Advances in Computers, the latest volume in the series published since 1960, presents detailed coverage of innovations in computer hardware, software, theory, design, and applications. In addition, it provides contributors with a medium in which they can explore their subjects in greater depth and breadth than journal articles usually allow. As a result, many articles have become standard references that continue to be of significant, lasting value in this rapidly expanding field.

The Physics of Computing gives a foundational view of the physical principles underlying computers. Performance, power, thermal behavior, and reliability are all harder and harder to achieve as transistors shrink to nanometer scales. This book describes the physics of computing at all levels of abstraction from single gates to complete computer systems. It can be used as a course for juniors or seniors in computer engineering and electrical engineering, and can also be used to teach students in other scientific disciplines important concepts in computing. For electrical engineering, the book provides the fundamentals of computing that link core concepts to computing. For computer science, it provides foundations of key challenges such as power consumption, performance, and thermal. The book can also be used as a technical reference by professionals.

Elementary Statistics: A Guide to Data Analysis Using R provides students with an introduction to both the field of statistics and R, one of the most widely used languages for statistical computing, analysis, and graphing in a variety of fields, including the sciences, finance, banking, health care, e-commerce, and marketing. Part I provides an overview of both statistics and R. Part II focuses on descriptive statistics and probability. In Part III, students learn about discrete and continuous probability distributions with chapters addressing probability distributions, binominal probability distributions, and normal probability distributions. Part IV speaks to statistical inference with content covering confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, chi-square tests and F-distributions. The final part explores additional statistical inference and assumptions, including correlation, regression, and nonparametric statistics. Helpful appendices provide students with an index of terminology, an index of applications, a glossary of symbols, and a guide to the most common R commands. Elementary Statistics is an ideal resource for introductory courses in undergraduate statistics, graduate statistics, and data analysis across the disciplines.

Complex Systems and Clouds: A Self-Organization and Self-Management Perspective provides insights into the intricate world of self-organizing systems. Large scale distributed computer systems have evolved into very complex systems and are at the point where they need to borrow self-adapting organizing concepts from nature. The book explores complexity in big distributed systems and in the natural processes in physics and chemistry, building a platform for understanding how self-organization in big distributed systems can be achieved. It goes beyond the theoretical description of self-organization to present principles for designing self-organizing systems, and concludes by showing the need for a paradigm shift in the development of large-scale systems from strictly deterministic to non-deterministic and adaptive.

Cyber-Physical Systems: Foundations, Principles and Applications explores the core system science perspective needed to design and build complex cyber-physical systems. Using Systems Science's underlying theories, such as probability theory, decision theory, game theory, organizational sociology, behavioral economics, and cognitive psychology, the book addresses foundational issues central across CPS applications, including System Design -- How to design CPS to be safe, secure, and resilient in rapidly evolving environments, System Verification -- How to develop effective metrics and methods to verify and certify large and complex CPS, Real-time Control and Adaptation -- How to achieve real-time dynamic control and behavior adaptation in a diverse environments, such as clouds and in network-challenged spaces, Manufacturing -- How to harness communication, computation, and control for developing new products, reducing product concepts to realizable designs, and producing integrated software-hardware systems at a pace far exceeding today's timeline. The book is part of the Intelligent Data-Centric Systems: Sensor-Collected Intelligence series edited by Fatos Xhafa, Technical University of Catalonia. Indexing: The books of this series are submitted to EI-Compendex and SCOPUS

Usability Testing for Survey Research provides researchers with a guide to the tools necessary to evaluate, test, and modify surveys in an iterative method during the survey pretesting process. It includes examples that apply usability to any type of survey during any stage of development, along with tactics on how to tailor usability testing to meet budget and scheduling constraints. The book's authors distill their experience to provide tips on how usability testing can be applied to paper surveys, mixed-mode surveys, interviewer-administered tools, and additional products. Readers will gain an understanding of usability and usability testing and why it is needed for survey research, along with guidance on how to design and conduct usability tests, analyze and report findings, ideas for how to tailor usability testing to meet budget and schedule constraints, and new knowledge on how to apply usability testing to other survey-related products, such as project websites and interviewer administered tools.

Parallelism is the key to achieving high performance in computing. However, writing efficient and scalable parallel programs is notoriously difficult, and often requires significant expertise. To address this challenge, it is crucial to provide programmers with high-level tools to enable them to develop solutions easily, and at the same time emphasize the theoretical and practical aspects of algorithm design to allow the solutions developed to run efficiently under many different settings. This thesis addresses this challenge using a three-pronged approach consisting of the design of shared-memory programming techniques, frameworks, and algorithms for important problems in computing. The thesis provides evidence that with appropriate programming techniques, frameworks, and algorithms, shared-memory programs can be simple, fast, and scalable, both in theory and in practice. The results developed in this thesis serve to ease the transition into the multicore era. The first part of this thesis introduces tools and techniques for deterministic parallel programming, including means for encapsulating nondeterminism via powerful commutative building blocks, as well as a novel framework for executing sequential iterative loops in parallel, which lead to deterministic parallel algorithms that are efficient both in theory and in practice. The second part of this thesis introduces Ligra, the first high-level shared memory framework for parallel graph traversal algorithms. The framework allows programmers to express graph traversal algorithms using very short and concise code, delivers performance competitive with that of highly-optimized code, and is up to orders of magnitude faster than existing systems designed for distributed memory. This part of the thesis also introduces Ligra , which extends Ligra with graph compression techniques to reduce space usage and improve parallel performance at the same time, and is also the first graph processing system to support in-memory graph compression. The third and fourth parts of this thesis bridge the gap between theory and practice in parallel algorithm design by introducing the first algorithms for a variety of important problems on graphs and strings that are efficient both in theory and in practice. For example, the thesis develops the first linear-work and polylogarithmic-depth algorithms for suffix tree construction and graph connectivity that are also practical, as well as a work-efficient, polylogarithmic-depth, and cache-efficient shared-memory algorithm for triangle computations that achieves a 2-5x speedup over the best existing algorithms on 40 cores. This is a revised version of the thesis that won the 2015 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Advances in Computers, the latest volume in the series published since 1960, presents detailed coverage of innovations in computer hardware, software, theory, design, and applications. In addition, it provides contributors with a medium in which they can explore their subjects in greater depth and breadth than journal articles usually allow. As a result, many articles have become standard references that continue to be of significant, lasting value in this rapidly expanding field.

Parallel Programming with OpenACC is a modern, practical guide to implementing dependable computing systems. The book explains how anyone can use OpenACC to quickly ramp-up application performance using high-level code directives called pragmas. The OpenACC directive-based programming model is designed to provide a simple, yet powerful, approach to accelerators without significant programming effort. Author Rob Farber, working with a team of expert contributors, demonstrates how to turn existing applications into portable GPU accelerated programs that demonstrate immediate speedups. The book also helps users get the most from the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPU plus multicore CPU architectures (and soon for Intel (R) Xeon Phi (TM) as well). Downloadable example codes provide hands-on OpenACC experience for common problems in scientific, commercial, big-data, and real-time systems. Topics include writing reusable code, asynchronous capabilities, using libraries, multicore clusters, and much more. Each chapter explains how a specific aspect of OpenACC technology fits, how it works, and the pitfalls to avoid. Throughout, the book demonstrates how the use of simple working examples that can be adapted to solve application needs.

The development of software has expanded substantially in recent years. As these technologies continue to advance, well-known organizations have begun implementing these programs into the ways they conduct business. These large companies play a vital role in the economic environment, so understanding the software that they utilize is pertinent in many aspects. Researching and analyzing the tools that these corporations use will assist in the practice of software engineering and give other organizations an outline of how to successfully implement their own computational methods. Tools and Techniques for Software Development in Large Organizations: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential reference source that discusses advanced software methods that prominent companies have adopted to develop high quality products. This book will examine the various devices that organizations such as Google, Cisco, and Facebook have implemented into their production and development processes. Featuring research on topics such as database management, quality assurance, and machine learning, this book is ideally designed for software engineers, data scientists, developers, programmers, professors, researchers, and students seeking coverage on the advancement of software devices in today's major corporations.

Certifiable Software Applications 1: Main Processes is dedicated to the establishment of quality assurance and safety assurance. It establishes the context for achieving a certifiable software application. In it, the author covers recent developments such as the module, component and product line approach. Applicable standards are presented and security principles are described and discussed. Finally, the requirements for mastering quality and configuration are explained. In this book the reader will find the fundamental practices from the field and an introduction to the concept of software application.