Since GRBs fade rapidly, it is important to publish accurate, precise positions at early times. For Swift-detected bursts, the best promptly available position is most commonly the X-ray Telescope (XRT) position. We present two processes, developed by the Swift team at Leicester, which are now routinely used to improve the precision and accuracy of the XRT positions reported by the Swift team. ...

Information flow analysis is a widely-adopted technique in software testing and malware analysis. For information flow analysis, a system-level emulator equipped with dynamic information flow tracking capability, DIFT, is needed. However, its effectiveness comes at a price of severe performance degradation due to interleaved system emulation and DIFT analysis. In this paper, a decoupled system-...

We review recent observations of short-hard gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows. The launch and successful ongoing operations of the Swift satellite, along with several localizations from the High-Energy Transient Explorer mission, have provoked a revolution in short-burst studies: first, by quickly providing high-quality positions to observers; and second, via rapid and sustained observation...

We predict the redshift of the first observable (i.e., in our past light cone) Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) and calculate the GRB-rate redshift distribution of the Population III stars at very early times (z = 20 − 60). Using the last 2 years of data from Swift we place an upper limit on the efficiency (ηGRB) of GRB production per solar mass from the first generation of stars. We find that the first o...

SWIFT J1756.9-2508 is one of the few accreting millisecond pulsars (AMPs) discovered to date. We report here the results of our analysis of its aperiodic X-ray variability, as measured with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer during the 2007 outburst of the source. We detect strong (∼35%) flat-topped broadband noise throughout the outburst with low characteristic frequencies (∼0.1 Hz). This makes S...

More and more high available applications are implemented on Windows NT. However, the current version of Windows NT (NT4) does not provide some facilities that are needed to implement these fault tolerant applications. In this paper, we describe a set of components collectively named NT-SwiFT (Software Implemented Fault Tolerance) which facilitates building fault-tolerant and highly available a...

SWIFT++ is a collision detection package capable of detecting intersection, performing tolerance verification, computing approximate and exact distance, and determining the contacts between pairs of objects in a scene composed of general rigid polyhedral models. It is a robust and efficient library shown to be substantially faster than currently available packages. It is a powerful package from...

Using the Swift data of GRB 050315, we progress in proving the uniqueness of our theoretically predicted Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) structure as composed by a proper-GRB, emitted at the transparency of an electron-positron plasma with suitable baryon loading, and an afterglow comprising the “prompt radiation” as due to external shocks. Detailed light curves for selected energy bands are theoreticall...

The Silicon Wafer Integrated Femtosatellites (SWIFT) Swarm Project presents a new paradigm-shifting definition of spacecraft technology that can enable flight of swarms of fully capable femtosats. One of the most important applications of SWIFT is a distributed aperture array. New swarm Golay array configurations are introduced and shown to dramatically increase the effective diameter derived f...

A 32×32 64b self-arbitrating switch fabric called SWIFT achieves a bandwidth of 2.1Tb/s with single cycle arbitration and data transfer la-tency in 65nm technology while operating at 1026MHz at 1.2V. SWIFT co-optimizes arbiter and crossbar logic using a unique fabric architecture that integrates conflict resolution with data routing to optimally use logic and interconnect resources. It spans 0....