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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

LSAFE: a Lightweight Static Analysis Framework for binary Executables

Static analysis is a widely used technique for analyzing various aspects of programs. However, as programs become more complex, static analysis tools require larger resources, such as CPU time and memory, to perform the same tasks. Moreover, the source code of programs may not always be accessible, requiring static analysis to be performed on the binary executable code directly. To overcome these challenges, we propose a lightweight static analysis framework called LSAFE, which constructs control flow graphs (CFGs) and data dependency graphs (DDGs) of target programs with optimized performance in terms of CPU and memory usage. We evaluated the proposed framework using both Spec benchmark programs and real-world industrial applications, and found that it outperformed Angr, an existing state-of-the-art static analysis tool. Additionally, we demonstrate a case study that utilizes the CFG generated by LSAFE to detect memory leaks.

Qu, Guangzhi↗
DOE OSTI2022

MAPredict: Static Analysis Driven Memory Access Prediction Framework for Modern CPUs

Application memory access patterns are crucial in deciding how much traffic is served by the cache and forwarded to the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). However, predicting such memory traffic is difficult because of the interplay of prefetchers, compilers, parallel execution, and innovations in manufacturer-specific micro-architectures. This research introduced MAPredict, a static analysis-driven framework that addresses these challenges to predict last-level cache (LLC)-DRAM traffic. By exploring and analyzing the behavior of modern Intel processors, MAPredict formulates cache-aware analytical models. MAPredict invokes these models to predict LLC-DRAM traffic by combining the application model, machine model, and user-provided hints to capture dynamic information. MAPredict successfully predicts LLC-DRAM traffic for different regular access patterns and provides the means to combine static and empirical observations for irregular access patterns. Evaluating 130 workloads from six applications on recent Intel micro-architectures, MAPredict yielded an average accuracy of 99% for streaming, 91% for strided, and 92% for stencil patterns. By coupling static and empirical methods, up to 97% average accuracy was obtained for random access patterns on different micro-architectures.

Monil, M. A. H.↗
DOE OSTI2020

Language Independent Static Analysis (LISA)

Software is becoming increasingly important in nearly every aspect of global society and therefore in nearly every aspect of national security as well. While there have been major advancements in recent years in formally proving properties of program source code during development, such approaches are still in the minority among development teams, and the vast majority of code in this software explosion is produced without such properties. In these cases, the source code must be analyzed in order to establish whether the properties of interest hold. Because of the volume of software being produced, automated approaches to software analysis are necessary to meet the need. However, this software boom is not occurring in just one language. There are a wide range of languages of interest in national security spaces, including well-known languages such as C, C++, Python, Java, Javascript, and many more. But recent years have produced a wide range of new languages, including Nim, (2008), Go (2009), Rust (2010), Dart (2011), Kotlin (2011), Elixir (2011), Red (2011), Julia (2012), Typescript (2012), Swift (2014), Hack (2014), Crystal (2014), Ballerina (2017) and more. Historically, automated software analyses are implemented as tools that intermingle both the analysis question at hand with target language dependencies throughout their code, making re-use of components for different analysis questions or different target languages impractical. This project seeks to explore how mission-relevant, static software analyses can be designed and constructed in a language-independent fashion, dramatically increasing the reusability of software analysis investments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2016

Size effects of 109° domain walls in rhombohedral barium titanate single crystals—A molecular statics analysis

Ferroelectric functional materials are of great interest in science and technology due to their electromechanically coupled material properties. Therefore, ferroelectrics, such as barium titanate, are modeled and simulated at the continuum scale as well as at the atomistic scale. Due to recent advancements in related manufacturing technologies the modeling and simulation of smart materials at the nanometer length scale is getting more important not only to predict but also fundamentally understand the complex material behavior of such materials. In this study, we analyze the size effects of 109° nanodomain walls in ferroelectric barium titanate single crystals in the rhombohedral phase using a recently proposed extended molecular statics algorithm. We study the impact of domain thicknesses on the spontaneous polarization, the coercive field, and the lattice constants. Moreover, we discuss how the electromechanical coupling of an applied electric field and the introduced strain in the converse piezoelectric effect is affected by the thickness of nanodomains.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2019

CAASCADE: A System for Static Analysis of HPC Software Application Portfolios

With the increasing complexity of upcoming HPC systems, so-called “co-design” efforts to develop the hardware and applications in concert for these systems also become more challenging. It is currently difficult to gather information about the usage of programming model features, libraries, and data structure considerations in a quantitative way across a variety of applications, and this information is needed to prioritize development efforts in systems software and hardware optimizations. In this paper we propose CAASCADE, a system that can harvest this information in an automatic way in production HPC environments, and we show some early results from a prototype of the system based on GNU compilers and a MySQL database.

Lopez, Graham↗
DOE OSTI2016

NVL-C: Static Analysis Techniques for Efficient, Correct Programming of Non-Volatile Main Memory Systems

Computer architecture experts expect that non-volatile memory (NVM) hierarchies will play a more significant role in future systems including mobile, enterprise, and HPC architectures. With this expectation in mind, we present NVL-C: a novel programming system that facilitates the efficient and correct programming of NVM main memory systems. The NVL-C programming abstraction extends C with a small set of intuitive language features that target NVM main memory, and can be combined directly with traditional C memory model features for DRAM. We have designed these new features to enable compiler analyses and run-time checks that can improve performance and guard against a number of subtle programming errors, which, when left uncorrected, can corrupt NVM-stored data. Moreover, to enable recovery of data across application or system failures, these NVL-C features include a flexible directive for specifying NVM transactions. So that our implementation might be extended to other compiler front ends and languages, the majority of our compiler analyses are implemented in an extended version of LLVM's intermediate representation (LLVM IR). We evaluate NVL-C on a number of applications to show its flexibility, performance, and correctness.

Denny, Joel↗
DOE OSTI2017

ExaSat: An Exascale Static Analysis Tool (ExaSat) v1.0

The ExaSAT framework automates the extraction of parameterized performance models directly from source code using compiler analysis. Its parameterized analytic model enables quantitative evaluation of a broad range of hardware design trade-offs and software optimizations on a variety of different performance metrics, with a primary focus on data movement as a metric. ExaSAT analysis provides insights in the hardware and software tradeoffs and lays the groundwork for exploring a more targeted set of design points using cycle-accurate architectural simulators and emulators.

Chan, Cy↗
DOE OSTI2019

Considerations for Canister Design and Drop Testing

This paper discusses some considerations for the proposed design and analysis of canisters used to ship reactor debris from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Energy-limited events, such as cask drops and other dynamic impacts, are evaluated much differently than other structures using static analysis. Static analysis of structures makes sense for engineers because static analysis is intuitive and material typically behaves in a linear elastic manner. Dynamic analyses are typically not intuitive because of non-linear material behavior. This is why canister designs need to be evaluated by dynamic finite element analysis and/or laboratory drop tests.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2021

MoorPy (Quasi-Static Mooring Analysis in Python)

MoorPy is a quasi-static mooring model and a suite of associated functions for mooring system analysis. The core model supports quasi-static analysis of moored floating systems including any arrangement of mooring lines and floating platforms. It solves the distributed position and tension of each mooring line segment using standard catenary equations. Floating platforms can be represented with linear hydrostatic characteristics. MoorPy automatically computes a floating system's equilibrium state and can be queried to identify a mooring system's nonlinear force-displacement relationships. Linearized stiffness matrices are efficiently computed using semi-analytic Jacobians. MoorPy also includes plotting functions and a library of mooring component property and cost coefficients. MoorPy can be used directly from Python scripts to perform mooring design and analysis tasks, or it can be coupled with other tools to compute quasi-static mooring reactions as part of a larger simulation.

Hall, Mathew↗
DOE OSTI2022

Software Verification Toolkit (SVT): Survey on Available Software Verification Tools and Future Direction

Writing software is difficult. However, writing complex, well tested and designed, and functionally correct software is incredibly difficult. An entire field of study is devoted to the validation and verification of software to address this problem, and in this paper we analyze the landscape of currently available third party software. We have divided our analyses into three separate subsections with regards to software validation: formal methods, static analysis, and test generation. Formal verification is the most complex method in which to validate software correctness, but also the most thorough as it truly validates the mathematical validity of the source code. Static analysis generally is relegated to abstract syntax tree traversal techniques to find errors related to faulty software such as memory leaks or stack overflow issues. Automatic test generation is similar in implementation to static analysis, but pushes a bit further in verifying the boundedness of function inputs and outputs with regards to annotated or parsed criteria. The crux of this report is to analyze and describe the software tools that implement these techniques to validate and verify software. Pros and cons related to installation, utilization, and capabilities of the frameworks are described, and reproducible examples are provided with a focus on usability. The initial survey concluded that the most interesting tools of note are Z3, Isabelle/HOL, and TLA+ with regards to formal verification; and Infer, Frama-C, and SonarQube with regards to static analysis. With these tools in mind, a final conjecture is provided that describes future avenues of utilizing these tools for developing a verification framework to assist in validating existing software at Sandia National Laboratories.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2015

Quasi-Static Indentation Analysis of Carbon-Fiber Laminates.

A series of quasi - static indentation experiments are conducted on carbon fiber reinforced polymer laminates with a systematic variation of thicknesses and fixture boundary conditions. Different deformation mechanisms and their resulting damage mechanisms are activated b y changing the thickn ess and boundary conditions. The quasi - static indentation experiments have been shown to achieve damage mechanisms similar to impact and penetration, however without strain rate effects. The low rate allows for the detailed analysis on the load response. Moreover, interrupted tests allow for the incremental analysis of various damage mechanisms and pr ogressions. The experimentally tested specimens are non - destructively evaluated (NDE) with optical imaging, ultrasonics and computed tomography. The load displacement responses and the NDE are then utilized in numerical simulations for the purpose of model validation and vetting. The accompanying numerical simulation work serves two purposes. First, the results further reveal the time sequence of events and the meaning behind load dro ps not clear from NDE . Second, the simulations demonstrate insufficiencies in the code and can then direct future efforts for development.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Deciphering Discrepancies: A Comparative Analysis of Docker Image Security

As the use of microservices continues to grow and become a foundational approach to architecting software solutions, ensuring the security of microservices is paramount. Docker images have emerged as the predominant solution to containerize microservices–and thus, Docker images are becoming a large attack surface. Thus, reducing vulnerabilities in Docker images will reduce microservice cyberattacks. A common way to find vulnerabilities in Docker images employs static analysis tools like Trivy and Grype. However, these tools frequently generate disparate vulnerability reports when analyzing the same Docker image, thus causing uncertainty in tool selection. We collected 927 Docker images, analyzed them with Trivy and Grype, and compared the vulnerabilities reported in each image. Among the 865 images found to have vulnerabilities, Trivy and Grype disagreed on both the number of vulnerabilities and the vulnerability IDs found therein. Since both tools interface with external vulnerability databases, some discrepancies can be attributed to how the tools interface with these external resources. The external vulnerability databases partially overlap and frequently contradict one another, thereby creating challenges for static analysis tool developers and end users alike. This New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) study contains new and critical information that practitioners need for selecting and using static analysis tools–given that increases in the use of Docker technologies means increases in the size of the attack surfaces.

Boles, Brittany [Montana State University]↗
DOE OSTI2017

Understanding Data Structures by Extracting Memory Access Graphs

Understanding the data structures employed by a program is important for reverse engineering activities and can improve the results of automated software analysis techniques. In a compiled binary, access to data structure fields and array indices defined in the source program are replaced by raw pointer arithmetic. We present a representation for capturing the essential details of how a program accesses memory regions, which we call a Memory Access Graph (MAG), and a static analysis for automatically extracting this information from a program binary. The static analysis to extract the MAGs from the program is straightforward and does not require sophisticated integer or pointer analysis. The MAGs are readily understood by reverse engineers; they are generally able to perceive the data structure definition corresponding to a MAG. We briefly discuss automatic extraction of structure definitions outlining some of the difficulties in doing so.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗