Kevin P. McAuliffe

An architecture for a scientific visualization system

The architecture of the Data Explorer, a scientific visualization system, is described. Data Explorer supports the visualization of a wide variety of data by means of a flexible set of visualization modules. A single powerful data model common to all modules allows a wide range of data types to be imported and passed between modules. There is integral support for parallelism, affecting the data model and the execution model. The visualization modules are highly interoperable, due in part to the common data model, and exemplified by the renderer. An execution model facilitates parallelization of modules and incorporates optimizations such as caching. The two-process client-server system structure consists of a user interface that communicates with an executive via a dataflow language.<<ETX>>

Initial experiences with RP3 performance monitoring

To understand the system interdependencies of a multiprocessor and the effects of these interdependencies on parallel applications, it is necessary to include a performance monitoring facility in the multiprocessor system. Such a monitoring facility can be either transparent (i.e. requiring no user initiated intervention) or non-transparent. In this paper we describe the performance monitoring facilities that are available to the user of the RP3 system. We will also describe our initial experience using these facilities and demonstrate their functionality.

Managing business health in the presence of malicious attacks

Business metrics play a critical role in determining the best system-level configuration to achieve an organizational business-level goal. We present a framework for reasoning about business-level implications of malicious attacks affecting information technology (IT) systems that underlie various business processes. Through an exemplar web-based retail company scenario, we demonstrate how to quantify both the relative value of the individual business processes, and the relative cost to the business caused by breach of key security properties. The framework allows for mapping business-level metrics to IT system-level metrics, and uses a combination of those metrics to recommend optimal response actions and to guide recovery from security attacks. We validate the framework against three high-impact attack classes common in such web-based retail company situations.

Promoting Integrated Social and Medical Care through Semantic Integration and Context Visualization

With many disparate information systems distributed among social and medical care facilities, achieving an integrated social and medical view of people is a huge challenge. We propose a system based on semantic integration that addresses this challenge. It achieves light-weight data integration and navigation via a three-layer architecture: a virtual RDF view layer, a distributed query processing layer and a unified context view layer. This integrates information from disparate systems without cloning data, and also supports data exploration through a novel visualization.

A Perspective on Shared-memory and Message-memory Architectures

Parallel processing is becoming widely accepted as a key technology in the development of extremely high performance computing systems. Although a wide variety of parallel processor architectures have been proposed over the last five to ten years, to date there is very little quantitative analysis comparing the various alternatives. The proposed architectures essentially fall into two broad categories: message-passing architectures and shared-memory architectures. In this paper we will briefly review the key characteristics of message-passing and shared-memory architectures. We then propose an approach to obtaining a quantitative comparison of these architectures and suggest areas for research.