The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was launched into orbit in June 2008, and is conducting a multi-year gamma-ray all-sky survey, using the main instrument on Fermi, the Large Area Telescope (LAT). Fermi began its science mission in August 2008, and has now been operating for almost 4 years. The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory hosts the LAT Instrument Science Operations Center (ISOC), which supports the operation of the LAT in conjunction with the Mission Operations Center (MOC) and the Fermi Science Support Center (FSSC), both at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The LAT has a continuous output data rate of about 1.5 Mbits per second, and data from the LAT are stored on Fermi and transmitted to the ground through TDRS and the MOC to the ISOC about 10 times per day. Several hundred computers at SLAC are used to process LAT data to perform event reconstruction, and gamma-ray photon data are subsequently delivered to the FSSC for public release with a few hours of being detected by the LAT. We summarize the current status of the LAT, and the evolution of the data processing and monitoring performed by the ISOC during the first 4 years of the Fermi mission, together …

Identifying software vulnerabilities is becoming more important as critical and sensitive systems increasingly rely on complex software systems. It has been suggested in previous work that some bugs are only identified as vulnerabilities long after the bug has been made public. These vulnerabilities are known as hidden impact vulnerabilities. This paper discusses the feasibility and necessity to mine common publicly available bug databases for vulnerabilities that are yet to be identified. We present bug database analysis of two well known and frequently used software packages, namely Linux kernel and MySQL. It is shown that for both Linux and MySQL, a significant portion of vulnerabilities that were discovered for the time period from January 2006 to April 2011 were hidden impact vulnerabilities. It is also shown that the percentage of hidden impact vulnerabilities has increased in the last two years, for both software packages. We then propose an improved hidden impact vulnerability identification methodology based on text mining bug databases, and conclude by discussing a few potential problems faced by such a classifier.

BigBOSS is a Stage IV ground-based dark energy experiment to study baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) and the growth of structure with a wide-area galaxy and quasar redshift survey over 14,000 square degrees. It has been conditionally accepted by NOAO in response to a call for major new instrumentation and a high-impact science program for the 4-m Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak. The BigBOSS instrument is a robotically-actuated, fiber-fed spectrograph capable of taking 5000 simultaneous spectra over a wavelength range from 340 nm to 1060 nm, with a resolution R = {lambda}/{Delta}{lambda} = 3000-4800. Using data from imaging surveys that are already underway, spectroscopic targets are selected that trace the underlying dark matter distribution. In particular, targets include luminous red galaxies (LRGs) up to z = 1.0, extending the BOSS LRG survey in both redshift and survey area. To probe the universe out to even higher redshift, BigBOSS will target bright [OII] emission line galaxies (ELGs) up to z = 1.7. In total, 20 million galaxy redshifts are obtained to measure the BAO feature, trace the matter power spectrum at smaller scales, and detect redshift space distortions. BigBOSS will provide additional constraints on early dark energy and on the curvature of …