Exploiting two-case delivery for fast protected messaging
We propose and evaluate two complementary techniques to protect and virtualize a tightly-coupled network interface in a multicomputer. The techniques allow efficient, direct application access to network hardware in a multiprogrammed environment while gaining most of the benefits of a memory-based network interface. First, two-case delivery allows an application to receive a message directly from the network hardware in ordinary circumstances, but provides buffering transparently when required for protection. Second, virtual buffering stores messages in virtual memory on demand, providing the convenience of effectively unlimited buffer capacity while keeping actual physical memory consumption low. The evaluation is based on workloads of real and synthetic applications running on a simulator and partly on emulated hardware. The results show that the direct path is also the common path, justifying the use of software buffering. Further results show that physical buffering requirements remain low in our applications despite the use of unacknowledged messages and despite adverse scheduling conditions.

title: Space-time scheduling of instruction-level parallelism on a raw machine
abstract: Increasing demand for both greater parallelism and faster clocks dictate that future generation architectures will need to decentralize their resources and eliminate primitives that require single cycle global communication. A Raw microprocessor distributes all of its resources, including instruction streams, register files, memory ports, and ALUs, over a pipelined two-dimensional mesh interconnect, and exposes them fully to the compiler. Because communication in Raw machines is distributed, compiling for instruction-level parallelism (ILP) requires both spatial instruction partitioning as well as traditional temporal instruction scheduling. In addition, the compiler must explicitly manage all communication through the interconnect, including the global synchronization required at branch points. This paper describes RAWCC, the compiler we have developed for compiling general-purpose sequential programs to the distributed Raw architecture. We present performance results that demonstrate that although Raw machines provide no mechanisms for global communication the Raw compiler can schedule to achieve speedups that scale with the number of available functional units.

title: Strength Reduction of Integer Division and Modulo Operations
abstract: Integer division, modulo, and remainder operations are expressive and useful operations. They are logical candidates to express complex data accesses such as the wrap-around behavior in queues using ring buffers. In addition, they appear frequently in address computations as a result of compiler optimizations that improve data locality, perform data distribution, or enable parallelization. Experienced application programmers, however, avoid them because they are slow. Furthermore, while advances in both hardware and software have improved the performance of many parts of a program, few are applicable to division and modulo operations. This trend makes these operations increasingly detrimental to program performance. 
 
This paper describes a suite of optimizations for eliminating division, modulo, and remainder operations from programs. These techniques are analogous to strength reduction techniques used for multiplications. In addition to some algebraic simplifications, we present a set of optimization techniques that eliminates division and modulo operations that are functions of loop induction variables and loop constants. The optimizations rely on algebra, integer programming, and loop transformations.

title: Baring It All to Software: Raw Machines
abstract: The most radical of the architectures that appear in this issue are Raw processors-highly parallel architectures with hundreds of very simple processors coupled to a small portion of the on-chip memory. Each processor, or tile, also contains a small bank of configurable logic, allowing synthesis of complex operations directly in configurable hardware. Unlike the others, this architecture does not use a traditional instruction set architecture. Instead, programs are compiled directly onto the Raw hardware, with all units told explicitly what to do by the compiler. The compiler even schedules most of the intertile communication. The real limitation to this architecture is the efficacy of the compiler. The authors demonstrate impressive speedups for simple algorithms that lend themselves well to this architectural model, but whether this architecture will be effective for future workloads is an open question.

title: Implications of I/O for Gang Scheduled Workloads
abstract: The job workloads of general-purpose multiprocessors usually include both compute-bound parallel jobs, which often require gang scheduling, as well as I/O-bound jobs, which require high CPU priority for the individual gang members of the job in order to achieve interactive response times. Our results indicate that an effective interactive multiprocessor scheduler must be flexible and tailor the priority, time quantum, and extent of gang scheduling to the individual needs of each job.

title: Using path information for query processing in object-oriented database systems
abstract: This paper argues that most queries in object-oriented databases require traversing from one object to another in the aggregation hierarchy. Thus, the connections between objects through object identifiers are essential to the efficiency of query processing and should be represented separately from the database. We introduce the concept of path dictionary and describe how it supports queries of different types. We evaluate the storage overhead, query and update costs of the path dictionary. Compared to the path index, the path dictionary has better overall query and update performance and lower storage overhead.

title: Personalized face and speech communication over the Internet
abstract: We present our system for personalized face and speech communication over the Internet. The overall system consists of three parts: the cloning of real human faces to use as the representative avatars; the Networked Virtual Environment System performing the basic task of network and device management; and the speech system which includes a text-to-speech engine and a real time phoneme extraction engine from natural speech. The combination of these three elements provides a system to allow real humans, represented by their virtual counterparts, to communicate with each other even when they are geographically remote. In addition to this, all elements present use MPEG-4 as a common communication and animation standard and were designed and tested on the Windows operating system (OS). The paper presents the main aim of the work, the methodology and the resulting communication system.

title: Mining Audit Data to Build Intrusion Detection Models
abstract: In this paper we discuss a data mining framework for constructing intrusion detection models. The key ideas are to mine system audit data for consistent and useful patterns of program and user behavior, and use the set of relevant system features presented in the patterns to compute (inductively learned) classifiers that can recognize anomalies and known intrusions. Our past experiments showed that classifiers can be used to detect intrusions, provided that sufficient audit data is available for training and the right set of system features are selected. We propose to use the association rules and frequent episodes computed from audit data as the basis for guiding the audit data gathering and feature selection processes. We modify these two basic algorithms to use axis attribute(s) as a form of item constraints to compute only the relevant ("useful") patterns, and an iterative level-wise approximate mining procedure to uncover the low frequency (but important) patterns. We report our experiments in using these algorithms on real-world audit data.

title: Building text classifiers using positive and unlabeled examples
abstract: We study the problem of building text classifiers using positive and unlabeled examples. The key feature of this problem is that there is no negative example for learning. Recently, a few techniques for solving this problem were proposed in the literature. These techniques are based on the same idea, which builds a classifier in two steps. Each existing technique uses a different method for each step. We first introduce some new methods for the two steps, and perform a comprehensive evaluation of all possible combinations of methods of the two steps. We then propose a more principled approach to solving the problem based on a biased formulation of SVM, and show experimentally that it is more accurate than the existing techniques.

title: Real Face Communication in a Virtual World
abstract: This paper describes an efficient method to make an individual face for animation from several possible inputs and how to use this result for a realistic talking head communication in a virtual world. We present a method to reconstruct 3D facial model from two orthogonal pictures taken from front and side views. The method is based on extracting features from a face in a semiautomatic way and deforming a generic model. Texture mapping based on cylindrical projection is employed using a composed image from the two images. A reconstructed head is animated immediately and is able to talk with given text, which is transformed to corresponding phonemes and visemes. We also propose a system for individualized face-to-face communication through network using MPEG4.