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Coordinator:
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 4th topic addresses virtualization and cloud computing.
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. |
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Series |
Type |
Lecture |
Description |
Lecturer |
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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
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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 practical 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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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 |
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 modelling 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 |
Exercise 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. Additionally, students will have a chance to try several source code analysis tools, and see how such tools can help them find functionality bugs and security vulnerabilities.
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Prerequisite Knowledge |
Desirable prerequisite
and
References to further information |
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Books
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| Virtualisation |
Lectures |
Lecture 1 |
Introduction to virtualisation technology First lecture covers the definition and description of the various modes of virtualization techniques used in computing science, also from a historical perspective. Later we present the most recent advances and technology trends, in particular we will single out the server virtualization as a key enabling technology behind the emerging cloud computing paradigm.
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Pere Mato |
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Lecture 2 |
Applications of the virtualisation technology Second lecture deals with possible applications of server virtualization technology to support LHC computing effort. We will be using the CernVM project as an example to illustrate how a virtual machine can be crafted to act as an end-user work environment as well as job hosting environment running on cloud or Grid infrastructure.
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Pere Mato | ||
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Exercises |
Exercises 1 |
Using a virtual machine for data analysis The student will exercise how to setup a virtual machine and perform some simple analysis task (using ROOT for example) on a local host. Later we will show how the same task can be achieved using cloud resources such as Amazon EC2.
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Predag Buncic Pere Mato |
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Prerequisite Knowledge |
Mandatory prerequisite |
Be familiar with ROOT and very basic C++ and Linux/Unix environment. |
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Desirable prerequisite |
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and References to further information |