Cybersecurity is a topic of growing interest. Do you have hands-on exercises that match the skills and levels of your students? Over the last few years, we have worked on making it easier to create, modify, and deploy exercises with assessment questions. EDURange is an open source project with exercises that span a wide range and can serve as templates for new ones. In addition to providing a framework for editing exercises, EDURange also allows Instructors to see student interaction and offer hints while they are doing the exercise. The features, that support this include chat with the instructor and machine learning algorithms for identifying which students need help.

Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving field that demands more workers and a wider array of knowledge every year. As such, cybersecurity education remains essential - not just for professionals, but for developers and non-technical roles as well. Due to this, hands-on cybersecurity exercises, such as the ones in the eduRange platform, are increasingly important. EduRange aims to be a flexible, intuitive cybersecurity platform that allows instructors to tailor pre-existing scenarios to their classes' needs. However, when students become stuck or frustrated, learning grinds to a halt. To combat this discouragement, we want to create a semi-automated hint system that can consistently identify struggling students. Such a hint system, however, requires a large quantity of data, which can be difficult to obtain through classroom testing alone.

This full paper in the research track evaluates the usage of data logged from cybersecurity exercises in order to predict students who are potentially at risk of performing poorly. Hands-on exercises are essential for learning since they enable students to practice their skills. In cybersecurity, hands-on exercises are often complex and require knowledge of many topics. Therefore, students may miss solutions due to gaps in their knowledge and become frustrated, which impedes their learning. Targeted aid by the instructor helps, but since the instructor's time is limited, efficient ways to detect struggling students are needed. This paper develops automated tools to predict when a student is having difficulty. We formed a dataset with the actions of 313 students from two countries and two learning environments: KYPO CRP and EDURange. These data are used in machine learning algorithms to predict the success of students in exercises deployed in these environments. After extracting features from the data, we trained and cross-validated eight classifiers for predicting the exercise outcome and evaluated their predictive power. The contribution of this paper is comparing two approaches to feature engineering, modeling, and classification performance on data from two learning environments. Using the features from either learning environment, we were able to detect and distinguish between successful and struggling students. A decision tree classifier achieved the highest balanced accuracy and sensitivity with data from both learning environments. The results show that activity data from cybersecurity exercises are suitable for predicting student success. In a potential application, such models can aid instructors in detecting struggling students and providing targeted help. We publish data and code for building these models so that others can adopt or adapt them.

Cybersecurity students need to develop practical skills such as using command-line tools. Hands-on exercises are the most direct way to assess these skills, but assessing students' mastery is a challenging task for instructors. We aim to alleviate this issue by modeling and visualizing student progress automatically throughout the exercise. The progress is summarized by graph models based on the shell commands students typed to achieve discrete tasks within the exercise. We implemented two types of models and compared them using data from 46 students at two universities. To evaluate our models, we surveyed 22 experienced computing instructors and qualitatively analyzed their responses. The majority of instructors interpreted the graph models effectively and identified strengths, weaknesses, and assessment use cases for each model. Based on the evaluation, we provide recommendations to instructors and explain how our graph models innovate teaching and promote further research. The impact of this paper is threefold. First, it demonstrates how multiple institutions can collaborate to share approaches to modeling student progress in hands-on exercises. Second, our modeling techniques generalize to data from different environments to support student assessment, even outside the cybersecurity domain. Third, we share the acquired data and open-source software so that others can use the models in their classes or research.

The critical shortage of cyber security professionals remains an unsolved problem. We need to greatly expand the community of faculty teaching in cybersecurity in order to meet the increasing demand for security professionals. The number of security-focused competitions and exercises has increased in recent years. As faculty we need to integrate them into our courses. Having a more unified environment and contributing to each other's educational projects will help. By bringing together new and experienced faculty we can build a community to engage in this work. We need to develop a critical mass of faculty, asking each other what we want from this learning community. As a learning community we can provide support for new members to learn about resources and help each other. These resources include exercises, webinars, and slides. We will share experiences, practices and ongoing efforts. The BoF also benefits experienced members, helping them to disseminate their work and reach other faculty with similar interests. As a community we have begun to discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have. The questions we will ask are, "What exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? What are you looking for from the community?"

Tor is among the most used overlay networks for anonymous communication. This anonymity can be undermined via entry-exit and end-to-end attacks. Using Game Theory, we analyze the viability of several methods for reducing Tor's vulnerability to such attacks. Entry-exit attacks rely upon controlling entry and exit nodes -- internal elements within the Tor Network, while end-to-end attacks utilize Autonomous Systems (internet service providers), elements outside of the Tor Network. Because both types of attacks rely on probability, we use Monte Carlo simulation and model the success probability maximizing strategies of adversaries. We analyze changes to Tor's node selection strategy that decrease the success probability of such attacks. Our goal is to support anonymity preserving systems against large Autonomous Systems providers and attackers with plenty of resources. We build upon previous work, but we also test eliminating the exit node bandwidth threshold and decreasing asymmetric routing to make compromising anonymity less likely. Given our results, we suggest the abandonment of the bandwidth threshold of exit nodes. Abandoning this threshold would not affect the bandwidth of the Tor network much, while it would impair an attacker's success probability significantly. We show that an attackers' success probability can be lowered by 23% over a year of usage. While prior to our changes (and assuming a large fraction of compromised nodes), anonymity is preserved ~62% of the time over a year, implementing our changes increases anonymity preservation to 85%.

Hands-on exercises are often used to improve student engagement and knowledge retention in systems, networking and cybersecurity classes. Even when students comprehend the concepts, they may lack the skills to complete an exercise. Teachers need effective tools to identify these problemsduring an assignment and offer targeted and timely help.

We need to greatly expand the number of students studying cybersecurity in order to meet the increasing demand for security professionals. As a community, we can use our expertise and alliances with other fields to create interdisciplinary courses and modules to attract diverse students into cybersecurity. For example, Liberal Arts Colleges have a strong core general education curriculum that can be enhanced with cybersecurity concepts. On one hand, students from non-CS majors are important for the cybersecurity workforce as they will be shaping the policies and business processes that affect cybersecurity decisions. On the other hand, well rounded CS students that take interdisciplinary security courses and CS1 will be able to apply the concepts and solve today's complex security problems. This BoF will explore ideas for integrating the technical content of cybersecurity with political science, business, law, psychology, philosophy, international affairs, and others. Participants from colleges, universities and K-12 will be able to co-create plans for these interdisciplinary experiences.

Engaging students in practical, hands-on exercises on testbeds improves student learning and knowledge retention. However, testbeds may also present an obstacle to learning for students who are not familiar with the environment, or who lack the necessary background to complete their assignments. Our research investigates how students learn with testbeds. We instrument a default operating system on the DeterLab testbed and monitor the students' command line input and output, as they perform homework assignments.We use this data to evaluate students' progress, to detect when a student is struggling and to identify common problems.

The critical shortage of cyber security professionals has driven faculty interest in adding this to the curriculum, and it was added to the ACM/ IEEE Model Curriculum of 2013. This is a subject that demands hands-on exercises. There has been a modest increase in the number of such exercises, but the limit is usability. Most faculty do not have the time to create their own exercises, modify and install VMs, and set up assessment mechanisms. EDURange is a framework for accessing, developing and assessing interactive cybersecurity exercises. It has a range of exercises from introductory to advanced. We will demo an introductory exercise about using the command line and an advanced exercise about network scanning. We want to reach and engage as many faculty as possible, so that they can develop their own exercises. EDURange uses VMs in the cloud. Students only need an ssh-client. We have built tools to give faculty detailed information on how students are doing. This allows instructors to more easily see when students are stuck or heading in the wrong direction. The exercises we have created have manuals that instructors can use. Information about EDURange can be found at https://edurange.org.

The critical shortage of cyber security professionals remains an unsolved problem. We need to greatly expand the community in order to meet the increasing demand. The number of security-focused competitions and exercises has increased in recent years. As faculty we need to choose those that we can best integrate into our courses. As a community, we can think about how to create a more unified environment to contribute to each other's projects. We would like to bring together new and experienced faculty to build community and engage in this work. We have set up a dedicated Facebook to allow us to work together outside of SIGCSE events. During the BoF, we will encourage participants to sign up for the closed group, and we will ask the questions, 'What do you want from this learning community? What exercises have you heard about or tried?" One benefit of having a learning community is that it will be easier to provide support for new members to learn about resources and get help. These resources include exercises, webinars, and slides. We will share experiences, practices and ongoing efforts (NSA's National Cybersecurity Curriculum Program), including our own (e.g. Security Injections, Security Knitting Kit, EDURange and UWGB GenCyber). The BoF also benefits experienced members, helping them to disseminate their work and reach other faculty with similar interests. We will discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. We will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing courses.

Abstract: Data science is on the rise, being a high-demand skill for a number of employers, both in the tech field and in various scientific disciplines. Since it is a new field, only a handful of schools offer a data science program, most of those being large research institutions. This presents a unique opportunity for smaller schools to combine an exciting and highly relevant topic with the personalized education, small class sizes, and individual attention they are known for. On the flip side, building out data science at small schools also presents numerous challenges, including finding sufficient faculty time and expertise, attracting a sufficient number of students, forging interdepartmental connections, and convincing the administration to approve the new courses and program. In this poster, we present lessons learned from data science efforts at three small institutions, including one which recently successfully developed a data science certificate (containing four new data science courses).

We need to greatly expand the community of faculty teaching cybersecurity using hands-on exercises. The number of security-focused competitions and exercises has increased in recent years so that faculty need to choose those that can best be integrated into their courses. As a community, we can contribute to each other/s projects. We would like to bring together both new and experienced faculty to build community. Our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/TeachingCyber/) allows us to work together outside of SIGCSE events, and we are developing a critical mass of users. In the BoF, participants can sign up for the closed group. Participants will discuss answers to specific questions on teaching security. One goal of our BoF is to provide support for new members to learn about resources and get help. These resources include exercises, webinars, and slides. We will share experiences, practices and ongoing efforts, including our own (e.g. Security Injections, the Security Knitting Kit project, and EDURange). The BoF also benefits experienced members, helping them to disseminate their work and reach other faculty with similar interests. As a community we have begun to share exercises and discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. We will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing courses. The questions we will ask are, What materials and exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? How do we expand and improve cybersecurity education?

In an increasingly computer-driven world, it is no surprise that undergraduate interest in computer science has grown enormously over the years. To meet this growing demand, it is vital to ensure there is a growing supply of talented and passionate CS educators. However, most computer science professors must first earn a PhD at a research university. Therefore, we seek to understand whether these institutions are meeting the growing need for passionate and highly-trained computer science educators. Specifically, we analyze 19 years of historical data gathered from the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering department. Although focusing on graduates from a single school is a limitation, University of Washington is somewhat unique in that it publicly posts graduating PhD students' preferences online, and UW has had numerous notable graduates pursue careers in teaching, research, and industry. Our analysis of 309 graduating students reveals that the number of graduating students interested in teaching is alarmingly small, and has not grown over time to meet the increased need for quality educators. Our more detailed analysis of the change in interest over time suggests several potential reasons for this phenomenon. We hope that this poster opens dialogue surrounding possible interventions that might alleviate this issue.

Cybersecurity is a topic of growing interest for CS educators. The goal of this workshop is to empower faculty to add hands-on security exercises to their courses. We introduce EDURange, a framework for accessing, developing and assessing interactive cybersecurity exercises. We want to reach and engage all students. The first step is to have interesting challenges that are easy to access. EDURange uses VMs in a public cloud, which also provides flexible resources. No software needs to be installed - students only need an ssh client. Another step is to give students feedback on how they are doing. This is an important role for faculty and is not something to automate. Instead, EDURange provides basic tools to visualize what students are doing as they work on the exercises. This allows instructors to more easily see when students are stuck or heading in the wrong direction. Since cybersecurity exercises are often easy to understand but hard to solve, guidance is especially important so that students don't become frustrated. In this workshop, participants will get to try EDURange and several exercises, including an introduction to ssh. Participants don't need to be security experts. We will provide sample syllabuses for an introductory security course as well as an interdisciplinary security course, and we will show how our exercises can be integrated into these courses. More information at http://www.edurange.org. Laptop required.

No abstract available.

We have been teaching cybersecurity using hands-on, interactive exercises that have successfully engaged students. However, in order to meet the increasing demand for security professionals, we need to greatly expand the community of faculty teaching in this area. We would like to bring together new and experienced faculty to do this. Ambareen Siraj has set up a dedicated Facebook group to allow us to work together outside of SIGCSE events, but we need to develop a critical mass of users. During the BoF, we will encourage participants to sign up for the closed group, and we will have an exercise where they ask and answer questions about what they want from this learning community. One benefit of having a learning community is that it will be easier to provide support for new members to learn about resources and get help. These resources include exercises, webinars, and slides. We will share experiences, practices and ongoing efforts, including our own (e.g. Security Injections, the Security Knitting Kit project, and EDURange). The BoF also benefits experienced members, helping them to reach other faculty with similar interests. As a community we have begun to share exercises and discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. For the last five years, we have been doing that at SIGCSE. We will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing courses. The questions we will ask are, "What exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? What are you looking for from the community?"

We see teaching cybersecurity through hands-on, interactive exercises as a way to engage students. However, we also want to assess how much students are learning from these exercises, and the exercises themselves could be used to assess what students know. Creating new hands-on exercises requires significant preparation on the part of the instructor. As a community we have begun to share exercises and discuss what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. The purpose of this BOF is two-fold: 1) to continue to bring together instructors who have developed hands-on exercises with those who would like to use them, and 2) extend the discussion to include assessment of student learning. We recognize that few CS programs can afford new required courses, so we will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing ones. This could include networking, OS, computer architecture, programming languages, software engineering, algorithms and programming (CS0, CS1, CS2). The questions we will ask are, "What exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? What are you looking for? What are the learning goals for your students? How do you assess them?"

Assessing student performance in cybersecurity labs and exercises is a difficult and time-consuming task. Simply recording the number of correct answers is inferior to in-depth assessment. Faculty are often best placed to offer expert feedback, advice, and guidance based on assessing student achievement and quality of performance for time-constrained exercises. Since this often takes place in the context of large classes and complex exercises, it can present obstacles to offering qualitative feedback. Yet, in some cases there is more information available that could simplify this task. This paper explores the use of command line history and visualization to add additional information and simplify the problem.

This paper reports on the experience of using the EDURange framework, a cloud-based resource for hosting on-demand interactive cybersecurity scenarios. Our framework is designed especially for the needs of teaching faculty. The scenarios we have implemented each are designed specifically to nurture the development of analysis skills in students as a complement to both theoretical security concepts and specific software tools.

We see teaching cybersecurity through hands-on, interactive exercises as a way to engage students. Some of the exercises that we have seen require significant preparation on the part of the instructor. Having a community makes it easier to share exercises, knowing what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. The purpose of this BOF is to bring together instructors who have developed hands-on exercises, those who have used them and those who would like to. We recognize that few CS programs can afford new required courses, so we will discuss ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing ones. This could include networking, OS, computer architecture, programming languages, software engineering, algorithms and programming. The questions we will ask are, "What exercises have you tried? What are your experiences? What are you looking for?"

There are many different ways to write parallel programs. We illustrate a variety of relevant language paradigms by presenting implementations of the Game of Life, a simple simulation motivated by living organisms. Featured paradigms include shared memory, GPU acceleration, message passing, and Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS).

We see teaching information security through hands-on, interactive exercises as a way to engage students. Some of the exercises that we have tried require significant preparation on the part of the instructor. Having a community makes it easier to share exercises, knowing what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. The purpose of this BOF is to bring together instructors who have used hands-on exercises and those who would like to. We recognize that few CS programs can afford new required courses, so we would be discussing ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing ones. This could include networking, OS, computer architecture, programming languages, software engineering and algorithms. The questions we will ask are, "What exercises, if any, have you tried" What are your experiences? What are you looking for?

Cybersecurity is a topic of growing interest for CS educators. The goal of this workshop is to provide faculty with tools and interactive exercises that would facilitate adding this topic to their curriculum. We will introduce the EDURange framework for developing interactive cybersecurity exercises. We have several exercises for participants to try, including network scanning and firewall configuration. We will give an introduction to some tools such as nmap, as well as the basic concepts. We have tested our framework several times in classrooms and workshops for students and faculty. One of its advantages is that faculty can use it in their classes with very little set-up. It uses Amazon's EC2/AWS to make the exercises readily available, so instructors will be able to access them with an account. We will also discuss other security exercises, including ones in the RAVE. It also provides each user with a number of VMs with tools and vulnerabilities. We will discuss using exercises as assessment tools. No previous experience in security is necessary. Laptop required. http://blogs.evergreen.edu/edurange

Bit errors are common in wireless networks, and techniques for overcoming them traditionally consist of expensive retransmission (e.g. Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ)) or expensive Forward Error Correction (FEC), both of which are undesirable in resource-constrained wireless networks such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we present TVA (Transmit-Verify-Acknowledge), a protocol that can correct errors without adding additional redundancy to data packets. Instead, TVA corrects errors using the redundancy inherent in Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRCs). The ubiquity of CRCs has the advantage of allowing TVA to be both backwards-compatible and backwards-efficient with link-layer protocols such as IEEE 802.15.4. We present a novel method of CRC error correction, which is compact and computationally efficient, and is designed to correct the most common error patterns observed in WSNs. We demonstrate that TVA provides reliability effectively equivalent to that of ARQ. We perform trace-driven simulations using data from sensor network deployments in different environments and analyze TVA's performance at different message lengths. To demonstrate the practicality of TVA, we implement it in TinyOS, and perform experiments on MicaZ motes to evaluate TVA in the presence of 802.11 interference. We find that TVA improves over ARQ and FEC-based protocols, using 31% less redundant communication and 30% less additional time to recover errored packets compared to ARQ.

The new CS curricular recommendations call for a heightened emphasis on parallel and distributed computing (PDC), in response to the explosive growth of multicore processors and "cloud" distributed computing. How can an educator incorporate this urgent priority into undergraduate CS courses? This panel describes four approaches: exploring GPU architecture and programming in a Computer Organization course; incorporating shared memory parallelism into several core courses; adding the PDC notion of reduction to multiple CS courses; and inserting short PDC modules into many courses at multiple curricular levels. We will illustrate how these contrasting approaches all respond to PDC recommendations within the feasibility constraint of incrementally modifying individual courses.

The emerging CS2013 Curriculum recommendations call for greatly expanded emphasis on parallel and distributed computing (PDC), in response to recent industry changes. CS2013's PDC knowledge units relate to many undergraduate courses. Participants in this BOF will consider responses to CS2013 PDC recommendations that involve multiple undergraduate CS courses at an institution, as opposed to approaches that concentrate PDC topics primarily within a single course. This sharing and brainstorming session will bring together: people having experience with a multi-course or multi-level approach to teaching PDC; people contemplating a multi-course approach to introducing PDC material; and people wishing to provide and/or hear rationale for a multi-course strategy for teaching PDC.

One promising approach to teaching parallel programming is to use high-level parallel programming languages, which handle some of the more mundane details of parallel programming and allow both instructors and students to focus on the main ideas. How does one go about selecting the language to use? We present short descriptions of a variety of languages (Chapel, Cilk, CUDA, Habanero Java, Hadoop, OpenACC, OpenMP and Scala), including our assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, plus some general considerations to keep in mind when teaching parallel programming.

We see teaching cybersecurity through hands-on, interactive exercises as a way to engage students. Some of the exercises that we have seen require significant preparation on the part of the instructor. Having a community makes it easier to share exercises, knowing what works and what problems students and instructors have encountered. The purpose of this BOF is to bring together instructors who have used hands-on exercises and those who would like to. We recognize that few CS programs can afford new required courses, so we would be discussing ways to integrate security-related exercises into existing ones. This could include networking, OS, computer architecture, programming languages, software engineering and algorithms.

This workshop is intended for anyone who would like to use hands-on exercises in cybersecurity for a variety of classes including Networking, OS, Computer Security and Software Engineering. It has received increased attention nationally in the proposed ACM/IEEE CS2013 Curricula Guidelines. The goal of this workshop is to provide faculty with varied backgrounds (including none) in this area with some tools and interactive exercises to facilitate incorporating this knowledge area into their curriculum. We believe that it is important that students develop analytical skills, thus we include an introduction to EDURange1 and the Hacker Curriculum principles: (1) understanding failure modes and (2) seeing across or through layers of abstraction according to a particular scenario. We will guide attendees through exercises tailored to their level and interests. The exercises will include port scanning and setting up a firewall. These can be done at a range of levels from beginner to advanced. We will include an introduction to tools for packet inspection, which is an important part of analysis. Attendees will receive accounts on the RAVE2 with exercises that they can take back and use immediately with their classes. RAVE provides a number of VMs pre-configured for the exercises. RAVE is also a general purpose technology for other hands-on exercises. Laptop required.

It is no longer news that undergraduates in computer science need to learn more about parallelism. The range of options for parallel programming is truly staggering, involving hundreds of languages. How can a CS instructor make informed choices among all the options? This panel provides a guided introduction to parallelism in programming languages and their potential for undergraduate CS education, organized into four progressive categories: low-level libraries and; higher-level libraries and features; programming languages that incorporate parallelism; and frameworks for productive parallel programming. The four panelists will present representative examples in their categories, then present viewpoints on how those categories relate to coursework, curriculum, and trends in parallelism.

Recent industry changes, including multi-core processors, cloud computing, and GPU programming, increase the need to teach parallelism to CS undergraduates. But few CS programs can afford to add new courses or greatly alter syllabi, and the large parallelism body of knowledge relates to many courses. Participants in this BOF will share incremental approaches for adding parallelism to undergraduate CS curricula, where students study parallel computing in brief units. This networking event/ brainstorming session/ swap meet will bring together: " people with sharable parallelism expository readings, hands-on exercises, tech support ideas, etc.; "people wishing to include such materials in their courses; and" people curious about incremental approaches to teaching parallel computing.

Incorporating information security into the undergraduate curriculum continues to be a topic of interest to SIGCSE attendees. The purpose of this BOF is to help sustain the existing community of educators and researchers interested in bringing ethical hacking skills and an understanding of security into the classroom and relating these topics to the foundations of Computer Science. We would like to bring our colleagues together to share pedagogical practices, stories of hacking and how to use them to inspire our students and communicate complex concepts in computer science and security. We also plan to discuss our own experiences, practices and ongoing efforts (e.g., our infosec teaching experiences, the SISMAT program, EDURange and the dissemination of infosec interactive exercises). SISMAT is one of many alternatives for teaching cybersecurity to undergraduates. It is based on the "Hacker Curriculum" and includes a two-week summer intensive program, a research component and an internship. A description can be viewed at http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/events/sismat/. An education in computer science can be an important resource in nurturing future leaders in cybersecurity, but only if we enable a community of educators willing to share approaches. This was highlighted by Sally Finch's keynote speech in 2010. At our BOF last year, several people had stories to share, and we plan to focus on that.

Wireless sensor networks are revolutionizing the instrumentation of the physical world, across scientific, industrial and military applications. In this paper, we describe our efforts developing and classroom-testing hands-on materials for use in undergraduate-accessible courses on sensor networks. In Winter 2008 at Portland State University, we introduced an in-class laboratory component to a sensor networks course that had previously been entirely lecture-based. For the laboratory exercises, we utilized Sun's Java-programmable Sun SPOT [7] sensor network technology. We found the Sun SPOT based laboratory activities to be quite powerful as a teaching and excitement-fostering tool.

In 2003, the MIT Technology review magazine listed wireless sensor networks as one of "Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World" [2]. Five years later, are wireless sensor networks ready for the undergraduate classroom? Our goal is to develop lab exercises that are suitable for activity-driven teaching of undergraduate students. We here describe our lab exercises and our experience class-testing them in the Winter quarter of 2008 at Portland State University.

Many sensor network deployments are heterogeneous: a large number of regular nodes perform sensing, while some nodes have better energy resources and/or more computational capacity. Whereas the effect of heterogeneous nodes on network reliability and lifetime has been studied [3], we here focus on exploiting heterogeneity for security. For security and privacy, the identity of nodes must be authenticated and keys have to be distributed. In our lightweight end-middle-end security framework, every node has a public/private key pair, but only resource-rich gateway nodes use public key cryptography to compute digital signatures. Since gateway nodes vouch for regular nodes, regular nodes can use symmetric cryptography until a gateway is reached. On regular nodes, this reduces energy consumption and processing delays by more than a factor of 3000. Re-encryption on the gateways is typically not the bottleneck, since gateways are often line-powered and typically more than 100 times faster than regular nodes (e.g. Stargate vs. Mica). An additional advantage of our end-middle-end architecture is that only gateways are affected by changes in user privileges.

In 2003, MIT Technology Review listed Grid computing as one of 'Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World' [5]. Five years later, is Grid computing ready for the undergraduate classroom? In this panel, a group of educators share their experiences in teaching Grid computing over the past several years and in various settings, and discuss how the subject materials should be developed for the future. Key points under discussion include the place in the undergraduate curriculum, the role of programming exercises, bottom-up versus top-down approaches, and the necessary Grid computing platform. This panel will be of interest to those who teach the subject, and those who wish to introduce Grid computing into their programs. It will also interest those who do not want to offer a full Grid computing course but may wish to introduce Grid computing into existing distributed systems, networking, or parallel programming courses.

The purpose of RFID tags is to provide identifying information; the problem is that tags may radiate identifying information to any RFID reader anywhere. Encryption alone does not help: even encrypted IDs are static, and can be identified as unique to a particular object, and are thus vulnerable to tracking. To preserve privacy, pseudonym protocols have been proposed. Using cryptography and pseudonyms, unauthorized entities cannot even link two sightings of the same tag. In this paper, we measure the cost of running tree-based pseudonym protocols. Pseudonym protocols require random numbers, cryptographic operations and writing to onboard memory (in case time-limited delegation is enabled), which we implement using TinyOS system software. For MicaZ hardware, we measure voltage drop with an oscilloscope. Our results show that one Skipjack block cipher (part of the pseudonym encryption process) costs more energy than generating ten random numbers. Therefore, when configuring the tree of secrets, it is more energy-efficient to have a wider rather than a deeper tree

Grid protocols and technologies arc being adopted in a wide variety of academic, government, and industrial environments, and there is a growing body of research-oriented literature in grid computing. However, there is a need for educational material that is suitable for classroom use. This paper describes our topics, exercises and experiences of teaching grid computing courses in the fall semester, 2004. to undergraduate computer science students at Lewis & Clark College and to a mix of undergraduate and graduate computer science students at the University of Arkansas. We identify a set of six knowledge areas that can help to structure course material in grid computing. In conclusion, we recommend that a grid computing course cover, or have as prerequisites, material on (1) remote method invocation and (2) security and certificates. Finally, student comments indicate the need for a series of grid programming exercises of increasing complexity.

Summary form only given. Motivated by observations about job runtimes on the CPlant system, we use a trace-driven microsimulator to begin characterizing the performance of different classes of allocation algorithms on jobs with different communication patterns in space-shared parallel systems with mesh topology. We show that relative performance varies considerably with communication pattern. The paging strategy using the Hilbert space-filling curve and the best fit heuristic performed best across several communication patterns.

Current job scheduling systems for massively parallel machines and Beowulf-class compute clusters support batch scheduling involving two classes of queues: prime time vs. non-prime time. Jobs running in these queue classes must satisfy different criteria with respect to job-size, runtime, or other resource needs. These constraints are designed to delay big jobs to non-prime time in order to provide better quality service during the prime time workday hours. This paper surveys existing prime time/non-prime time scheduling policies and investigates the sensitivity of scheduling performance to changes in the jobsize and runtime limits allowed during prime time vs. non-prime time. Our simulation study, using real workload traces from the NASA NAS IBM SP/2 cluster gives strong evidence for the use of specific prime time limits and sheds light oil the performance trade-offs regarding response times, utilization, short term scheduling algorithm (FCFS vs. EASY backfilling), and success and overflow rates.

In most peer-to-peer systems, edge resources self-organize into overlay networks. At the core of Freenet-style peer-to-peer systems are insert and request algorithms that dynamically change the overlay network and replicate files on demand. We ran simulations to test how effective these algorithms are at improving the performance of subsequent queries. Our results show that for the original Freenet algorithms, performance improved less rapidly with a ratio of 99 requests to 1 insert than with an equal number of requests and inserts. This motivated us to design and test the performance of several new request algorithms. By changing the overlay network after failed requests and by further rewarding the fulfillers of successful requests, our new algorithms improved median pathlength by up to a factor of 9.25.

With the progress of research on cluster computing, more and more universities have begun to offer various courses covering cluster computing. A wide variety of content can be taught in these courses. Because of this, a difficulty that arises is the selection of appropriate course material. The selection is complicated by the fact that some content in cluster computing is also covered by other courses such as operating systems, networking, or computer architecture. In addition, the background of students enrolled in cluster computing courses varies. These aspects of cluster computing make the development of good course material difficult. Combining our experiences in teaching cluster computing in several universities in the USA and Australia and conducting tutorials at many international conferences all over the world, we present prospective topics in cluster computing along with a wide variety of information sources (books, software, and materials on the Web) from which instructors can choose. The course material described includes system architecture, parallel programming, algorithms, and applications. We share our experiences in teaching cluster computing and the topics we have chosen depending on course objectives.

Parallel file systems provide high performance disk access, which is crucial for many scientific and commercial applications.In this paper, we explore the current state of the art of parallel file systems for PC clusters.To do so, we evaluate the I/O performance of Intel PFS, a commercial file system for ASCI Red, and PVFS, an open-source file system for Linux clusters.Our study shows that parallel file systems for PC clusters have come a long way.While there is still room for improvements, high performance disk access on PC clusters is becoming a reality.Three and a half years after I/O throughputs of more than 1 Gigabyte/sec have been achieved for the first time (with Intel PFS on ASCI Red), PVFS can now deliver this level of I/O performance on PC clusters.

As communication and I/O traffic increase on the interconnection network of high-performance systems, network contention becomes a critical problem drastically reducing performance. Whereas earlier allocation strategies were either sensitive to communication alone or sensitive to I/O alone, we present a new strategy that is sensitive to both communication and I/O. Our new strategy MC-Elongated, strives to achieve (1) the compactness needed to minimize communication-based contention as well as (2) the balance and orientation relative to I/O nodes needed to minimize I/O-based contention. We tested our new strategy using synthetic workloads and a real workload trace of 6087 jobs captured from a 400 node Intel Paragon. Our results show that with respect to system throughput and average job turnaround time, in environments with varying degree of communication and I/O traffic, MC-Elongated outperforms previous allocation strategies that are in use today. Regarding the tension between communication and I/O, our results show that spatial layout is more critical for I/O intensive jobs at lower utilization levels and more critical for communication-intensive jobs at higher utilization levels; and that in general, the impact of I/O traffic is dominant.