arXiv subjects

Jose M. Fernandez

Publications and source records attributed to Jose M. Fernandez.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Workflows Community Summit 2024: Future Trends and Challenges in Scientific Workflows

The Workflows Community Summit gathered 111 participants from 18 countries to discuss emerging trends and challenges in scientific workflows, focusing on six key areas: time-sensitive workflows, AI-HPC convergence, multi-facility workflows, heterogeneous HPC environments, user experience, and FAIR computational workflows. The integration of AI and exascale computing has revolutionized scientific workflows, enabling higher-fidelity models and complex, time-sensitive processes, while introducing challenges in managing heterogeneous environments and multi-facility data dependencies. The rise of large language models is driving computational demands to zettaflop scales, necessitating modular, adaptable systems and cloud-service models to optimize resource utilization and ensure reproducibility. Multi-facility workflows present challenges in data movement, curation, and overcoming institutional silos, while diverse hardware architectures require integrating workflow considerations into early system design and developing standardized resource management tools. The summit emphasized improving user experience in workflow systems and ensuring FAIR workflows to enhance collaboration and accelerate scientific discovery. Key recommendations include developing standardized metrics for time-sensitive workflows, creating frameworks for cloud-HPC integration, implementing distributed-by-design workflow modeling, establishing multi-facility authentication protocols, and accelerating AI integration in HPC workflow management. The summit also called for comprehensive workflow benchmarks, workflow-specific UX principles, and a FAIR workflow maturity model, highlighting the need for continued collaboration in addressing the complex challenges posed by the convergence of AI, HPC, and multi-facility research environments.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

The never ending war in the stack and the reincarnation of ROP attacks

Return Oriented Programming (ROP) is a technique by which an attacker can induce arbitrary behavior inside a vulnerable program without injecting a malicious code. The continues failure of the currently deployed defenses against ROP has made it again one of the most powerful memory corruption attacks. ROP is also considered as one of the most flexible attacks, its level of flexibility, unlike other code reuse attacks, can reach the Turing completeness. Several efforts have been undertaken to study this threat and to propose better defense mechanisms (mitigation or prevention), yet the majority of them are not deeply reviewed nor officially implemented.Furthermore, similar studies show that the techniques proposed to prevent ROP-based exploits usually yield a high false-negative rate and a higher false-positive rate, not to mention the overhead that they introduce into the protected program. The first part of this research work aims at providing an in-depth analysis of the currently available anti-ROP solutions (deployed and proposed), focusing on inspecting their defense logic and summarizing their weaknesses and problems. The second part of this work aims at introducing our proposed Indicators Of Compromise (IOCs) that could be used to improve the detection rate of ROP attacks. The three suggested indicators could detect these attacks at run-time by checking the presence of some artifacts during the execution of the targeted program.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2009

Mass and radius determinations for five transiting M-dwarf stars

We have derived masses and radii for both components in five short-period single-lined eclipsing binary stars discovered by the TrES wide-angle photometric survey for transiting planets. All these systems consist of a visible F-star primary and an unseen M-star secondary (M_A > 0.8 M_sun, M_B < 0.45 M_sun). The spectroscopic orbital solution combined with a high precision transit light curve for each system gives sufficient information to calculate the density of the primary star and the surface gravity of the secondary. The masses of the primary stars were obtained using stellar evolution models. The solutions were compared with results obtained by calculating the radius of the primary stars under the assumption of rotational synchronization with the orbital period and alignment between their spin axis and the axis of the orbit. Four systems show an acceptable match between the two sets of results, but one system shows a clear mismatch between the two solutions, which may indicate the absence of synchronization or a misalignment between the rotational and orbital axis. When compared to low-mass stellar evolution models, the derived masses and radii of the unseen M dwarfs are inconsistent (three only marginally) with the predicted values, with all of the radii being larger than expected for their masses. These results confirm the discrepancy shown in previous work between the predicted and observed radii on low-mass binary stars. This work also shows that reliance on the assumption of synchronization to derive the mass and radius of stars in eclipsing single--lined F+M binaries is a useful tool, but may not always be warranted and should be carefully tested against stellar evolution models.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2009

The Transit Light Curve Project. XII. Six Transits of the Exoplanet XO-2b

We present photometry of six transits of the exoplanet XO-2b. By combining the light-curve analysis with theoretical isochrones to determine the stellar properties, we find the planetary radius to be 0.996 +0.031/-0.018 rjup and the planetary mass to be 0.565 +/- 0.054 mjup. These results are consistent with those reported previously, and are also consistent with theoretical models for gas giant planets. The mid-transit times are accurate to within 1 min and are consistent with a constant period. However, the period we derive differs by 2.5 sigma from the previously published period. More data are needed to tell whether the period is actually variable (as it would be in the presence of an additional body) or if the timing errors have been underestimated.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2006

Cluster state quantum computing in optical fibers

A scheme for the implementation of the cluster state model of quantum computing in optical fibers, which enables the feedforward feature, is proposed. This scheme uses the time-bin encoding of qubits. Following previously suggested methods of applying arbitrary one-qubit gates in optical fibers, two different ways for the realization of fusion gate types I and II for cluster production are proposed: a fully time-bin based encoding scheme and a combination of time-bin and polarization based encoding scheme. Also the methods of measurement in any desired bases for the purpose of the processing of cluster state computing for both these encodings are explained.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2005

Experimental Heat-Bath Cooling of Spins

Algorithmic cooling is a novel technique to generate ensembles of highly polarized spins, which could significantly improve the signal strength in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. It combines reversible (entropy-preserving) manipulations and irreversible controlled interactions with the environment, using simple quantum computing techniques to increase spin polarization far beyond the Shannon entropy-conservation bound. Notably, thermalization is beneficially employed as an integral part of the cooling scheme, contrary to its ordinary destructive implications. We report the first cooling experiments bypassing Shannon's entropy-conservation bound, performed on a standard liquid-state NMR spectrometer. We believe that this experimental success could pave the way for the first near-future application of quantum computing devices.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2005

Paramagnetic Materials and Practical Algorithmic Cooling for NMR Quantum Computing

Algorithmic Cooling is a method that uses novel data compression techniques and simplecquantum computing devices to improve NMR spectroscopy, and to offer scalable NMR quantum computers. The algorithm recursively employs two steps. A reversible entropy compression of the computation quantum-bits (qubits) of the system and an irreversible heat transfer from the system to the environment through a set of reset qubits that reach thermal relaxation rapidly. Is it possible to experimentally demonstrate algorithmic cooling using existing technology? To allow experimental algorithmic cooling, the thermalization time of the reset qubits must be much shorter than the thermalization time of the computation qubits. However such thermalization-times ratios have yet to be reported. We investigate here the effect of a paramagnetic salt on the thermalization-times ratio of computation qubits (carbons) and a reset qubit (hydrogen). We show that the thermalization-times ratio is improved by approximately three-fold. Based on this result, an experimental demonstration of algorithmic cooling by thermalization and magnetic ions is currently performed by our group and collaborators.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2004

Quaternionic Computing

We introduce a model of computation based on quaternions, which is inspired on the quantum computing model. Pure states are vectors of a suitable linear space over the quaternions. Other aspects of the theory are the same as in quantum computing: superposition and linearity of the state space, unitarity of the transformations, and projective measurements. However, one notable exception is the fact that quaternionic circuits do not have a uniquely defined behaviour, unless a total ordering of evaluation of the gates is defined. Given such an ordering a unique unitary operator can be associated with the quaternionic circuit and a proper semantics of computation can be associated with it. The main result of this paper consists in showing that this model is no more powerful than quantum computing, as long as such an ordering of gates can be defined. More concretely we show, that for all quaternionic computation using n quaterbits, the behaviour of the circuit for each possible gate ordering can be simulated with n+1 qubits, and this with little or no overhead in circuit size. The proof of this result is inspired of a new simplified and improved proof of the equivalence of a similar model based on real amplitudes to quantum computing, which states that any quantum computation using n qubits can be simulated with n+1 rebits, and in this with no circuit size overhead. Beyond this potential computational equivalence, however, we propose this model as a simpler framework in which to discuss the possibility of a quaternionic quantum mechanics or information theory. In particular, it already allows us to illustrate that the introduction of quaternions might violate some of the ``natural'' properties that we have come to expect from physical models.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2004

Algorithmic Cooling of Spins: A Practicable Method for Increasing Polarization

An efficient technique to generate ensembles of spins that are highly polarized by external magnetic fields is the Holy Grail in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Since spin-half nuclei have steady-state polarization biases that increase inversely with temperature, spins exhibiting high polarization biases are considered cool, even when their environment is warm. Existing spin-cooling techniques are highly limited in their efficiency and usefulness. Algorithmic cooling is a promising new spin-cooling approach that employs data compression methods in open systems. It reduces the entropy of spins on long molecules to a point far beyond Shannon's bound on reversible entropy manipulations (an information-theoretic version of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics), thus increasing their polarization. Here we present an efficient and experimentally feasible algorithmic cooling technique that cools spins to very low temperatures even on short molecules. This practicable algorithmic cooling could lead to breakthroughs in high-sensitivity NMR spectroscopy in the near future, and to the development of scalable NMR quantum computers in the far future. Moreover, while the cooling algorithm itself is classical, it uses quantum gates in its implementation, thus representing the first short-term application of quantum computing devices.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2003

Quantum Arithmetic on Galois Fields

In this paper we discuss the problem of performing elementary finite field arithmetic on a quantum computer. Of particular interest, is the controlled-multiplication operation, which is the only group-specific operation in Shor's algorithms for factoring and solving the Discrete Log Problem. We describe how to build quantum circuits for performing this operation on the generic Galois fields GF($p^k$), as well as the boundary cases GF($p$) and GF($2^k$). We give the detailed size, width and depth complexity of such circuits, which ultimately will allow us to obtain detailed upper bounds on the amount of quantum resources needed to solve instances of the DLP on such fields.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2002

A common algebraic description for probabilistic and quantum computations

We study the computational complexity of the problem SFT (Sum-free Formula partial Trace): given a tensor formula F over a subsemiring of the complex field (C,+,.) plus a positive integer k, under the restrictions that all inputs are column vectors of L2-norm 1 and norm-preserving square matrices, and that the output matrix is a column vector, decide whether the k-partial trace of $F\dagg{F}$ is superior to 1/2. The k-partial trace of a matrix is the sum of its lowermost k diagonal elements. We also consider the promise version of this problem, where the 1/2 threshold is an isolated cutpoint. We show how to encode a quantum or reversible gate array into a tensor formula which satisfies the above conditions, and vice-versa; we use this to show that the promise version of SFT is complete for the class BPP for formulas over the semiring (Q^+,+,.) of the positive rational numbers, for BQP in the case of formulas defined over the field (Q,+,.), and for P in the case of formulas defined over the Boolean semiring, all under logspace-uniform reducibility. This suggests that the difference between probabilistic and quantum polynomial-time computers may ultimately lie in the possibility, in the latter case, of having destructive interference between computations occuring in parallel.

quant-ph↗