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Coordinators:
Pere Mato,
CERN |
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This theme presents a selection of advanced underlying computing technologies which are particularly relevant in the context of scientific computing, and serve as a basis to construct higher level services services such as those offered by Grid Technologies. They include software engineering, computer architectures, computing security and networking topics
The first series of lectures presents modern techniques for software design and modern tools and technologies for understanding and improving existing software. The emphasis is placed on the large software projects and large executables that are common in HEP. The series consist of lectures and exercises. These lectures include topics such software engineering, design, methodology and testing.
The second series of lectures describes the evolution and the state of the art of computer architectures, discusses the bottlenecks and the consequences of this evolution on software design and optimization. It presents principles for writing software that scales with the hardware , techniques for hardware and software performance monitoring and issues related to the impact of compilers on performances.
The third topic addresses computer security with a particular focus on two aspects: cryptography, authentication and security infrastructures on the one hand, and the creation of secure software on the other hand. The latter series includes hand-on exercises.
The theme is complemented by a series of lectures on networking, which presents principles, methods and techniques for improving quality of service and network performance.
In addition to pure software design and development issues, the track is complemented by two special yet essential topics:
Glossary of the different acronyms: http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/gas/ |
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Series |
Type |
Lecture |
Description |
Lecturer |
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Tools and Techniques |
Lectures |
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Lecture 1 |
Introduction to the Track To start, we discuss some of the characteristics of software projects for high energy physics, and some of the issues that arise when people want to contribute to them. This forms the framework for the Software Technologies Track. We then continue with a brief introduction to software engineering from the perspective of the individual contributor, both as a formal process and how it actually effects what you do.
Tools You Can Use This lecture discusses several categories of tools & techniques you can use to make yourself more productive and effective. Continuous testing and documentation has proven to be important in producing high quality work, but it's often difficult to do; we discuss some available approaches. Many problems require specific tools and techniques to solve them effectively: We discuss the examples of performance tuning and memory access problems. |
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Lecture 2 |
Tools for Collaboration
HEP software is built by huge teams. How can this be done
effectively, while still giving people satisfying tasks to
perform? |
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Lecture 3 |
Software Engineering Across the Project
Now that we've covered both individual and group work, we go
back to the software engineering topics of the first lecture
to see how these fit together. How does our individual work
effect the ability of the entire project to proceed? What
are tools and techniques that will improve both our
individual work, and out contributions to the whole? |
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Exercises |
Exercise 1
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Exercises 1 and 2 The first two exercises provide some direct experience with the tools and techniques described in Lectures 1 and 2. In particular, pairs of students will work together to update existing applications, working through examples designed to show the strengths and weaknesses of several approaches. |
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Exercise 3
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Exercises 3 and 4 After the two-person teams acquire some experience with the CMT release system, and CVS if needed, we will have groups of 5 teams work together to create a functional release from individual sub-projects at various stages of completion. Although a limited exercise, this is intended to demonstrate some of the real issues discussed in the lecture. |
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Exercise 5 |
Exercises 5 Wrap-up session. |
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Computer Architecture and Performance Tuning |
Lectures |
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Lecture 1 |
Understanding scalable hardware |
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Lecture 2 |
Software
that may scale with the hardware |
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Lecture 3 |
Understanding performance tuning Performance tuning is an important step in application development. Modern processor architectures often give us the benefit of being able to look inside the application at very low levels, however drawing high-level conclusions is not always straightforward. The objective of this lecture is to familiarize the attendees with certain common metrics which can be used to define application performance. In addition, we will demonstrate how to use perfmon2, a language independent Linux performance monitoring system, in order to obtain information about program characteristics and bottlenecks. |
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Exercises |
Exercise 1 Exercise 2 Exercise 3 |
The aim of the exercises in this series is to give the
attendees a pratical introduction to performance monitoring
on Linux. Pfmon will serve as the primary tool used during
the course, enabling the participants to discover how the
structure of the code influences its performance. The
participants will also be given the task of correlating
performance figures with certain programming decisions. In
addition, the participants will understand the limits of
performance tuning and the ways to establish at which point
inside those limits their workload is placed. The exercises
will be supported by demonstrating real world problems in
production environments. |
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Prerequisite Knowledge |
Desirable prerequisite
and references to further information |
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Computer Security |
Lectures |
Lecture 1 |
An Introduction to Cryptography Computer security relies on a number of complementary technologies. Cryptography is one of them. Unlike what is sometimes believed, cryptography's role is not only to ensure the confidentiality of exchanges. It also serves to protect the integrity of transmitted information, and more importantly in Grid environments to authenticate individuals and systems. The lecture describes he fundamentals of asymmetric encryption, and explain how it is implemented in the real world. |
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Lecture 2 |
An Introduction to PKI Cryptography is not sufficient to ensure that secret information is safely shared. In particular, distributing cryptographic keys requires an infrastructure of logically connected systems. This is called Public Key Infrastructure and is the subject of this lecture. |
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Lecture 3 |
An Introduction to Kerberos Kerberos is an alternative to PKI fro authentication. This third lecture explains the respective positioning and the differences. It also explains how the two technologies can be integrated. This is illustrated by practical examples drawn from web and mail services. |
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Networking QoS and Performance |
Lectures |
Lecture 1 |
Internet QoS options Improving Quality of Service guarantees and performances in data network is a key requirement of Grid computing. Indeed, fast transfers require high-bit rate connections, and grid operation requires network predictability and high availability. On the other hand, the Internet historical technology is not naturally best suited to deterministic behaviour. This lecture explains the technical challenges and the range of options available to improve QoS guarantees in Internet-based networks. |
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Lecture 2 |
TCP and Congestion Control Not only the underlying network has to be highly performing, but the network software running within the end-systems must have an optimal behaviour. This lecture recalls the basics of TCP and discusses the relationships between TCP and the risks of congestions over Internet-based connections. |
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Lecture 3 |
Multimedia over the Internet The Grid is not only a network of computer resources but also a network of people cooperating to use these resources. Part of the collaborative tools scientists are increasingly using include audio and video systems. They place new challenging requirements on the networking systems. The class discusses these requirements and their consequences on the end-systems as well as within the underlying network. |
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Prerequisite Knowledge
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Mandatory prerequisite |
For this series of lectures, there is no mandatory pre-requisite knowledge, as long as the participants are professional computer scientists. |
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Desirable prerequisite
and references to further information |
The participants will draw maximum benefits from the lectures if they have a fair knowledge of computer network principles, in particular the concepts of
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Books
Vikipedia Computer Networking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_networks) Other Links |
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Creating secure software
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Lectures
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Lecture 1 |
Introduction to computer security First lecture starts with a definition of computer security and an explanation of why it is so difficult to achieve. The lecture highlights the importance of proper threat modeling and risk assessment. It then presents three complementary methods of mitigating threats: protection, detection, reaction; and tries to prove that security through obscurity is not a good choice. |
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Lecture 2 |
Security in different phases of software development The second lecture addresses the following question: how to create secure software? It introduces the main security principles (like least-privilege, or defense-in-depth) and discusses security in different phases of the software development cycle. The emphasis is put on the implementation part: most common pitfalls and security bugs are listed, followed by advice on best practice for security development. |
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Exercises |
Exercises 1 |
Avoiding, detecting and removing software security vulnerabilities In the practice session, a range of typical security vulnerabilities will be presented. The goal is to learn how they are exploited (for privilege escalation, data confidentiality compromise etc.), how to correct them, and how to avoid them in the first place! Students will be given source code of a simple program, and will be asked to find vulnerabilities and fix them. On-line course documentation consists of several parts (made available in steps, one after another), each tackles different vulnerability type. For a given security bug planted in the code, the documentation first shows how this bug/vulnerability can be attacked. Then students are given time to find the bug and work on a fix. And after some time, a possible solution is made available. |
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Prerequisite Knowledge |
Desirable prerequisite
and
References to further information |
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Books
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