The development of nature-inspired computational techniques has enhanced problem solving in dynamic and uncertain environments. By implementing effective computing strategies, this ensures adaptable, self-organizing, and decentralized behavioral techniques. Recent Developments in Intelligent Nature-Inspired Computing is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly material on natural computation methods and applications in diverse fields. Highlighting multidisciplinary studies on swarm intelligence, global optimization, and group technology, this publication is an ideal reference source for professionals, researchers, scholars, and engineers interested in the latest developments in computer science methodologies.

This book explores the design implications of emerging, non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies on future computer memory hierarchy architecture designs. Since NVM technologies combine the speed of SRAM, the density of DRAM, and the non-volatility of Flash memory, they are very attractive as the basis for future universal memories. This book provides a holistic perspective on the topic, covering modeling, design, architecture and applications. The practical information included in this book will enable designers to exploit emerging memory technologies to improve significantly the performance/power/reliability of future, mainstream integrated circuits.

The purpose of the 4th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS) was to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in the advances and business applications of information systems. The research papers focused on real world applications covering four main themes: Enterprise Database Applications, Artificial Intelligence Applications and Decision Support Systems, Systems Analysis and Specification, and Internet and Electronic Commerce.
This book will be of interest to information technology professionals, especially those working on systems integration, databases, decision support systems or electronic commerce. It will also be of use to middle managers who need to work with information systems and require knowledge of current trends in development methods and applications.

This book examines the issue of design of fully-integrated frequency synthesizers suitable for system-on-a-chip (SOC) processors. This book takes a more global design perspective in jointly examining the design space at the circuit level as well as at the architectural level. The coverage of the book is comprehensive and includes summary chapters on circuit theory as well as feedback control theory relevant to the operation of phase locked loops (PLLs). On the circuit level, the discussion includes low-voltage analog design in deep submicron digital CMOS processes, effects of supply noise, substrate noise, as well device noise. On the architectural level, the discussion includes PLL analysis using continuous-time as well as discrete-time models, linear and nonlinear effects of PLL performance, and detailed analysis of locking behavior.

The material then develops into detailed circuit and architectural analysis of specific clock generation blocks. This includes circuits and architectures of PLLs with high power supply noise immunity and digital PLL architectures where the loop filter is digitized.

Methods of generating low-spurious sampling clocks for discrete-time analog blocks are then examined. This includes sigma-delta fractional-N PLLs, Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) techniques and non-conventional uses of PLLs. Design for test (DFT) issues as they arise in PLLs are then discussed. This includes methods of accurately measuring jitter and built-in-self-test (BIST) techniques for PLLs. Finally, clocking issues commonly associated to system-on-a-chip (SOC) designs, such as multiple clock domain interfacing and partitioning, and accurate clock phase generation techniques usingdelay-locked loops (DLLs) are also addressed. The book provides numerous real world applications, as well as practical rules-of-thumb for modern designers to use at the system, architectural, as well as the circuit level. This book is well suited for practitioners as well as graduate level students who wish to learn more about time-domain analysis and design of frequency synthesis techniques.

The Fibre Channel Association is an international organization devoted to educating and promoting the Fibre Channel standard.
.A thorough introduction to the Fibre Channel standard, including structures, features, and terminology
.Discusses typical applications for Fibre Channel
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Offering thorough coverage of atomic layer deposition (ALD), this book moves from basic chemistry of ALD and modeling of processes to examine ALD in memory, logic devices and machines. Reviews history, operating principles and ALD processes for each device.

Distributed and Parallel Systems: From Instruction Parallelism to Cluster Computing is the proceedings of the third Austrian-Hungarian Workshop on Distributed and Parallel Systems organized jointly by the Austrian Computer Society and the MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute. This book contains 18 full papers and 12 short papers from 14 countries around the world, including Japan, Korea and Brazil. The paper sessions cover a broad range of research topics in the area of parallel and distributed systems, including software development environments, performance evaluation, architectures, languages, algorithms, web and cluster computing. This volume will be useful to researchers and scholars interested in all areas related to parallel and distributed computing systems.

Digital signal processing is an area of science and engineering that has been developed rapidly over the past years. This rapid development is the result of the significant advances in digital computer technology and integrated circuits fabrication. Many of the signal processing tasks conventionally performed by analog means, are realized today by less expensive and often more reliable digital hardware. Multirate Systems: Design and Applications addresses the rapid development of multirate digital signal processing and how it is complemented by the emergence of new applications.

We are extremely pleased to present a comprehensive book comprising a collection of research papers which is basically an outcome of the Second IFIP TC 13.6 Working Group conference on Human Work Interaction Design, HWID2009. The conference was held in Pune, India during October 7-8, 2009. It was hosted by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India, and jointly organized with Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Aarhus University, Denmark; and Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. The theme of HWID2009 was Usability in Social, C- tural and Organizational Contexts. The conference was held under the auspices of IFIP TC 13 on Human-Computer Interaction. 1 Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction The committees under IFIP include the Technical Committee TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction within which the work of this volume has been conducted. TC13 on Human-Computer Interaction has as its aim to encourage theoretical and empirical human science research to promote the design and evaluation of human-oriented ICT. Within TC13 there are different working groups concerned with different aspects of human- computer interaction. The flagship event of TC13 is the bi-annual international conference called INTERACT at which both invited and contributed papers are presented. Contributed papers are rigorously refereed and the rejection rate is high.

The implementation of object-oriented languages has been an active topic of research since the 1960s when the first Simula compiler was written. The topic received renewed interest in the early 1980s with the growing popularity of object-oriented programming languages such as c++ and Smalltalk, and got another boost with the advent of Java. Polymorphic calls are at the heart of object-oriented languages, and even the first implementation of Simula-67 contained their classic implementation via virtual function tables. In fact, virtual function tables predate even Simula-for example, Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad drawing editor employed very similar structures in 1960. Similarly, during the 1970s and 1980s the implementers of Smalltalk systems spent considerable efforts on implementing polymorphic calls for this dynamically typed language where virtual function tables could not be used. Given this long history of research into the implementation of polymorphic calls, and the relatively mature standing it achieved over time, why, one might ask, should there be a new book in this field? The answer is simple. Both software and hardware have changed considerably in recent years, to the point where many assumptions underlying the original work in this field are no longer true. In particular, virtual function tables are no longer sufficient to implement polymorphic calls even for statically typed languages; for example, Java's interface calls cannot be implemented this way. Furthermore, today's processors are deeply pipelined and can execute instructions out-of order, making it difficult to predict the execution time of even simple code sequences."

Advances in optical technologies have made it possible to implement optical interconnections in future massively parallel processing systems. Photons are non-charged particles, and do not naturally interact. Consequently, there are many desirable characteristics of optical interconnects, e.g. high speed (speed of light), increased fanout, high bandwidth, high reliability, longer interconnection lengths, low power requirements, and immunity to EMI with reduced crosstalk. Optics can utilize free-space interconnects as well as guided wave technology, neither of which has the problems of VLSI technology mentioned above. Optical interconnections can be built at various levels, providing chip-to-chip, module-to-module, board-to-board, and node-to-node communications. Massively parallel processing using optical interconnections poses new challenges; new system configurations need to be designed, scheduling and data communication schemes based on new resource metrics need to be investigated, algorithms for a wide variety of applications need to be developed under the novel computation models that optical interconnections permit, and so on. Parallel Computing Using Optical Interconnections is a collection of survey articles written by leading and active scientists in the area of parallel computing using optical interconnections. This is the first book which provides current and comprehensive coverage of the field, reflects the state of the art from high-level architecture design and algorithmic points of view, and points out directions for further research and development.

Multicore Processors and Systems provides a comprehensive overview of emerging multicore processors and systems. It covers technology trends affecting multicores, multicore architecture innovations, multicore software innovations, and case studies of state-of-the-art commercial multicore systems. A cross-cutting theme of the book is the challenges associated with scaling up multicore systems to hundreds of cores.

The book provides an overview of significant developments in the architectures for multicore processors and systems. It includes chapters on fundamental requirements for multicore systems, including processing, memory systems, and interconnect. It also includes several case studies on commercial multicore systems that have recently been developed and deployed across multiple application domains. The architecture chapters focus on innovative multicore execution models as well as infrastructure for multicores, including memory systems and on-chip interconnections. The case studies examine multicore implementations across different application domains, including general purpose, server, media/broadband, network processing, and signal processing.

Multicore Processors and Systems is the first book that focuses solely on multicore processors and systems, and in particular on the unique technology implications, architectures, and implementations. The book has contributing authors that are from both the academic and industrial communities.

This book describes for readers a methodology for dynamic power estimation, using Transaction Level Modeling (TLM). The methodology exploits the existing tools for RTL simulation, design synthesis and SystemC prototyping to provide fast and accurate power estimation using Transaction Level Power Modeling (TLPM). Readers will benefit from this innovative way of evaluating power on a high level of abstraction, at an early stage of the product life cycle, decreasing the number of the expensive design iterations.

Grids are a crucial enabling technology for scientific and industrial development. Grid and Services Evolution, the 11th edited volume of the CoreGRID series, was based on The CoreGRID Middleware Workshop, held in Barcelona, Spain, June 5-6, 2008.

Grid and Services Evolution provides a bridge between the application community and the developers of middleware services, especially in terms of parallel computing. This edited volume brings together a critical mass of well-established researchers worldwide, from forty-two institutions active in the fields of distributed systems and middleware, programming models, algorithms, tools and environments.

Grid and Services Evolution is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners within the Grid community industry. This volume is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

In this volume organizational learning theory is used to analyse various practices of managing and facilitating knowledge sharing within companies. Experiences with three types of knowledge sharing, namely knowledge acquisition, knowledge reuse, and knowledge creation, at ten large companies are discussed and analyzed. This critical analysis leads to the identification of traps and obstacles when managing knowledge sharing, when supporting knowledge sharing with IT tools, and when organizations try to learn from knowledge sharing practices. The identification of these risks is followed by a discussion of how organizations can avoid them.

This work will be of interest to researchers and practitioners working in organization science and business administration. Also, consultants and organizations at large will find the book useful as it will provide them with insights into how other organizations manage and facilitate knowledge sharing and how potential failures can be prevented.

This book discusses the trade-offs involved in designing direct RF digitization receivers for the radio frequency and digital signal processing domains. A system-level framework is developed, quantifying the relevant impairments of the signal processing chain, through a comprehensive system-level analysis. Special focus is given to noise analysis (thermal noise, quantization noise, saturation noise, signal-dependent noise), broadband non-linear distortion analysis, including the impact of the sampling strategy (low-pass, band-pass), analysis of time-interleaved ADC channel mismatches, sampling clock purity and digital channel selection. The system-level framework described is applied to the design of a cable multi-channel RF direct digitization receiver. An optimum RF signal conditioning, and some algorithms (automatic gain control loop, RF front-end amplitude equalization control loop) are used to relax the requirements of a 2.7GHz 11-bit ADC.
A two-chip implementation is presented, using BiCMOS and 65nm CMOS processes, together with the block and system-level measurement results. Readers will benefit from the techniques presented, which are highly competitive, both in terms of cost and RF performance, while drastically reducing power consumption.
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The most exciting development in parallel computer architecture is the convergence of traditionally disparate approaches on a common machine structure. This book explains the forces behind this convergence of shared-memory, message-passing, data parallel, and data-driven computing architectures. It then examines the design issues that are critical to all parallel architecture across the full range of modern design, covering data access, communication performance, coordination of cooperative work, and correct implementation of useful semantics. It not only describes the hardware and software techniques for addressing each of these issues but also explores how these techniques interact in the same system. Examining architecture from an application-driven perspective, it provides comprehensive discussions of parallel programming for high performance and of workload-driven evaluation, based on understanding hardware-software interactions.
* synthesizes a decade of research and development for practicing engineers, graduate students, and researchers in parallel computer architecture, system software, and applications development
* presents in-depth application case studies from computer graphics, computational science and engineering, and data mining to demonstrate sound quantitative evaluation of design trade-offs
* describes the process of programming for performance, including both the architecture-independent and architecture-dependent aspects, with examples and case-studies
* illustrates bus-based and network-based parallel systems with case studies of more than a dozen important commercial designs

This book provides graduate students and practitioners with knowledge of the CORBA standard and practical experience of implementing distributed systems with CORBA's Java mapping. With tested code examples that will run immediately!

Ferroelectric memories have changed in 10 short years from academic curiosities of the university research labs to commercial devices in large-scale production. This is the first text on ferroelectric memories that is not just an edited collection of papers by different authors. Intended for applied physicists, electrical engineers, materials scientists and ceramists, it includes ferroelectric fundamentals, especially for thin films, circuit diagrams and processsing chapters, but emphazises device physics. Breakdown mechanisms, switching kinetics and leakage current mechanisms have lengthly chapters devoted to them. The book will be welcomed by research scientists in industry and government laboratories and in universities. It also contains 76 problems for students, making it particularly useful as a textbook for fourth-year undergraduate or first-year graduate students.

The BeOS is the exciting new operating system designed natively for the Internet and digital media. Programmers are drawn to the BeOS by its many state-of-the-art features, including pervasive multithreading, a symmetric multiprocessing architecture, and an integrated multithreaded graphics system. The Be engineering team also built in many UNIX-like capabilities as part of a POSIX toolkit. Best of all, the BeOS runs on a variety of Intel architectures and PowerPC platforms and uses off-the-shelf hardware.

This book explores the BeOS from a POSIX programmer's point of view, providing a comprehensive and practical guide to porting UNIX and other POSIX-based software to the BeOS. BeOS: Porting UNIX Applications will help you move your favorite UNIX software to an environment designed from the ground up for high-performance applications.
* Supports BeOS Release 3
* Provides a step-by-step guide to the porting process from downloading the source code to installing the application
* Explains how to port off-the-shelf utilities like Emacs and Perl as well as your own programs and tools to the BeOS
* Offers a comprehensive POSIX reference for anyone who is porting or writing software for the BeOS
* Furnishes a simple catalog of tools and features available on the BeOS

The continous development of computer technology supported by the VLSI revolution stimulated the research in the field .of multiprocessors systems. The main motivation for the migration of design efforts from conventional architectures towards multiprocessor ones is the possibi I ity to obtain a significant processing power together with the improvement of price/performance, reliability and flexibility figures. Currently, such systems are moving from research laboratories to real field appl ications. Future technological advances and new generations of components are I ikely to further enhance this trend. This book is intended to provide basic concepts and design methodologies for engineers and researchers involved in the development of mul tiprocessor systems and/or of appl ications based on multiprocessor architectures. In addition the book can be a source of material for computer architecture courses at graduate level. A preliminary knowledge of computer architecture and logical design has been assumed in wri ting this book. Not all the problems related with the development of multiprocessor systems are addressed in th i s book. The covered range spans from the electrical and logical design problems, to architectural issues, to design methodologis for system software. Subj ects such as software development in a multiprocessor environment or loosely coupled multiprocessor systems are out of the scope of the book. Since the basic elements, processors and memories, are now available as standard integrated circuits, the key design problem is how to put them together in an efficient and reliable way."

This Handbook is the first volume of the International Handbook on Information Systems. It offers a comprehensive overview of architectures, languages, methods, and techniques for modelling and analysing information systems in organisations. The contributions are written by authoritative figures in this area. Numerous approaches are surveyed coming from computer science, information systems, and business administration among others. This volume brings together more than 30 contributions in order to provide a reference source for problem solvers in business, industry, and government, and which can be used by professional researchers and graduate students. In the new edition, all contributions have been revised completely. New papers have been added on XML and UML.

The core idea of this book is that object- oriented technology is a generic technology whose various technical aspects can be presented in a unified and consistent framework. This applies to both practical and formal aspects of object-oriented technology. Course tested in a variety of object-oriented courses, numerous examples, figures and exercises are presented in each chapter. The approach in this book is based on typed technologies, and the core notions fit mainstream object-oriented languages such as Java and C#. The book promotes object-oriented constraints (assertions), their specification and verification. Object-oriented constraints apply to specification and verification of object-oriented programs, specification of the object-oriented platform, more advanced concurrent models, database integrity constraints and object-oriented transactions, their specification and verification.