The march toward developing relevant and robust CPU benchmarks continues with the introduction of SPEC CPU 2026, the next generation suite for measuring processor performance. This paper details the methodology behind its creation, showcasing a process centered on community collaboration and principled development. The suite is built upon a foundation of modern, open-source applications, selected and hardened through a process that emphasizes workload diversity, portability, and software longevity. A key contribution is Rolling-Round-Robin Rate, a novel and standardized approach to running heterogeneous, multiprogrammed workloads that addresses a long-standing gap in benchmarking practice. Additionally, the suite features an expanded set of multithreaded benchmarks and introduces workloads with distinct microarchitectural profiles, reflecting the demands of contemporary software. By detailing our principled approach to benchmark selection, adaptation, and validation, we demonstrate how the SPEC CPU 2026 suite sets the standard for performance evaluation in the next era of computer architecture research and development.

Testing security systems is challenging because a system's authors have to play the double role of attackers and defenders. Red team/blue team exercises are an invaluable mechanism for security testing. They partition researchers into two competing teams of attackers and defenders, enabling them to create challenging and realistic test scenarios. While such exercises provide valuable insight into vulnerabilities of security systems, they are very expensive and thus rarely performed. In this paper we describe a red team/blue team exercise, sponsored by DARPA's FTN program, and performed October 2002 --- May 2003. The goal of the exercise was to evaluate a collaborative DDoS defense, comprised of a distributed system, COSSACK, and a stand-alone defense, D-WARD. The role of the blue team was played by developers of the tested systems from USC/ISI and UCLA, the red team included researchers from Sandia National Laboratory, and all the coordination, experiment execution, result collection and analysis was performed by the white team from BBN Technologies. This exercise was of immense value to all involved --- it uncovered significant vulnerabilities in tested systems, pointed out desirable characteristics in DDoS defense systems (e.g., avoiding reliance on timing mechanisms), and taught us many lessons about testing of DDoS defenses.

OBJECTIVE: To support clinically relevant indexing of biomedical images and image-related information based on the attributes of image acquisition procedures and the judgments (observations) expressed by observers in the process of image interpretation. DESIGN: The authors introduce the notion of "image acquisition context," the set of attributes that describe image acquisition procedures, and present a standards-based strategy for utilizing the attributes of image acquisition context as indexing and retrieval keys for digital image libraries. METHODS: The authors' indexing strategy is based on an interdependent message/terminology architecture that combines the Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) standard, the SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Human and Veterinary Medicine) vocabulary, and the SNOMED DICOM microglossary. The SNOMED DICOM microglossary provides context-dependent mapping of terminology to DICOM data elements. RESULTS: The capability of embedding standard coded descriptors in DICOM image headers and image-interpretation reports improves the potential for selective retrieval of image-related information. This favorably affects information management in digital libraries.