Nourin Shahin

Nourin Shahin, Izzat Alsmadi

As large language models (LLMs) move from research prototypes to enterprise systems, their security vulnerabilities pose serious risks to data privacy and system integrity. This study benchmarks various Llama model variants against the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications framework, evaluating threat detection accuracy, response safety, and computational overhead. Using the FABRIC testbed with NVIDIA A30 GPUs, we tested five standard Llama models and five Llama Guard variants on 100 adversarial prompts covering ten vulnerability categories. Our results reveal significant differences in security performance: the compact Llama-Guard-3-1B model achieved the highest detection rate of 76% with minimal latency (0.165s per test), whereas base models such as Llama-3.1-8B failed to detect threats (0% accuracy) despite longer inference times (0.754s). We observe an inverse relationship between model size and security effectiveness, suggesting that smaller, specialized models often outperform larger general-purpose ones in security tasks. Additionally, we provide an open-source benchmark dataset including adversarial prompts, threat labels, and attack metadata to support reproducible research in AI security, [1].

Nourin Shahin, Izzat Alsmadi

Modern scientific research increasingly depends on High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures, yet many researchers face significant operational barriers when interacting with cluster environments, job schedulers, GPU resources, and parallel computing frameworks. General-purpose large language models (LLMs) provide useful coding assistance but often lack the domain-specific operational knowledge required for reliable HPC support. This paper presents HPC-LLM, a retrieval augmented and domain-adapted assistant designed to support common HPC workflows including Slurm scheduling, MPI execution, GPU utilization, filesystem management, and cluster troubleshooting. The proposed framework integrates automated documentation ingestion, dense retrieval, lightweight domain adaptation using QLoRA, and local inference within a modular orchestration pipeline. To support domain adaptation, we construct an HPC-oriented corpus from publicly available university HPC documentation, curated operational examples, and synthetic instruction-answer pairs generated from retrieved HPC content. The resulting dataset contains approximately 9,000 to 24,000 HPC-focused training examples spanning job scheduling, GPU computing, distributed training, storage systems, and cluster administration topics. We fine-tune Llama 3.1 8B using QLoRA and evaluate the resulting model against several open weight baselines under retrieval-augmented settings on JetStream2 infrastructure. Experimental results indicate that the adapted 8B model achieves performance comparable to substantially larger general-purpose models while operating under significantly lower GPU memory requirements and inference latency. In particular, the adapted model approaches the performance of Qwen 2.5 14B while requiring substantially fewer computational resources.