The Center for Global Computing

The adoption of multi- and many-core chips as the architecture-of-choice for mainstream computing will undoubtedly bring about profound changes in the way software is developed. In particular, the use of fine grained locking as the multi-core programmer's coordination methodology is viewed by most experts as a dead-end.

The transactional memory (TM) programming paradigm is a strong contender to become the approach of choice for replacing locks and implementing atomic operations in concurrent programming. Combining sequences of concurrent operations into atomic transactions promises a great reduction in the complexity of both programming and verification, by making parts of the code appear to be sequential without the need to program fine-grained locks. Transactions remove from the programmer the burden of figuring out the interaction among concurrent operations that happen to conflict when accessing the same locations in memory.

To make TM an effective tool, TM systems will need the right hardware and software support to provide scalability not only in terms of number of cores, but also in terms of code size and complexity. The objective of this project is to understand how to provide such support by developing an integrated TM stack. Such a TM stack would span a system from the underlying hardware to the high end application and would consist of the following components: CPU, operating system, runtime, libraries, compilers, programming languages and application environments.

We anticipate that such a fully integrated TM system will not only improve our understanding of TM designs but also greatly help in the adoption of the TM paradigm by the European software industry, making it a tool-of-choice for concurrent programming on multi- and many-core platforms.

The overall goal of the OKKAM project is to enable the Web of Entities, a global digital space for publishing and managing information about entities , where every entity is uniquely identified, and links between entities can be explicitly specified and exploited in a variety of scenarios. Compared to the WWW, the main differences are that the domain of entities is extended beyond the realm of digital resources to include objects in other realms like products, organizations, associations, countries, events, publications, hotels or people; and that links between entities are extended beyond hyperlinks to include virtually any type of relation.

The WWW has clearly demonstrated the socio-economical potential of enabling a global decentralized network of documents, connected by hyperlinks, and services built on top of this infrastructure. In a short period of time, we have witnessed how the WWW has had a remarkable impact on our personal, social and professional lives. We believe that the Web of Entities has the potential to increase this impact, and to foster a whole new family of applications and services. However, to make this happen, the Web of Entities must trigger (as the WWW did) what economists call network externality effect , and this requires at least three pillars to be in place:

• a suitable infrastructure which can support the open and sustainable growth of the Web of Entities;
• a critical mass of new entity-aware content and data accessible to a very large number of users in a relatively short time; and
• a collection of exemplary and high impact applications, which can prove to the key players in ICT that investing on the Web of Entities is worthwhile.

The OKKAM project presents a strategy and an effective work plan to build the three pillars of this Web of Entities, not only from a technical point of view, but also from a social, organizational and business-oriented perspective.

ECRYPT II is a NoE in the area of cryptology with a duration of 48 months. Cryptology is the science that studies mathematical techniques in order to provide secrecy, authenticity and related properties for digital information including the secure implementations of these techniques. It is an interdisciplinary research area with high strategic impact for European industry and for the society as a whole. It is a fundamental enabler for secure, dependable and trusted infrastructures.

The ECRYPT II research roadmap is motivated by the changing environment and threat models in which cryptology is deployed, by the gradual erosion of the computational difficulty of the mathematical problems on which cryptology is based, and by the requirements of new applications and cryptographic implementations. Its main objective is to ensure a durable integration of European research in both academia and industry and to maintain and strengthen the European excellence in these areas. In order to reach this goal, 11 leading players propose to integrate their research capabilities within three virtual labs focusing on symmetric key algorithms, public key algorithms and protocols, and hardware and software implementation. They will be joined by more than 20 adjoint members to the network who will closely collaborate with the core partners.

ECRYPT II plans to build on an expand the integration activities developed within ECRYPT that include joint workshops, exchange of researchers and students, development of common tools and benchmarks and a website and forum which will be a focal point for the network and the wider cryptographic community. Spreading activities will include a training program, a substantial contribution towards standardization, bodies and an active publication policy. The project team has the critical mass and breadth to address the key questions in these areas.