Showing papers by "Hewlett-Packard published in 2015"

Quality Engineering Using Robust Design

Abstract: From the Publisher: Phadke was trained in robust design techniques by Genichi Taguchi, the mastermind behind Japanese quality manufacturing technologies and the father of Japanese quality control. Taguchi's approach is currently under consideration to be adopted as a student protocol with the US govrnment. The foreword is written by Taguchi. This book offers a complete blueprint for structuring projects to achieve rapid completion with high engineering productivity during the research and development phase to ensure that high quality products can be made quickly and at the lowest possible cost. Some topics covered are: orthogonol arrays, how to construct orthogonal arrays, computer-aided robutst design techniques, dynamic systems design methods, and more.

Achromatic Metasurface Lens at Telecommunication Wavelengths

Abstract: Nanoscale optical resonators enable a new class of flat optical components called metasurfaces. This approach has been used to demonstrate functionalities such as focusing free of monochromatic aberrations (i.e., spherical and coma), anomalous reflection, and large circular dichroism. Recently, dielectric metasurfaces that compensate the phase dispersion responsible for chromatic aberrations have been demonstrated. Here, we utilize an aperiodic array of coupled dielectric nanoresonators to demonstrate a multiwavelength achromatic lens. The focal length remains unchanged for three wavelengths in the near-infrared region (1300, 1550, and 1800 nm). Experimental results are in agreement with full-wave simulations. Our findings are an essential step toward a realization of broadband flat optical elements.

A realistic evaluation and comparison of indoor location technologies: experiences and lessons learned

Abstract: We present the results, experiences and lessons learned from comparing a diverse set of technical approaches to indoor localization during the 2014 Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition. 22 different solutions to indoor localization from different teams around the world were put to test in the same unfamiliar space over the course of 2 days, allowing us to directly compare the accuracy and overhead of various technologies. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of the evaluation study's results, discuss the current state-of-the-art in indoor localization, and highlight the areas that, based on our experience from organizing this event, need to be improved to enable the adoption of indoor location services.

Overcoming the challenges of crossbar resistive memory architectures

Abstract: The scalability of DRAM faces challenges from increasing power consumption and the difficulty of building high aspect ratio capacitors. Consequently, emerging memory technologies including Phase Change Memory (PCM), Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STT-RAM), and Resistive RAM (ReRAM) are being actively pursued as replacements for DRAM memory. Among these candidates, ReRAM has superior characteristics such as high density, low write energy, and high endurance, making it a very attractive cost-efficient alternative to DRAM. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of ReRAM-based memory systems. ReRAM's high density comes from its unique crossbar architecture where some peripheral circuits are laid below multiple layers of ReRAM cells. A crossbar architecture introduces special constraints on operating voltages, write latency, and array size. The access latency of a crossbar is a function of the data patterns involved in a write operation. These combined with ReRAM's exponential relationship between its write voltage and switching latency provide opportunities for architectural optimizations. This paper makes several key contributions. First, we study the crossbar architecture and describe trade-offs involving voltage drop, write latency, and data pattern. We then analyze microarchitectural enhancements such as double-sided ground biasing and multiphase reset operations to improve write performance. At the architecture level, a simple compression based data encoding scheme is proposed to further bring down the latency. As the compressibility of a block varies based on its content, write latency is not uniform across blocks. To mitigate the impact of slow writes on performance, we propose and evaluate a novel scheduling policy that makes writing decisions based on latency and activity of a bank. The experimental results show that our architecture improves the performance of a system using ReRAM-based main memory by about 44% over a conservative baseline and 14% over an aggressive baseline on average, and has less than 10% performance degradation compared to an ideal DRAM-only system.

WiDraw: Enabling Hands-free Drawing in the Air on Commodity WiFi Devices

Abstract: This paper demonstrates that it is possible to leverage WiFi signals from commodity mobile devices to enable hands-free drawing in the air. While prior solutions require the user to hold a wireless transmitter, or require custom wireless hardware, or can only determine a pre-defined set of hand gestures, this paper introduces WiDraw, the first hand motion tracking system using commodity WiFi cards, and without any user wearables. WiDraw harnesses the Angle-of-Arrival values of incoming wireless signals at the mobile device to track the user's hand trajectory. We utilize the intuition that whenever the user's hand occludes a signal coming from a certain direction, the signal strength of the angle representing the same direction will experience a drop. Our software prototype using commodity wireless cards can track the user's hand with a median error lower than 5 cm. We use WiDraw to implement an in-air handwriting application that allows the user to draw letters, words, and sentences, and achieves a mean word recognition accuracy of 91%.

Network Function Placement for NFV Chaining in Packet/Optical Datacenters

Abstract: In an operator's datacenter, optical technologies can be employed to perform network function (NF) chaining for larger aggregated flows in parallel with the conventional packet-based fine-grained traffic steering schemes. When network function virtualization (NFV) is enabled, virtualized NFs (vNF) can be placed when and where needed. In this study, we identify the possibility of minimizing the expensive optical/electronic/optical (O/E/O) conversions for NFV chaining in packet/optical datacenters, which is introduced by the on-demand placement of vNFs. When the vNFs of the same NF chain are properly grouped into fewer pods, traffic flows can avoid unnecessary traversals in the optical domain. We formulate the problem of optimal vNF placement in binary integer programming (BIP), and propose an alternative efficient heuristic algorithm to solve this problem. Evaluation results show that our algorithm can achieve near-optimal O/E/O conversions comparable to BIP. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm under various scenarios, with comparison to a simple first-fit algorithm.

PGA: Using Graphs to Express and Automatically Reconcile Network Policies

Abstract: Software Defined Networking (SDN) and cloud automation enable a large number of diverse parties (network operators, application admins, tenants/end-users) and control programs (SDN Apps, network services) to generate network policies independently and dynamically. Yet existing policy abstractions and frameworks do not support natural expression and automatic composition of high-level policies from diverse sources. We tackle the open problem of automatic, correct and fast composition of multiple independently specified network policies. We first develop a high-level Policy Graph Abstraction (PGA) that allows network policies to be expressed simply and independently, and leverage the graph structure to detect and resolve policy conflicts efficiently. Besides supporting ACL policies, PGA also models and composes service chaining policies, i.e., the sequence of middleboxes to be traversed, by merging multiple service chain requirements into conflict-free composed chains. Our system validation using a large enterprise network policy dataset demonstrates practical composition times even for very large inputs, with only sub-millisecond runtime latencies.

FOEDUS: OLTP Engine for a Thousand Cores and NVRAM

Abstract: Server hardware is about to drastically change. As typified by emerging hardware such as UC Berkeley's Firebox project and by Intel's Rack-Scale Architecture (RSA), next generation servers will have thousands of cores, large DRAM, and huge NVRAM. We analyze the characteristics of these machines and find that no existing database is appropriate. Hence, we are developing FOEDUS, an open-source, from-scratch database engine whose architecture is drastically different from traditional databases. It extends in-memory database technologies to further scale up and also allows transactions to efficiently manipulate data pages in both DRAM and NVRAM. We evaluate the performance of FOEDUS in a large NUMA machine (16 sockets and 240 physical cores) and find that FOEDUS achieves multiple orders of magnitude higher TPC-C throughput compared to H-Store with anti-caching.

Storage device interface and methods for using same

Abstract: A memory system controller includes one or more sockets for accommodating NVDIMM cards produced by different NVDIMM providers; a PCIe interface for coupling the memory system controller to a host; and a controller coupled to the PCIe interface over a PCIe-compliant connection and to the one or more sockets over respective DDR2 connections. The controller is configured to manage data transfers between the host and a specified one of the NVDIMM sockets in which an NVDIMM card is accommodated as DMA reads and writes, format data received from the PCIe interface for transmission to the specified NVDIMM socket over the corresponding one or more DDR2 interfaces, and initiate save and restore operations on the NVDIMM card accommodated within the specified NVDIMM socket in response to power failure and power restoration indications.

Using Semantic Web Technologies for Exploratory OLAP: A Survey

Abstract: This paper describes the convergence of some of the most influential technologies in the last few years, namely data warehousing (DW), on-line analytical processing (OLAP), and the Semantic Web (SW). OLAP is used by enterprises to derive important business-critical knowledge from data inside the company. However, the most interesting OLAP queries can no longer be answered on internal data alone, external data must also be discovered (most often on the web), acquired, integrated, and (analytically) queried, resulting in a new type of OLAP, exploratory OLAP . When using external data, an important issue is knowing the precise semantics of the data. Here, SW technologies come to the rescue, as they allow semantics (ranging from very simple to very complex) to be specified for web-available resources. SW technologies do not only support capturing the “passive” semantics, but also support active inference and reasoning on the data. The paper first presents a characterization of DW/OLAP environments, followed by an introduction to the relevant SW foundation concepts. Then, it describes the relationship of multidimensional (MD) models and SW technologies, including the relationship between MD models and SW formalisms. Next, the paper goes on to survey the use of SW technologies for data modeling and data provisioning, including semantic data annotation and semantic-aware extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. Finally, all the findings are discussed and a number of directions for future research are outlined, including SW support for intelligent MD querying, using SW technologies for providing context to data warehouses, and scalability issues.

Pt/Ta2O5/HfO2−x/Ti Resistive Switching Memory Competing with Multilevel NAND Flash

Abstract: Pt/Ta2 O5 /HfO2- x /Ti resistive switching memory with a new circuit design is presented as a feasible candidate to succeed multilevel-cell (MLC) NAND flash memory. This device has the following characteristics: 3 bit MLC, electroforming-free, self-rectifying, much higher cell resistance than interconnection wire resistance, low voltage operation, low power consumption, long-term reliability, and only an electronic switching mechanism, without an ionic-motion-related mechanism.

Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition: Experiences and Lessons Learned

Abstract: We present the results, experiences and lessons learned from the 2014 Microsoft Indoor Localization Competition. 22 different technical approaches to indoor location competed in the same unfamiliar space over the course of 2 days, allowing us to directly compare the accuracy and overhead of different technologies. In this article, we provide a high-level analysis of the competition’s results, discuss the current state-of-the-art in indoor localization, and highlight the areas that, based on our experience from organizing this event, need to be improved to enable the adoption of indoor location services.

Three-dimensional (3d) printing

Abstract: In at least some examples, a three-dimensional (3D) printing system comprises a coarse 3D printing interface to form a 3D object core. The 3D printing system also comprises a fine 3D printing interface to form a 3D object shell around at least some of the 3D object core. The 3D printing system also comprises a controller to receive a dataset corresponding to a 3D object model and to direct the coarse 3D printing interface to form the 3D object core based on the dataset.

TypingRing: A Wearable Ring Platform for Text Input

Abstract: This paper presents TypingRing, a wearable ring platform that enables text input into computers of different forms, such as PCs, smartphones, tablets, or even wearables with tiny screens. The basic idea of TypingRing is to have a user wear a ring on his middle finger and let him type on a surface - such as a table, a wall, or his lap. The user types as if a standard QWERTY keyboard is lying underneath his hand but is invisible to him. By using the embedded sensors TypingRing determines what key is pressed by the user. Further, the platform provides visual feedback to the user and communicates with the computing device wirelessly. This paper describes the hardware and software prototype of TypingRing and provides an in-depth evaluation of the platform. Our evaluation shows that TypingRing is capable of detecting and sending key events in real-time with an average accuracy of 98.67%. In a field study, we let seven users type a paragraph with the ring, and we find that TypingRing yields a reasonable typing speed (e.g., 33-50 keys per minute) and their typing speed improves over time.

Collaborative and adaptive threat intelligence for computer security

Abstract: Collaborative and adaptive threat intelligence. Data collected on a first customer network is received. One or more local models are trained with at least the received data, where the one or more local models are related to security. An amount of data to transmit to a centralized controller is determined based at least on a result of the training one or more local models and the determined amount of data is transmitted to the centralized controller. Result data is received from the centralized controller that is a result of one or more global models trained on the centralized controller using data collected on multiple customer networks including the first customer network. The one or more local models are adjusted using the received result data and the one or more adjusted local models are trained.

NFV-VITAL: A framework for characterizing the performance of virtual network functions

Abstract: Network Function Virtualization (NFV) brings a cloud service automation paradigm to demand-driven elastic flexing of infrastructure resources. Thus, it is essential to characterize the impact of hardware and virtualization options on the virtual network function (VNF) performance, and on the load on underlying infrastructure. In this paper, we present VNF characterization case studies with three sample open-source VNF platforms, the Clearwater IMS VNF and two intrusion detection system VNFs (Snort and Suricata). We demonstrate that VNF characterization is vital for optimizing VNF performance, as well as efficient utilization of infrastructure resources. We use the lessons learned from our case studies to design and implement a VNF characterization framework, NFV-VITAL, to characterize VNFs based on user preferences and available resources. We demonstrate how NFV-VITAL can automatically determine optimal configurations under different workloads with the three sample VNFs.

Quartz: A Lightweight Performance Emulator for Persistent Memory Software

Abstract: Next-generation non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, such as phase-change memory and memristors, can enable computer systems infrastructure to continue keeping up with the voracious appetite of data-centric applications for large, cheap, and fast storage. Persistent memory has emerged as a promising approach to accessing emerging byte-addressable non-volatile memory through processor load/store instructions. Due to lack of commercially available NVM, system software researchers have mainly relied on emulation to model persistent memory performance. However, existing emulation approaches are either too simplistic, or too slow to emulate large-scale workloads, or require special hardware. To fill this gap and encourage wider adoption of persistent memory, we developed a performance emulator for persistent memory, called Quartz. Quartz enables an efficient emulation of a wide range of NVM latencies and bandwidth characteristics for performance evaluation of emerging byte-addressable NVMs and their impact on applications performance (without modifying or instrumenting their source code) by leveraging features available in commodity hardware. Our emulator is implemented on three latest Intel Xeon-based processor architectures: Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell. To assist researchers and engineers in evaluating design decisions with emerging NVMs, we extend Quartz for emulating the application execution on future systems with two types of memory: fast, regular volatile DRAM and slower persistent memory. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by using a set of specially designed memory-intensive benchmarks and real applications. The accuracy of the proposed approach is validated by running these programs both on our emulation platform and a multisocket (NUMA) machine that can support a range of memory latencies. We show that Quartz can emulate a range of performance characteristics with low overhead and good accuracy (with emulation errors 0.2% - 9%).

Microservice with decoupled user interface

Abstract: A microservice may be developed comprising application programming interfaces (APIs), a user interface, logic, and data received from at least one backend system, wherein the APIs and the user interface are decoupled from the logic and the at least one backend system, and the user interface, the logic and the data are decomposable into modules that may be shared with a different microservice. The microservice may expose a set of functions sufficient to support a target use case and Recycle management of the microservice, comprising at least one of exposing lifecycle management APIs and providing lifecycle self-management functionality.

A 25 Gb/s, 4.4 V-Swing, AC-Coupled Ring Modulator-Based WDM Transmitter with Wavelength Stabilization in 65 nm CMOS

Abstract: Silicon photonics devices offer promising solution to meet the growing bandwidth demands of next-generation interconnects. This paper presents a 5 × 25 Gb/s carrier-depletion microring-based wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmitter in 65 nm CMOS. An AC-coupled differential driver is proposed to realize 4 × VDD output swing as well as tunable DC-biasing. The proposed transmitter incorporates 2-tap asymmetric pre-emphasis to effectively cancel the optical nonlinearity of the ring modulator. An average-power-based dynamic wavelength stabilization loop is also demonstrated to compensate for thermal induced resonant wavelength drift. At 25 Gb/s operation, each transmitter channel consumes 113.5 mW and maintains 7 dB extinction ratio with a 4.4 V $_{\rm pp-diff}$ output swing in the presence of thermal fluctuations.

SERS-based pesticide detection by using nanofinger sensors.

Abstract: Simple, sensitive, and rapid detection of trace levels of extensively used and highly toxic pesticides are in urgent demand for public health. Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)-based sensor was designed to achieve ultrasensitive and simple pesticide sensing. We developed a portable sensor system composed of high performance and reliable gold nanofinger sensor strips and a custom-built portable Raman spectrometer. Compared to the general procedure and previously reported studies that are limited to laboratory settings, our analytical method is simple, sensitive, rapid, and cost-effective. Based on the SERS results, the chemical interaction of two pesticides, chlorpyrifos (CPF) and thiabendazole (TBZ), with gold nanofingers was studied to determine a fingerprint for each pesticide. The portable SERS-sensor system was successfully demonstrated to detect CPF and TBZ pesticides within 15 min with a detection limit of 35 ppt in drinking water and 7 ppb on apple skin, respectively.

Beyond processor-centric operating systems

Abstract: By the end of the decade, computing designs will shift from a processor-centric architecture to a memory-centric architecture. At rack scale, we can expect a large pool of non-volatile memory (NVM) that will be accessed by heterogeneous and decentralized compute resources [3, 17]. Such memory-centric architectures will present challenges that today's processor-centric OSes may not be able to address. In this paper, we describe the characteristics and consequences of memory-centric architectures and propose a memory-centric OS design that moves traditional OS functionality outside of the compute node and closer to memory.

How to Build a Benchmark

Abstract: Standardized benchmarks have become widely accepted tools for the comparison of products and evaluation of methodologies. These benchmarks are created by consortia like SPEC and TPC under confidentiality agreements which provide little opportunity for outside observers to get a look at the processes and concerns that are prevalent in benchmark development. This paper introduces the primary concerns of benchmark development from the perspectives of SPEC and TPC committees. We provide a benchmark definition, outline the types of benchmarks, and explain the characteristics of a good benchmark. We focus on the characteristics important for a standardized benchmark, as created by the SPEC and TPC consortia. To this end, we specify the primary criteria to be employed for benchmark design and workload selection. We use multiple standardized benchmarks as examples to demonstrate how these criteria are ensured.

IoTAbench: an Internet of Things Analytics Benchmark

Abstract: The commoditization of sensors and communication networks is enabling vast quantities of data to be generated by and collected from cyber-physical systems. This ``Internet-of-Things" (IoT) makes possible new business opportunities, from usage-based insurance to proactive equipment maintenance. While many technology vendors now offer ``Big Data" solutions, a challenge for potential customers is understanding quantitatively how these solutions will work for IoT use cases. This paper describes a benchmark toolkit called IoTAbench for IoT Big Data scenarios. This toolset facilitates repeatable testing that can be easily extended to multiple IoT use cases, including a user's specific needs, interests or dataset. We demonstrate the benchmark via a smart metering use case involving an eight-node cluster running the HP Vertica analytics platform. The use case involves generating, loading, repairing and analyzing synthetic meter readings. The intent of IoTAbench is to provide the means to perform ``apples-to-apples" comparisons between different sensor data and analytics platforms. We illustrate the capabilities of IoTAbench via a large experimental study, where we store 22.8 trillion smart meter readings totaling 727 TB of data in our eight-node cluster.

A comb laser-driven DWDM silicon photonic transmitter based on microring modulators.

Abstract: We demonstrate concurrent multi-channel transmission at 10 Gbps per channel of a DWDM silicon photonic transmitter. The DWDM transmitter is based on a single quantum dot comb laser and an array of microring resonator-based modulators. The resonant wavelengths of microrings are thermally tuned to align with the wavelengths provided by the comb laser. No obvious crosstalk is observed at 240 GHz channel spacing.

Schema-agnostic vs schema-based configurations for blocking methods on homogeneous data

Abstract: Entity Resolution constitutes a core task for data integration that, due to its quadratic complexity, typically scales to large datasets through blocking methods. These can be configured in two ways. The schema-based configuration relies on schema information in order to select signatures of high distinctiveness and low noise, while the schema-agnostic one treats every token from all attribute values as a signature. The latter approach has significant potential, as it requires no fine-tuning by human experts and it applies to heterogeneous data. Yet, there is no systematic study on its relative performance with respect to the schema-based configuration. This work covers this gap by comparing analytically the two configurations in terms of effectiveness, time efficiency and scalability. We apply them to 9 established blocking methods and to 11 benchmarks of structured data. We provide valuable insights into the internal functionality of the blocking methods with the help of a novel taxonomy. Our studies reveal that the schema-agnostic configuration offers unsupervised and robust definition of blocking keys under versatile settings, trading a higher computational cost for a consistently higher recall than the schema-based one. It also enables the use of state-of-the-art blocking methods without schema knowledge.

Ranking and Selection: Efficient Simulation Budget Allocation

Abstract: This chapter reviews the problem of selecting the best of a finite set of alternatives, where best is defined with respect to the highest mean performance, and where the performance is uncertain but may be estimated with simulation. This problem has been explored from several perspectives, including statistical ranking and selection, multiple comparisons, and stochastic optimization. Approaches taken in the literature include frequentist statistics, Bayesian statistics, related heuristics, and asymptotic convergence in probability. This chapter presents algorithms that are derived from Bayesian and related conceptual frameworks to provide empirically effective performance for the ranking and selection problem. In particular, we motivate the optimal computing budget allocation (OCBA) algorithm and expected value of information (EVI) approaches, give example algorithms, and provide pointers to the literature for detailed derivations and extensions of these approaches.

Focused energy field method for the localized synthesis and direct integration of 1D nanomaterials on microelectronic devices.

Abstract: In the focused energy field method, localized heating, and convective mass transfer in a liquid precursor realizes selective synthesis and direct integration of 1D nanomaterials as well as their surface functionalization, all in a low-temperature, liquid environment. This allows facile fabrication of 1D nanomaterial-based nanoelectronic devices.

Constant Time Median and Bilateral Filtering

Abstract: This paper formulates both the median filter and bilateral filter as a cost volume aggregation problem whose computational complexity is independent of the filter kernel size. Unlike most of the previous works, the proposed framework results in a general bilateral filter that can have arbitrary spatial$$^{1}$$1 and arbitrary range filter kernels. This bilateral filter takes about 3.5 s to exactly filter a one megapixel 8-bit grayscale image on a 3.2 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU. In practice, the intensity/range and spatial domain can be downsampled to improve the efficiency. This compression can maintain very high accuracy (e.g., 40 dB) but over $$100\times $$100? faster.

Short Dynamic Group Signature Scheme Supporting Controllable Linkability

Abstract: The controllable linkability of group signatures introduced by Hwang et al. enables an entity who has a linking key to find whether or not two group signatures were generated by the same signer, while preserving the anonymity. This functionality is very useful in many applications that require the linkability but still need the anonymity, such as sybil attack detection in a vehicular ad hoc network and privacy-preserving data mining. In this paper, we present a new group signature scheme supporting the controllable linkability. The major advantage of this scheme is that the signature length is very short, even shorter than this in the best-known group signature scheme without supporting the linkability. We have implemented our scheme in both a Linux machine with an Intel Core2 Quad and an iPhone4. We compare the results with a number of existing group signature schemes. We also prove security features of our scheme, such as anonymity, traceability, nonframeability, and linkability, under a random oracle model.