Software applications need to change and adapt as modern architectures evolve. Nowadays advancement in chip design translates to increased parallelism. Exploiting such parallelism is a major challenge in modern software engineering. Multicore processors are about to introduce a significant change in the way we design and use fundamental data structures. In this work we describe the design and programming principles of a software library of highly concurrent scalable and nonblocking data containers. In this project we have created algorithms and data structures for handling fundamental computations in massively multithreaded contexts, and we have incorporated these into a usable library with familiar look and feel. In this work we demonstrate the first design and implementation of a wait-free hash table. Our multiprocessor data structure design allows a large number of threads to concurrently insert, remove, and retrieve information. Non-blocking designs alleviate the problems traditionally associated with the use of mutual exclusion, such as bottlenecks and thread-safety. Lock-freedom provides the ability to share data without some of the drawbacks associated with locks, however, these designs remain susceptible to starvation. Furthermore, wait-freedom provides all of the benefits of lock-free synchronization with the added assurance that every thread makes progress in a finite number of steps. This implies deadlock-freedom, livelock-freedom, starvation-freedom, freedom from priority inversion, and thread-safety. The challenges of providing the desirable progress and correctness guarantees of wait-free objects makes their design and implementation difficult. There are few wait-free data structures described in the literature. Using only standard atomic operations provided by the hardware, our design is portable; therefore, it is applicable to a variety of data-intensive applications including the domains of embedded systems and supercomputers. Our experimental evaluation shows that our hash table design outperforms the most advanced locking solution, provided by Intel's TBB library, by 22.

Information systems belonging to the DoD and U.S. Army experience cyber attacks on a daily basis. Increasingly, these attacks are targeting popular third-party applications, instead of focusing on vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. The DoD responded to this threat by adopting Citadel Hercules, which did not find a willing audience with the U.S. Army. Instead, the Army adopted Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), followed by System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 to meet this threat. After more than five years, the rollout of SCCM to all organizations within the U.S. Army is still incomplete. This study provides an overview of the threats facing U.S. Army information systems and looks at how the Army has addressed this challenge in the past. Next, the study takes a system engineering approach to identifying an optimal tool for mitigating third-party vulnerabilities and suggests potential alternatives to SCCM. In addition, the study utilizes a cost benefit analysis approach to aid in evaluating the potential Return on Investment (ROI) provided by each tool. The purpose of this study is to answer the question: What is the most optimal solution for mitigating vulnerabilities in third-party applications on U.S. Army information systems.

The U.S government has created and been executing an Identity and Management (IdM) vision to support a global, robust, trusted and interoperable identity management capability that provides the ability to correctly identify individuals and non-person entities in support of DoD mission operations. Many Directives and Instructions have been issued to standardize the process to design, re-designed new and old systems with latest available technologies to meet the vision's requirements. In this thesis we introduce a cloud-based architecture for the Defense Biometric Identification System (DBIDS), along with a set of DBIDS Cloud Services that supports the proposed architecture. This cloud-based architecture will move DBIDS in the right direction to meet Dod IdM visions and goals by decoupling current DBIDS functions into DBIDS core services to create interoperability and flexibility to expand future DBIDS with new requirements. The thesis will show its readers how DBIDS Cloud Services will help Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) easily expanding DBIDS functionalities such as connecting to other DMDC services or federated services for vetting purposes. This thesis will also serve as a recommendation of a blue- print for DBIDS architecture to support new generation of DBIDS application. This is a step closer in moving DMDC Identity Enterprise Solution toward DoD IdM realizing vision and goals. The thesis also includes a discussion of how to utilize virtualized DBIDS workstations to address software-deployment and maintenance issues to resolve configuration and deployment issues which have been costly problems for DMDC over the years.

Maintaining an accurate Common Operational Picture (COP) is a strategic requirement for efficient and successful missions in both disaster response and battlefield scenarios. Past practices include utilizing cellular, radio, and computer based communication methods and updating individual maps accordingly. A drawback of these practices has been interoperability of these devices as well as accurate reporting and documentation among different entities of the effort.

Software lifecycles are becoming an increasingly important issue for computational science & engineering (CSE) software. The process by which a piece of CSE software begins life as a set of research requirements and then matures into a trusted high-quality capability is both commonplace and extremely challenging. Although an implicit lifecycle is obviously being used in any e ort, the challenges of this process-respecting the competing needs of research vs. production-cannot be overstated.

The Common Misuse Scoring System (CMSS) is a set of measures of the severity of software feature misuse vulnerabilities. A software feature is a functional capability provided by software. A software feature misuse vulnerability is a vulnerability in which the feature also provides an avenue to compromise the security of a system. Such vulnerabilities are present when the trust assumptions made when designing software features can be abused in ways that violate security. Misuse vulnerabilities allow attackers to use for malicious purposes the functionality that was intended to be beneficial. CMSS can provide measurement data to assist organizations in making sound decisions on addressing software feature misuse vulnerabilities and in conducting quantitative assessments of the overall security posture of a system. This report defines proposed measures for CMSS and equations to be used to combine the measures into severity scores for each vulnerability. The report also provides examples of how CMSS measures and scores would be determined for selected software feature misuse vulnerabilities.

Rapid computer usage growth and Internet expansion along with growth in big data and analytics Desire for computing application solution that is: Cost-effective Able to meet consumer needs, especially adaptability and availability Reliable Secure.

The DoD Cloud Computing Strategy has evolved to identify the most effective ways for the Department to capitalize on opportunities and take advantage of cloud computing benefits that accelerate IT delivery, efficiency, and innovation as an Enterprise. Prior drafts were informally coordinated and comments from across the Department were used to broaden the scope and depth of the current document; significant modifications and additions have been incorporated. In addition, DoD CIO and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) led a DoD Capability Assurance and Alignment Process (CAAP) Working Group to refine the approach and clarify required capabilities. The DoD Cloud Computing Strategy has been expanded to address use of commercial cloud services in the Department's multi-provider enterprise cloud environment. Adoption and implementation of commercially provided cloud services are being rapidly accelerated with the maturing of the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (Fed RAMP), and release of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

Gun-launched munitions rely heavily on the global positioning system (GPS) receivers for position, velocity, and “up-finding” in their guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) systems. These receivers account for substantial cost in the GN&C electronics due to the contractor intellectual property and non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs. Typically, the designs are not optimized for gun-launched munitions, but rather as general purpose receivers for missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, aircraft, man-portable location systems, and vehicles. Due to the high launch dynamics, short time of flight, high spin rate, etc., the general purpose receivers have trouble acquiring and locking on the weak GPS signals. To address these challenges, software algorithms tailored to the flight dynamics can assist in the basic features of the receiver as well as provide jamming and spoofing immunity. In this report, a software-defined radio (SDR) approach is used for the development of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) receivers. This approach provides an evaluation capability for algorithm development and evaluation that is nearly hardware agnostic.

This research seeks to utilize a software defined radio for the detection and spatial identification of radio frequency identification tags. A software defined radio (SDR) is a hardware platform that provides the ability to broadcast and receive across multiple bands of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum, depending on the RF front end and software profile loaded on it. The focus of the research will be on the spatial identification (SID) of passive radio frequency identification tags (RFID). The research is applicable to many areas of day-to-day operations both within the DoD and industry. Flight line safety tracking of equipment and personnel, as well as perimeter defense, are two areas that may benefit from this technology. One dual-purpose, civilian and military, application would be the tracking and locating of inventory within a warehouse. The research developed and implemented a SID process, and proved its suitability to quickly identify and locate target tags within range. A profile of the system's capabilities and limitations in a laboratory environment was developed, including range, sensitivity, and accuracy.

Software-defined radios (SDRs) provide researchers with a powerful and flexible wireless communications experimentation platform. GNU Radio is the most popular open-source software toolkit for deploying SDRs, and is frequently used with the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). After establishing a USRP testbed, the researcher will need to implement new signal processing algorithms or modify existing ones. This document describes this process, highlighting those details that have received minimal attention in the existing documentation.

Mobile cloud computing is growing rapidly because its device (i.e., smart phone) is becoming one of the main processing devices for users nowadays. Due to the limitation of resources such as battery life time, CPU and memory capacity, etc., a mobile device cannot satisfy some applications which usually demand more resources than it can afford. To alleviate this, the mobile device should collaborate with external resources to increase its capacity. In order to address these problems, we introduce a collaboration of thin-thick clients which enhances thin client capacities. We further propose a strategy to optimize the data distribution, especially big data in cloud computing. Moreover, we present an algorithm to allocate resources to meet service level agreement (SLA) and conduct simulations to evaluate our approach. Our results evaluation shows that our approach can improve resource allocation efficiency and has better performance than existing approaches.

The objective of this technical note is to demonstrate, by way of example(s), how to use the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) implementation of the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) and Secant LM (SLM) method for model independent parameter estimation to calibrate a Gridded Surface Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis (GSSHA) hydrologic model. The purpose is not to present or focus on the theory which underlies the parameter estimation method(s), but rather to carefully describe how to use the ERDC software implementation of the secant LM method that accommodates the PEST model independent interface to calibrate a GSSHA hydrologic model. We will consider variations of our Secant LM (SLM) implementation in attempts to provide the interested reader with an intuitive sense of how the method works. We will also demonstrate how our LM/SLM implementation compares with its counterparts as implemented in the popular PEST software.

This document presents the transportation research on the information systems, the geographic information systems, and the advanced computing.

Given today’s technological advances in Cloud computing and data consolidation, DoD has the opportunity for significant positive impact on its core mission through IT modernization. This modernization should not be viewed as an end in itself, but as a means to a greater end of enhanced combat capability. Selected findings are listed below, with the complete findings listed in the accompanying presentation.

This final report contains the findings from the trustworthy composition of pre-designed software components project. Since DoD software is often developed at multiple vendor sites, individual components may be verified and delivered to an integrator--but the integration might fail because of behavioral incompatibility of the component interfaces. This work proposed behavioral types of interfaces by extracting the polychronous model from source code, and then using the theory of polychronous composition to check if the composition satisfied all of the requirements. The computation of composition properties (type inference) required novel development of a specialized Boolean theory for Prime Implicates, which provided a huge computational improvement through highly efficient generation of Prime Implicates.