This paper presents the design and implementation of the Cell Broadband Engine TM(Cell/B.E.) isolation loader which is a part of the IBM Software Development Kit for Multicore Acceleration [14]. Our isolation loader is a key component in realizing secure application boot and encrypted application execution. During the application load process, the isolation loader fetches, validates, and decrypts a Synergistic Processor Element (SPE) executable, establishing a chain of trust from the hardware to the application. Since not all applications are SPE executables, we also introduce a general solution. This is a verification service framework in which all applications including system functions can be verified by the isolation loader immediately before execution.We have applied several novel implementation techniques to the isolation loader. The countermeasure implemented in our isolation loader against the substituted-ciphertext attack is given and our staging technique to allocate contiguous working areas for applications is also introduced. The load overhead of this loader including application fetch, validation (RSA-2048/SHA-1), and decryption (RSA-2048 and AES) is less than 50 milliseconds on the 2.8 GHz IBM PowerXCell 8i processor. This overhead is reasonable compared with the 500-millisecond 2048-bit RSA signing needed by the Trusted Platform Module chips [3].

Cone-beam X-ray computed tomography (CT) is attracting increasing attention due to its applications in medicine, biomedical sciences, material engineering, and nondestructive industrial evaluation. Rapid volumetric image reconstruction is highly desirable in all these fields for prompt visualization and analysis of complex structures of interest. However, in most applications, volumetric image reconstruction is still a very demanding computational task. The cell broadband engine architecture (CBEA) is a novel microprocessor architecture designed to provide power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance processing for some of the world's most demanding applications, including next generation game consoles. Applications that show special promise of benefiting from CBEA are medical imaging, security and surveillance, digital media, entertainment, communications, and selected scientific workloads. We implemented 3-D CT image reconstruction on the CBEA. However, the programming scheme of CBEA is different from single-core architectures. To archive peak performance on CBEA, coding optimizations are needed by exploiting the unique features of the hardware. In this paper, we describe the parallelization of the 3-D image reconstruction algorithm on the CBEA. The results show that the CBEA can achieve significant run time savings.

The Internet, digital television, and similar technologies have accelerated the speed of digitalization. Nevertheless, paper media forms, such as newspapers and magazines, still have large market shares, and the authors believe that these two worlds, digital and analog, will coexist even in the future, with their own market areas. However, the demands to connect between these two worlds are increasing, and barcodes and watermarking are examples of technologies used to connect them. However, a barcode occupies space and disrupts the layout of an article, and watermarking has limited capacity for embedding data.In this paper, we propose an "electronic clipping system with invisible barcodes", which connects the analog and digital worlds, addressing these problems. In this system, we overprint invisible 2D barcodes on printed articles using invisible ink, then take pictures of them using a camera equipped with a special LED (Light Emitting Diode)that the invisible ink responds to, decode the encoded data of the 2D barcode after the image is processed, and extract the information. We developed a code extraction system which can extract the information from invisible 2D barcodes even if the barcodes are overprinted on the articles in media such as newspapers, and even if the article is in color. We also made a prototype cell phone which includes both the barcode extraction code and the LED, and confirmed that we can correctly extract the information from the pictures taken by the phone.

We propose a new method for constructing a context-dependent Japanese syllabic unit inventory, which effectively incorporates the spectral influence of left- and right-hand neighboring phonemes on CV (consonant and vowel) syllabic units. The syllabic unit inventory is generated by using a set of phonemic clusters, which we define, to approximate the average spectral behavior of phonemes in triphone contexts. Unit inventories of multiple sizes are generated for a waveform-concatenation-based text-to-speech system. The sizes of the inventories range from 322 to 3892 units, according to the fineness of the phonemic cluster set used. The synthetic speech generated by using the largest one is highly natural and intelligible. We also discuss the scalability of the proposed unit inventories.