Emulation Technology Research Articles

Ab initio predictions link the neutron skin of 208Pb to nuclear forces

Heavy atomic nuclei have an excess of neutrons over protons, which leads to the formation of a neutron skin whose thickness is sensitive to details of the nuclear force. This links atomic nuclei to properties of neutron stars, thereby relating objects that differ in size by orders of magnitude. The nucleus 208Pb is of particular interest because it exhibits a simple structure and is experimentally accessible. However, computing such a heavy nucleus has been out of reach for ab initio theory. By combining advances in quantum many-body methods, statistical tools and emulator technology, we make quantitative predictions for the properties of 208Pb starting from nuclear forces that are consistent with symmetries of low-energy quantum chromodynamics. We explore 109 different nuclear force parameterizations via history matching, confront them with data in select light nuclei and arrive at an importance-weighted ensemble of interactions. We accurately reproduce bulk properties of 208Pb and determine the neutron skin thickness, which is smaller and more precise than a recent extraction from parity-violating electron scattering but in agreement with other experimental probes. This work demonstrates how realistic two- and three-nucleon forces act in a heavy nucleus and allows us to make quantitative predictions across the nuclear landscape.

Power-Electronics-Based Mission Profile Emulation and Test for Electric Machine Drive System—Concepts, Features, and Challenges

In the last decade, significant progress has been made in electrification, especially in the applications of electrical vehicles, renewable energies, and industry automations, which imposed much more complicated working conditions to electric machines as well as the drive converters. More advanced features, such as the control strategies, functionality, stability, and reliability of machine drive systems, need to be characterized and validated. Thus, there is an emerging need to accurately recreate the behaviors of electric machine drive systems from more aspects for comprehensive tests. This article aims to foster and investigate the mission profile emulation technologies for the testing of electric machine drive systems. The key factors of the system to be emulated are first clarified, and then different testing concepts are summarized and compared, including dynamometer test, controller hardware-in-the-loop simulation, power hardware-in-the-loop simulation, and power-electronics-based emulation. The features of power-electronics-based emulation, which is considered as a promising trend, will be further discussed with respect to the degrees of coupling with the drive converter, electric machine models, and control structures. Finally, challenges in the field of mission profile emulation for electric machine drive systems are discussed.

Robotic Emulation of Candidate Prosthetic Foot Designs May Enable Efficient, Evidence-Based, and Individualized Prescriptions.

ABSTRACTIntroductionThe design and selection of lower-limb prosthetic devices is currently hampered by a shortage of evidence to drive the choice of prosthetic foot parameters. We propose a new approach wherein prostheses could be designed, specified, and provided based on individualized measurements of the benefits provided by candidate feet. In this manuscript, we present a pilot test of this evidence-based and personalized process.MethodsWe previously developed a “prosthetic foot emulator,” a wearable robotic system that provides users with the physical sensation of trying on different prosthetic feet before definitive fitting. Here we detail preliminary demonstrations of two possible approaches to personalizing foot design: 1) an emulation and test-drive strategy of representative commercial foot models, and 2) a prosthetist-driven tuning procedure to optimize foot parameters.ResultsThe first experiment demonstrated large and sometimes surprising differences in optimal prosthetic foot parameters across a variety of subjects, walking conditions, and outcome measures. The second experiment demonstrated a quick and effective simple manual tuning procedure for identifying preferred prosthetic foot parameters.ConclusionsEmulator-based approaches could improve individualization of prosthetic foot prescription. The present results motivate future clinical studies of the validity, efficacy, and economics of the approach across larger and more diverse subject populations.Clinical RelevanceToday, emulator technology is being used to accelerate research and development of novel prosthetic and orthotic devices. In the future, after further refinement and validation, this technology could benefit clinical practice by providing a means for rapid test-driving and optimal selection of clinically available prosthetic feet.

Cloud-Based User Behavior Emulation Approach for Space-Ground Integrated Networks.

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) based on space-ground integrated networks (SGINs) enable CPSs to break through geographical restrictions in space. Therefore, providing a test platform is necessary for new technical verification and network security strategy evaluations of SGINs. User behavior emulation technology can effectively support the construction of a test platform. Given the inherent dynamic changes, diverse behaviors, and large-scale characteristics of SGIN users, we propose user behavior emulation technology based on a cloud platform. First, the dynamic emulation architecture for user behavior for SGINs is designed. Then, normal user behavior emulation strategy driven by the group user behavior model in real time is proposed, which can improve the fidelity of emulation. Moreover, rogue user behavior emulation technology is adopted, based on traffic replay, to perform the security evaluation. Specifically, virtual Internet Protocol (IP) technology and the epoll model are effectively integrated in this investigation to resolve the contradiction between large-scale emulation and computational overhead. The experimental results demonstrate that the strategy meets the requirement of a diverse and high-fidelity dynamic user behavior emulation and reaches the emulation scale of 100,000-level concurrent communication for normal users and 100,000-level concurrent attacks for rogue users.

Research and Implementation of SVDU Simulator Based on Emulation Technology

The safety video display unit (SVDU), as the display machine of the reactor protection system, performs the functions of displaying the reactor’s safety parameters and sending safety control commands. In order to meet the needs of nuclear power safety-level digital control system (DCS), like designing verification, operator training, and accidental drills, for the SVDU in the NASPIC platform developed independently by China National Nuclear Corporation, a virtual embedded system technology based on the micro x86 industrial host is proposed to make software simulation to the SVDU physical controller with exactly the same hardware appearance of the original one. The SVDU stimulator realized by this research can achieve 100% simulation of the logical functions of the SVDU physical equipment and the synchronized upgrading function between stimulator and the real equipment. With the development of multiple engineering application requirements, such as configuration verification and operator training, this stimulator has been applied in several virtual security level DCS projects.

High-Performance Routing Emulation Technologies Based on a Cloud Platform

Currently, the emergence of edge computing provides low-latency and high-efficiency computing for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, new architectures, protocols, and security technologies of edge computing need to be verified and evaluated before use. Since network emulation based on a cloud platform has advantages in scalability and fidelity, it can provide an effective network environment for verifying and evaluating new edge computing technologies. Therefore, we propose a high-performance emulation technology supporting the routing protocol based on a cloud platform. First, we take OpenStack as a basic network environment. To improve the performance and scalability of routing emulation, we then design the routing emulation architecture according to the software-defined network (SDN) and design the cluster scheduling mechanism. Finally, the design of the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol can support communication with physical routers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that this technology not only can provide a realistic OSPF protocol but also has obvious advantages in the overhead and performance of routing nodes compared with those of other network emulation technologies. Furthermore, the realization of the controller cluster improves the scalability in the emulation scale.

High-Fidelity Router Emulation Technologies Based on Multi-Scale Virtualization

Virtualization has the advantages of strong scalability and high fidelity in host node emulation. It can effectively meet the requirements of network emulation, including large scale, high fidelity, and flexible construction. However, for router emulation, virtual routers built with virtualization and routing software use Linux Traffic Control to emulate bandwidth, delay, and packet loss rates, which results in serious distortions in congestion scenarios. Motivated by this deficiency, we propose a novel router emulation method that consists of virtualization plane, routing plane, and a traffic control method. We designed and implemented our traffic control module in multi-scale virtualization, including the kernel space of a KVM-based virtual router and the user space of a Docker-based virtual router. Experiments show not only that the proposed method achieves high-fidelity router emulation, but also that its performance is consistent with that of a physical router in congestion scenarios. These findings provide good support for network research into congestion scenarios on virtualization-based emulation platforms.

The case for emulating insect brains using anatomical “wiring diagrams” equipped with biophysical models of neuronal activity

Developing whole-brain emulation (WBE) technology would provide immense benefits across neuroscience, biomedicine, artificial intelligence, and robotics. At this time, constructing a simulated human brain lacks feasibility due to limited experimental data and limited computational resources. However, I suggest that progress toward this goal might be accelerated by working toward an intermediate objective, namely insect brain emulation (IBE). More specifically, this would entail creating biologically realistic simulations of entire insect nervous systems along with more approximate simulations of non-neuronal insect physiology to make "virtual insects." I argue that this could be realistically achievable within the next 20years. I propose that developing emulations of insect brains will galvanize the global community of scientists, businesspeople, and policymakers toward pursuing the loftier goal of emulating the human brain. By demonstrating that WBE is possible via IBE, simulating mammalian brains and eventually the human brain may no longer be viewed as too radically ambitious to deserve substantial funding and resources. Furthermore, IBE will facilitate dramatic advances in cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robotics through studies performed using virtual insects.

A GA-Based Accelerator for Solving Sparse Matrices

This paper presents a novel hardware solution for solving sparse matrices using emulation technology. The proposed solution introduces a bio-inspired technique, which is Genetic Algorithm (GA) to solve the sparse system of linear equations (SLEs). The proposed solution can be used with any physical system that can be modeled as SLEs. Computations involved in Finite Element Method (FEM) consume too much time, which affects the final time-to-market value. Profiling shows that the most time-consuming part in the simulation process is the solver part which is responsible for solving the resultant SLEs generated from the FEM. The total number of equations may reach thousands or millions of linear equations. Hardware implementation of GA and making a good use of parallelism in implementing the architecture accelerate the time taken by the solver part. Solving the system by classical numerical methods, such as conjugate gradient (CG) implemented in software is performed sequentially, here the architecture allows the parallelism in performing GA operators, such as selection, crossover, and mutation. The parallelism in the proposed architecture is the superiority point which we rely on. The results show that our proposed method to solve the SLEs outperforms the classical CG software implementation on run time and number of equations.

Adding emulation functionality to existing digital preservation infrastructure

This paper shows how using emulation technologies to simulate obsolete computer systems can play an integral role in the digital preservation of information. The combination of state-of-the-art emulation as a service technology with an off-the-shelf digital preservation platform can make the process straightforward for the end user. The emulation of obsolete hardware and software environments to enable information to be read, and to facilitate interaction in a way that simulates the original user experience, is a well-established part of digital preservation solutions. Excellent tools have been developed to work with emulators, but these have remained in the research domain rather than being exploited at scale. This paper explores how an emulation framework has been added to an existing digital preservation infrastructure, enabling information extracted from obsolete hardware to be held in a digital preservation system at Yale University Library (YUL), and linked to an appropriate emulator. This enables YUL to recreate the user experience of interacting with content using the original software quickly and easily. This paper shows why emulation is required and how the integration of these technologies offers the prospect of large-scale emulation as a service linked to real preserved data. It will also examine the next steps needed to make this a reality.

Towards Transparent Debugging

Traditional malware analysis relies on virtualization or emulation technology to run samples in a confined environment, and to analyze malicious activities by instrumenting code execution. However, virtual machines and emulators inevitably create artifacts in the execution environment, making these approaches vulnerable to detection or subversion. In this paper, we present MalT , a debugging framework that employs System Management Mode, a CPU mode in the x86 architecture, to transparently study armored malware. MalT does not depend on virtualization or emulation and thus is immune to threats targeting such environments. Our approach reduces the attack surface at the software level, and advances state-of-the-art debugging transparency. MalT embodies various debugging functions, including register/memory accesses, breakpoints, and seven stepping modes. Additionally, MalT restores the system to a clean state after a debugging session. We implemented a prototype of MalT on two physical machines, and we conducted experiments by testing an array of existing anti-virtualization, anti-emulation, and packing techniques against MalT . The experimental results show that our prototype remains transparent and undetected against the samples. Furthermore, debugging and restoration introduce moderate but manageable overheads on both Windows and Linux platforms.

Shifting the ticketing paradigm: The role of open standards

This paper discusses the transit ticketing industry and the challenges it faces to evolve current systems. Providing an overview of the key pressures facing public transport operators, the piece will investigate how single-vendor fare collection systems are increasingly problematic and how the adoption of an open standard can bring new opportunities. The paper investigates how developments in internet of things (IoT), urban mobility and increasingly ‘smart cities’ are forcing transit ticketing to look beyond public transport. The need to develop multi-application solutions and collaborate with adjacent ecosystems, including access control and payments, is crucial. Moreover, it will consider how host card emulation (HCE) technology will be central to effecting this change. This consumer-centric approach will facilitate consumer demand for greater functionality and ease of use, and allow public transport operators to tap into new revenue streams at low initial cost. Readers will learn how open standards are vital for the future of fare collection and the only way to truly realise the full benefits of adopting HCE in transport. The paper will discuss the OSPT Alliance’s market-leading standard, CIPURSE, and its ability to both meet the challenges facing transport operators in the short term and provide scope for future developments and scalable long-term deployments.

A Tokenization-Based Communication Architecture for HCE-Enabled NFC Services

Following the announcement of Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology, card emulation mode based Near Field Communication (NFC) services have gained further appreciation as an enabler of the Cloud-based Secure Element (SE) concept. A comprehensive and complete architecture with a centralized and feasible business model for diverse HCE-based NFC services will be highly appreciated, particularly by Service Providers and users. To satisfy the need in this new emerging research area, a Tokenization-based communication architecture for HCE-based NFC services is presented in this paper. Our architecture proposes Two-Phased Tokenization to enable the identity management of both user and Service Provider. NFC Smartphone users can store, manage, and make use of their sensitive data on the Cloud for NFC services; Service Providers can also provide diverse card emulation NFC services easily through the proposed architecture. In this paper, we initially present the Two-Phased Tokenization model and then validate the proposed architecture by providing a case study on access control. We further evaluate the usability aspect in terms of an authentication scheme. We then discuss the ecosystem and business model comprised of the proposed architecture and emphasize the contributions to ecosystem actors. Finally, suggestions are provided for data protection in transit and at rest.

SCREDENT: Scalable Real-time Anomalies Detection and Notification of Targeted Malware in Mobile Devices

The ubiquitous availability of Android devices has led to increasing malicious mobile attacks targeting the Android mobile operating system. In recent times, adversaries leverage situational awareness, user and device context to create targeted malware for mobile devices. Several mobile security tools such as Mobile Sandbox, TargetDroid, and ANANAS focus on tailoring the detection schemes for individual users and suffer from scalability by analyzing individual user's activities. To the best of our knowledge, these tools do not incorporate user group profiling in their automated user-behavior driven dynamic analysis. In addition, adaptive and location-based alerts are not provided to mobile users. We propose SCREDENT: Scalable Real-time Anomalies Detection and Notification of Targeted Malware in Mobile Devices, to provide a scalable system to classify, detect, and predict targeted malware in real-time. SCREDENT incorporates behavior-triggering probabilistic models and user grouping to minimize the number of parallel dynamic analysis instances needed. SCREDENT leverages container technology to perform dynamic analysis and allow for modularity as emulation technology improves. SCREDENT uses adaptive, location-based notification principles to create a geographical fence which warn users of malicious attacks. Finally, SCREDENT provides proactive, adaptive alerts to individual users if at least one of the group members has triggered malicious activities in an application currently used by the individual.

입출력 가상화 기반 가상 데스크탑 서비스를 이용한 물리적 네트워크 망분리 시스템 설계 및 구현

IOV is a technology that supports one or more virtual desktops, and can share a single physical device. In general, the virtual desktop uses the virtual IO devices which are provided by virtualization SW, using SW emulation technology. Virtual desktops that use the IO devices based on SW emulation have a problem in which service quality and performance are declining. Also, they cannot support the high-end application operations such as 3D-based CAD and game applications. In this paper, we propose a physical network separation system using Virtual Desktop Service based on HW direct assignments to overcome these problems. The proposed system provides independent desktops that are used to access the intranet or internet using server virtualization technology in a physical desktop computer for the user. In addition, this system can also support a network separation without network performance degradation caused by inspection of the network packet for logical network separations and additional installations of the desktop for physical network separations.

An Efficient Screening Method for Computer Experiments

Computer simulators of real-world processes are often computationally expensive and require many inputs. The problem of the computational expense can be handled using emulation technology; however, highly multidimensional input spaces may require more simulator runs to train and validate the emulator. We aim to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by screening the simulator’s inputs for nonlinear effects on the output rather than distinguishing between negligible and active effects. Our proposed method is built upon the elementary effects (EE) method for screening and uses a threshold value to separate the inputs with linear and nonlinear effects. The technique is simple to implement and acts in a sequential way to keep the number of simulator runs down to a minimum, while identifying the inputs that have nonlinear effects. The algorithm is applied on a set of simulated examples and a rabies disease simulator where we observe run savings ranging between 28% and 63% compared with the batch EE method. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Is Brain Emulation Dangerous?

Abstract Brain emulation is a hypothetical but extremely transformative technology which has a non-zero chance of appearing during the next century. This paper investigates whether such a technology would also have any predictable characteristics that give it a chance of being catastrophically dangerous, and whether there are any policy levers which might be used to make it safer. We conclude that the riskiness of brain emulation probably depends on the order of the preceding research trajectory. Broadly speaking, it appears safer for brain emulation to happen sooner, because slower CPUs would make the technology‘s impact more gradual. It may also be safer if brains are scanned before they are fully understood from a neuroscience perspective, thereby increasing the initial population of emulations, although this prediction is weaker and more scenario-dependent. The risks posed by brain emulation also seem strongly connected to questions about the balance of power between attackers and defenders in computer security contests. If economic property rights in CPU cycles1 are essentially enforceable, emulation appears to be comparatively safe; if CPU cycles are ultimately easy to steal, the appearance of brain emulation is more likely to be a destabilizing development for human geopolitics. Furthermore, if the computers used to run emulations can be kept secure, then it appears that making brain emulation technologies ―open‖ would make them safer. If, however, computer insecurity is deep and unavoidable, openness may actually be more dangerous. We point to some arguments that suggest the former may be true, tentatively implying that it would be good policy to work towards brain emulation using open scientific methodology and free/open source software codebases

Research and Construction of Information Security Simulation Test Bed for Electric Power System

Electric power system relies heavily on common information technologies and platforms, so all common information security issues have been experienced in the electric power information system. Because of attacks destructivity and uncontrollability, it is inappropriate to conduct security analysis in a real Power system directly. Therefore, the paper uses simulation and emulation technology to build a information security test bed for power system at a lower cost and no affect the normal operation and the premise of the aimed system. Simulation contents in the test bed are arranged in four different layers including firmware layer, system layer, network layer and application layer. The test bed also provides a network attack and defense combat system. The test bed can be used for Power system information and network system security testing, engineering validation and evaluation.

Study on Key Technologies of One Radar Emulation System

Visual emulation Technology is one of the important parts of VR systems. It takes charge of Vision issue in VR systems, and is the most important fact to affect the immersive of the system. To deal with the difficulties of one type artillery radar, such as limited training field, serious radar loss and expensive training outlay, a training simulator system is realized based on scene simulation technologies. Composition structure, function module and key technologies of the system are discussed first. This system is then developed with tools of Multigen-Creator, Vega, VC++6.0, and a living virtual battlefield environment is created. The emulation pictures are listed, the results show that the emulation system simulates operation process of artillery radar livingly and can meet the requirements of real time emulation.

Crustal constraint through complete model space screening for diverse geophysical datasets facilitated by emulation

Deep crustal constraint is often carried out using deterministic inverse methods, sometimes using seismic refraction, gravity and electromagnetic datasets in a complementary or “joint” scheme. With increasingly powerful parallel computer systems it is now possible to apply joint inversion schemes to derive an optimum model from diverse input data. These methods are highly effective where the uncertainty in the system is small. However, given the complex nature of these schemes it is often difficult to discern the uniqueness of the output model given the noise in the data, and the application of necessary regularization and weighting in the inversion process means that the extent of user prejudice pertaining to the final result may be unclear. We can rigorously address the subject of uncertainty using standard statistical tools but these methods also become less feasible if the prior model space is large or the forward simulations are computationally expensive. We present a simple Monte Carlo scheme to screen model space in a fully joint fashion, in which we replace the forward simulation with a fast and uncertainty-calibrated mathematical function, or emulator. This emulator is used as a proxy to run the very large number of models necessary to fully explore the plausible model space. We develop the method using a simple synthetic dataset then demonstrate its use on a joint data set comprising first-arrival seismic refraction, MT and scalar gravity data over a diapiric salt body. This study demonstrates both the value of a forward Monte Carlo approach (as distinct from a search-based or conventional inverse approach) in incorporating all kinds of uncertainty in the modelling process, exploring the entire model space, and shows the potential value of applying emulator technology throughout geophysics. Though the target here is relatively shallow, the methodology can be readily extended to address the whole crust.