Adding capability-based security to high performance Parallex
J. Habraken · TU/e Research Portal · 2013
The first exa-scale computers are predicted to arrive in 2018 but we are currently unable to fully utilise such massive parallelism. ParalleX is an execution model which attempts to solve this through hiding system-wide latencies, decoupling hardware execution resources from executing software tasks, and enabling runtime dynamic adaptive scheduling of these tasks. In order for this model to be evaluated High Performance ParalleX (HPX) has been developed, the first feature-complete, open-source implementation of ParalleX. In this thesis we design a capability-based protection system for HPX through the collection of requirements from scenarios and subsequently using these to select the primitive building blocks to secure the system. This allows a machine with read capabilities to monitor a simulation without influencing it for example. To prove the design its viable a partial implementation of the design is done within HPX. Afterwards the cost of the protection layer is evaluated by comparing unprotected and protected runs as increased latencies are expected due to the cryptographic overhead.