Ingolf H. Krueger - US grants

This workshop in real-time networked embedded systems focuses on future automotive systems. The workshop will explore embedded system architectures, automotive software services, platforms, on- and off-board ad-hoc networking, networked automotive services, mobile sensor services, security and privacy issues for automotive applications, and enabling technology for automotive applications. The workshop brings together experts from industry and academia, who work on highly complex, distributed, reactive software systems related to the automotive domain. The expected outcome is deeper insight into the research challenges and proposed solutions for future automotive embedded software. This will help develop understanding by industry, academia, and Federal agencies of the research needed to advance progress in this embedded systems domain.

The broader impact of this workshop is the opportunity to stimulate communications between academia and industry, fuel international collaboration, and enhance communication between diverse research communities. Because of the pervasive demand for highly complex, dependable software systems, the workshop results are also relevant in many application domains beyond automotive, such as avionics, medical and telecommunications systems.

Advances in enabling technologies, such as wireless networking and communication, have brought computer systems into almost every aspect of daily life. Many areas of individual and mass transportation have become almost completely dependent on the correct functioning of software services. Cars, for instance, rely heavily on the complex interplay of hundreds to thousands of software functions that are distributed over dozens of networked computer systems. Some of these functions manage highly safety-relevant aspects of the vehicle. Service-oriented software and systems engineering has emerged as a promising approach to managing the integration complexity of high-quality, feature-rich systems-of-systems. This research focuses on a novel methodology for service-oriented development of highly interactive software systems. At the core of the methodology is the understanding that services, and their composition, emerge from the interplay of interacting components. This gives rise to a fresh look at the composition and refinement of services and components as composition and refinement, respectively, of corresponding interaction aspects. Besides theoretical foundations for interaction-based software-services and their composition, intuitive description techniques, an architectural definition language, component synthesis algorithms, and practical development guidelines for service-oriented software development are investigated. The research is validated using case studies from the automotive domain.

This planning grant serves to establish the basis for a new Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Software-Intensive Ultra-Large-Scale Systems. This proposed center will initially comprise of five research sites, at the University of Virginia, Michigan State University, the University of California San Diego, Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington. The research focus of this proposed center is on software for complex systems. The Center will conduct basic and applied research in traditional and emerging areas of software theory and practice, including research at the intersection of computer science and other disciplines, to include economics, cognition and anthropology. The research will address important problems and opportunities in six key areas: software language, software analysis and synthesis, software design, trustworthy software, software infrastructure and sentient software.

Proposal #: CNS 08-21155
PI(s): DeFanti, Thomas A.
Krueger, Ingolf H.; Papadopoulos, Philip M.; Smarr, Larry L.; Vahdat, Amin M.
Institution: University of California ? San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0934
Title: MRI/Dev.: Development of Instrumentation for Project Green Light
Project Proposed:
This project, developing an instrument called GreenLight, measures, monitors, and optimizes the energy consumption of large-scale scientific applications from many different areas. The work enables inter-disciplinary researchers to understand how to make ?green? (i.e., energy efficient) decision for IT computation and storage. Consequently, an experienced team might be able to make deep and quantitative explorations in advanced architecture, including alternative circuit fabrics such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), direct-graph execution machines, graphics processors, solid-state disks, and photonic networking. The enabled computing and systems research will yield new quantitative data to support engineering judgments on comparative ?computational work per watt? across full-scale applications running at-scale computing platforms, thus helping to re-define fundamentals of systems engineering for a transformative concept, that of green CyberInfrastructure (CI). Keeping in mind that the IT industry consumes as much energy (same carbon footprint) as the airline industry, this project enables five communities of application scientists, drawn from metagenomics, ocean observing, microscopy, bioinformatics, and the digital media, to understand how to measure and then minimize energy consumption, to make use of novel energy/cooling sources, and employ middleware that automates optimal choice of compute/power strategies. The research issues addressed include studying the dynamic migration of applications to virtual machines for power consumption reduction, studying the migrations of virtual machines to physical machines to achieve network locality, developing new power/thermal management policies (closed loop, using feedback from sensors), classifying scientific algorithms in the context of co-processing hardware such as GPUs and FPGAs, and developing algorithms for resource sharing/scheduling in heterogeneous platforms. The full-scale virtualized device, the GreenLight Instrument, will be developed to measure, monitor, and make publicly available (via service oriented architecture methodology), real-time sensor outputs, empowering researchers anywhere to study the energy cost of at-scale scientific computing. Hence, this work empowers domain application researchers to continue to exploit exponential improvements in silicon technology, and to compete globally. Although the IT industry has begun to develop strategies for ?greening? traditional data centers, the physical reality of modern campus CI currently involves a complex network of ad hoc and suboptimal energy environments in departmental facilities. The number of these facilities increases extremely fast creating campus-wide crisis of space, power, and cooling due to the value of computational and data intensive approaches to research. This project addresses these important issues offering the possibility to improve.

Broader Impacts: The project enables researchers to carry-out quantitative explorations into energy efficient CyberInfrastructure (CI) and to train the next generation of energy-aware scientists. It enlists graduate students from five disciplinary projects, involves minority serving institutions, and is likely to have direct impact on commercial components of the nation?s CI.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

The objective of this research project is to achieve fundamental advances in software technology that will enable building cyber-physical systems to allow citizens to see the environmental and health impacts of their daily activities through a citizen-driven body-worn mobile-phone-based commodity sensing platform. The approach is to create aspect-oriented extensions to a publish-subscribe architecture, called Open Rich Services (ORS), to provide a highly extensible and adaptive infrastructure. As one example, ORS will enable highly adaptive power management that not only adapts to current device conditions, but also the nature of the data, the data?s application, and the presence and status of other sensors in the area. In this way, ORS will enable additional research advances in power management, algorithms, security and privacy during the project. A test-bed called CitiSense will be built, enabling in-the-world user and system studies for evaluating the approach and providing a glimpse of a future enhanced by cyber-physical systems.

The research in this proposal will lead to fundamental advances in modularity techniques for composable adaptive systems, adaptive power management, cryptographic methods for open systems, interaction design for the mobile context, and statistical inference under multiple sources of noise.

The scientific and engineering advances achieved through this proposal will advance our national capability to develop cyber-physical systems operating under decentralized control and severe resource constraints. The students trained under this project will become part of a new generation of researchers and practitioners prepared to advance the state of cyber-physical systems for the coming decades.

Modern automobiles are no longer mere mechanical devices; they are pervasively monitored and controlled by dozens of digital computers coordinated via internal vehicular networks and bridged to external networks as well. While this transformation has driven major advancements in efficiency, safety and convenience, it has also introduced a broad range of new potential risks. In this effort, we are evaluating these risks by experimentally mapping the attack surface of the modern automobile, identifying architectural security and privacy vulnerabilities, and developing new defense methodologies that can provide safety within the rubric of the existing automotive design ecosystem.