesize about new attacks and defenses.
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Summary

Since the introduction of return-oriented programming, increasingly compiles defenses and subtle attacks that bypass them have been proposed. Unfortunately the lack of a unifying threat model among code reuse security papers makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of defenses, and answer critical questions about the interoperability, composability, and efficacy...

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Systematic analysis of defenses against return-oriented programming

D4M 2.0 Schema: a general purpose high performance schema for the Accumulo database

September 10, 2013
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Jeremy Kepner
…
Published in:
HPEC 2013: IEEE Conf. on High Performance Extreme Computing, 10-12 September 2013.
Topic:
supercomputing
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Non-traditional, relaxed consistency, triple store databases are the backbone of many web companies (e.g., Google Big Table, Amazon Dynamo, and Facebook Cassandra). The Apache Accumulo database is a high performance open source relaxed consistency database that is widely used for government applications. Obtaining the full benefits of Accumulo requires using novel schemas. The Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model (D4M) [http://www.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/~kepner/D4M] provides a uniform mathematical framework based on associative arrays that encompasses both traditional (i.e., SQL) and non-traditional databases. For non-traditional databases D4M naturally leads to a general purpose schema that can be used to fully index and rapidly query every unique string in a dataset. The D4M 2.0 Schema has been applied with little or no customization to cyber, bioinformatics, scientific citation, free text, and social media data. The D4M 2.0 Schema is simple, requires minimal parsing, and achieves the highest published Accumulo ingest rates. The benefits of the D4M 2.0 Schema are independent of the D4M interface. Any interface to Accumulo can achieve these benefits by using the D4M 2.0 Schema.
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Summary

Non-traditional, relaxed consistency, triple store databases are the backbone of many web companies (e.g., Google Big Table, Amazon Dynamo, and Facebook Cassandra). The Apache Accumulo database is a high performance open source relaxed consistency database that is widely used for government applications. Obtaining the full benefits of Accumulo requires using...

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D4M 2.0 Schema: a general purpose high performance schema for the Accumulo database

LLSuperCloud: sharing HPC systems for diverse rapid prototyping

September 10, 2013
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Albert I. Reuther
…
Published in:
HPEC 2013: IEEE Conf. on High Performance Extreme Computing, 10-12 September 2013.
Topic:
supercomputing
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

The supercomputing and enterprise computing arenas come from very different lineages. However, the advent of commodity computing servers has brought the two arenas closer than they have ever been. Within enterprise computing, commodity computing servers have resulted in the development of a wide range of new cloud capabilities: elastic computing, virtualization, and data hosting. Similarly, the supercomputing community has developed new capabilities in heterogeneous, massively parallel hardware and software. Merging the benefits of enterprise clouds and supercomputing has been a challenging goal. Significant effort has been expended in trying to deploy supercomputing capabilities on cloud computing systems. These efforts have resulted in unreliable, low performance solutions, which requires enormous expertise to maintain. LLSuperCloud provides a novel solution to the problem of merging enterprise cloud and supercomputing technology. More specifically LLSuperCloud reverses the traditional paradigm of attempting to deploy supercomputing capabilities on a cloud and instead deploys cloud capabilities on a supercomputer. The result is a system that can handle heterogeneous, massively parallel workloads while also providing high performance elastic computing, virtualization, and databases. The benefits of LLSuperCloud are highlighted using a mixed workload of C MPI, parallel MATLAB, Java, databases, and virtualized web services.
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Summary

The supercomputing and enterprise computing arenas come from very different lineages. However, the advent of commodity computing servers has brought the two arenas closer than they have ever been. Within enterprise computing, commodity computing servers have resulted in the development of a wide range of new cloud capabilities: elastic computing...

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LLSuperCloud: sharing HPC systems for diverse rapid prototyping

D4M 2.0 Schema: a general purpose high performance schema for the Accumulo database

September 10, 2013
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Jeremy Kepner
…
Published in:
HPEC 2013: IEEE Conf. on High Performance Extreme Computing, 10-12 September 2013.
Topic:
big data
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Non-traditional, relaxed consistency, triple store databases are the backbone of many web companies (e.g., Google Big Table, Amazon Dynamo, and Facebook Cassandra). The Apache Accumulo database is a high performance open source relaxed consistency database that is widely used for government applications. Obtaining the full benefits of Accumulo requires using novel schemas. The Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model (D4M) [http://www.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/~kepner/D4M] provides a uniform mathematical framework based on associative arrays that encompasses both traditional (i.e., SQL) and non-traditional databases. For non-traditional databases D4M naturally leads to a general purpose schema that can be used to fully index and rapidly query every unique string in a dataset. The D4M 2.0 Schema has been applied with little or no customization to cyber, bioinformatics, scientific citation, free text, and social media data. The D4M 2.0 Schema is simple, requires minimal parsing, and achieves the highest published Accumulo ingest rates. The benefits of the D4M 2.0 Schema are independent of the D4M interface. Any interface to Accumulo can achieve these benefits by using the D4M 2.0 Schema.
READ LESS

Summary

Non-traditional, relaxed consistency, triple store databases are the backbone of many web companies (e.g., Google Big Table, Amazon Dynamo, and Facebook Cassandra). The Apache Accumulo database is a high performance open source relaxed consistency database that is widely used for government applications. Obtaining the full benefits of Accumulo requires using...

READ MORE
D4M 2.0 Schema: a general purpose high performance schema for the Accumulo database

Very large graphs for information extraction (VLG) - summary of first-year proof-of-concept study

August 20, 2013
  |
Project Report
Author:
Benjamin A. Miller
…
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report VLG-1
Topic:
signal processing
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

In numerous application domains relevant to the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, data of interest take the form of entities and the relationships between them, and these data are commonly represented as graphs. Under the Very Large Graphs for Information Extraction effort--a one-year proof-of-concept study--MIT LL developed novel techniques for anomalous subgraph detection, building on tools in the signal processing research literature. This report documents the technical results of this effort. Two datasets--a snapshot of Thompson Reuters? Web of Science database and a stream of web proxy logs--were parsed, and graphs were constructed from the raw data. From the phenomena in these datasets, several algorithms were developed to model the dynamic graph behavior, including a preferential attachment mechanism with memory, a streaming filter to model a graph as a weighted average of its past connections, and a generalized linear model for graphs where connection probabilities are determined by additional side information or metadata. A set of metrics was also constructed to facilitate comparison of techniques. The study culminated in a demonstration of the algorithms on the datasets of interest, in addition to simulated data. Performance in terms of detection, estimation, and computational burden was measured according to the metrics. Among the highlights of this demonstration were the detection of emerging coauthor clusters in the Web of Science data, detection of botnet activity in the web proxy data after 15 minutes (which took 10 days to detect using state-of-the-practice techniques), and demonstration of the core algorithm on a simulated 1-billion-vertex graph using a commodity computing cluster.
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Summary

In numerous application domains relevant to the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, data of interest take the form of entities and the relationships between them, and these data are commonly represented as graphs. Under the Very Large Graphs for Information Extraction effort--a one-year proof-of-concept study--MIT LL developed novel...

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Very large graphs for information extraction (VLG) - summary of first-year proof-of-concept study

LLGrid: supercomputer for sensor processing

April 15, 2013
  |
Book Chapter
Author:
Jeremy Kepner
…
Published in:
Chapter 24 in Contemporary High Performance Computing, April 2013.
Topic:
supercomputing
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center that applies advanced technology to problems of national interest. Research and development activities focus on long-term technology development as well as rapid system prototyping and demonstration. A key part of this mission is to develop and deploy advanced sensor systems. Developing the algorithms for these systems requires interactive access to large scale computing and data storage. Deploying these systems requires that the computing and storage capabilities are transportable and energy efficient. The LLGrid system of supercomputers allows hundreds of researchers simultaneous interactive access to large amounts of processing and storage for development and testing of their sensor processing algorithms. The requirements of the LLGrid user base are as diverse as the sensors they are developing: sonar, radar, infrared, optical, hyperspectral, video, bio and cyber. However, there are two common elements: delivering large amounts of data interactively to many processors and high level user interfaces that require minimal user training. The LLGrid software stack provides these capabilities on dozens of LLGrid computing clusters across Lincoln Laboratory. LLGrid systems range from very small (a few nodes) to very large (40+ racks).
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Summary

MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center that applies advanced technology to problems of national interest. Research and development activities focus on long-term technology development as well as rapid system prototyping and demonstration. A key part of this mission is to develop and deploy advanced sensor...

READ MORE
LLGrid: supercomputer for sensor processing

Taming biological big data with D4M

January 30, 2013
  |
Journal Article
Author:
Jeremy Kepner
…
Published in:
Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2013, pp. 82-91.
Topic:
supercomputing
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

The supercomputing community has taken up the challenge of "taming the beast" spawned by the massive amount of data available in the bioinformatics domain: How can these data be exploited faster and better? MIT Lincoln Laboratory computer scientists demonstrated how a new Laboratory-developed technology, the Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model (D4M), can be used to accelerate DNA sequence comparison, a core operation in bioinformatics.
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Summary

The supercomputing community has taken up the challenge of "taming the beast" spawned by the massive amount of data available in the bioinformatics domain: How can these data be exploited faster and better? MIT Lincoln Laboratory computer scientists demonstrated how a new Laboratory-developed technology, the Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model...

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Taming biological big data with D4M
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