. Consider, for example, simulations of the dynamics of biomolecules at the atomic level. Such simulations are traditionally limited to the nanosecond time scale. Duan and Kollman have demonstrated that traditional parallel molecular dynamics simulations can break the microsecond barrier (3), provided

am deeply indebted to my advisor Prof. Zhenhai Duan, without whose patience, constant guidance, support & direction, I would not have learnt as much and benefited. I would also like to thank Dr.Xin Yuan & Dr.Kartik Gopalan for serving on the thesis committee and for their valuable inputs. I

of design for questionnaires to be administered by interviewers has not been ac-MARIA ELENA SANCHEZ iS a survey methodologist at the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. I wish to thank the following: Duane F. Alwin, who generously granted permission to use the data; Merilynn R. Dielman, especially

I herewith certify that all material in this dissertation which is not my own work has been properly acknowledged.

Intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDSs/IPSs) heavily rely on signature databases and pattern matching (PM) techniques to identify network attacks. The engines of such systems often employ traditional PM algorithms to search for telltale patterns in network flows. The observations that real-world network traffic is largely legitimate and that telltales manifested by exploits rarely appear in network streams lead us to the proposal of Fingerprinter. This framework integrates fingerprinting and PM methods to rapidly distinguish well-behaved from malicious traffic. Fingerprinter produces concise digests or fingerprints for attack signatures during its programming phase. In its querying phase, the framework quickly identifies attack-free connections by transforming input traffic into its fingerprint space and matching its digest against those of attack signatures. If the legitimacy of a stream cannot be determined by fingerprints alone, our framework uses the Boyer–Moore algorithm to ascertain whether attack signatures appear in the stream. To reduce false matches, we resort to multiple fingerprinting techniques including Bloom–Filter and Rabin–Fingerprint. Experimentation with a prototype and a variety of traces has helped us establish that Fingerprinter significantly accelerates the attack detection process.