Trusting a computer for a security-sensitive task (such as checking email or banking online) requires the user to know something about the computer’s state. We examine research on securely capturing a computer’s state, and consider the utility of this information both for improving security

In this paper we discuss and demonstrate the feasibility of solving high-fidelity, nonlinear computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems of practical interest on commodity machines, namely Pentium Pro PC's. Such calculations have now become possible due to the progress in computational power

overall system performance. In this paper, we show how to leverage largely commodity Ethernet switches to support the full aggregate bandwidth of clusters consisting of tens of thousands of elements. Similar to how clusters of commodity computers have largely replaced more specialized SMPs and MPPs, we

, and hence works on commodity software. To demonstrate this idea, we have implemented TaintCheck, a mechanism that can perform dynamic taint analysis by performing binary rewriting at run time. We show that TaintCheck reliably detects most types of exploits. We found that TaintCheck produced no false

The aim of the Swiss-Tx project was to build, install, test and use high performance commodity computers. The biggest machine is the 70 Compaq Alpha processors Swiss-T1 machine installed at the EPFL computing centre and running in production mode since July 2000. This parallel MPI computer is well

Since 1984, the Condor project has enabled ordinary users to do extraordinary computing. Today, the project continues to explore the social and technical problems of cooperative computing on scales ranging from the desktop to the world-wide computational grid. In this chapter, we provide

Trust is a judgement of unquestionable utility — as humans we use it every day of our lives. However, trust has suffered from an imperfect understanding, a plethora of definitions, and informal use in the literature and in everyday life. It is common to say “I trust you, ” but what does that mean? This thesis provides a clarification of trust. We present a formalism for trust which provides us with a tool for precise discussion. The formalism is implementable: it can be embedded in an artificial agent, enabling the agent to make trust-based decisions. Its applicability in the domain of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is raised. The thesis presents a testbed populated by simple trusting agents which substantiates the utility of the formalism. The formalism provides a step in the direction of a proper understanding and definition of human trust. A contribution of the thesis is its detailed exploration of the possibilities of future work in the area. Summary 1. Overview This thesis presents an overview of trust as a social phenomenon and discusses it formally. It argues that trust is: • A means for understanding and adapting to the complexity of the environment. • A means of providing added robustness to independent agents. • A useful judgement in the light of experience of the behaviour of others. • Applicable to inanimate others. The thesis argues these points from the point of view of artificial agents. Trust in an artificial agent is a means of providing an additional tool for the consideration of other agents and the environment in which it exists. Moreover, a formalisation of trust enables the embedding of the concept into an artificial agent. This has been done, and is documented in the thesis. 2. Exposition There are places in the thesis where it is necessary to give a broad outline before going deeper. In consequence it may seem that the subject is not receiving a thorough treatment, or that too much is being discussed at one time! (This is particularly apparent in the first and second chapters.) To present a thorough understanding of trust, we have proceeded breadth first in the introductory chapters. Chapter 3 expands, depth first, presenting critical views of established researchers.

We review the growing power and capability of commodity computing and communication technologies largely driven by commercial distributed information systems. These systems are built from CORBA, Microsoft's COM, JavaBeans, and rapidly advancing Web approaches. One can abstract these to a three

The rapid increase in the performance of graphics hardware, coupled with recent improvements in its programmability, have made graphics hardware acompelling platform for computationally demanding tasks in awide variety of application domains. In this report, we describe, summarize, and analyze

The difficulty of developing reliable distributed softwme is an impediment to applying distributed computing technology in many settings. Expeti _ with the Isis system suggests that a structured approach based on virtually synchronous _ groups yields systems that are substantially easier to develop