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Books > Computing & IT > Computer hardware & operating systems > Computer architecture & logic design > General
Transaction processing is an established technique for the concurrent and fault tolerant access of persistent data. While this technique has been successful in standard database systems, factors such as time-critical applications, emerg ing technologies, and a re-examination of existing systems suggest that the performance, functionality and applicability of transactions may be substan tially enhanced if temporal considerations are taken into account. That is, transactions should not only execute in a "legal" (i.e., logically correct) man ner, but they should meet certain constraints with regard to their invocation and completion times. Typically, these logical and temporal constraints are application-dependent, and we address some fundamental issues for the man agement of transactions in the presence of such constraints. Our model for transaction-processing is based on extensions to established mod els, and we briefly outline how logical and temporal constraints may be ex pressed in it. For scheduling the transactions, we describe how legal schedules differ from one another in terms of meeting the temporal constraints. Exist ing scheduling mechanisms do not differentiate among legal schedules, and are thereby inadequate with regard to meeting temporal constraints. This provides the basis for seeking scheduling strategies that attempt to meet the temporal constraints while continuing to produce legal schedules."
Concurrent data structures simplify the development of concurrent programs by encapsulating commonly used mechanisms for synchronization and commu nication into data structures. This thesis develops a notation for describing concurrent data structures, presents examples of concurrent data structures, and describes an architecture to support concurrent data structures. Concurrent Smalltalk (CST), a derivative of Smalltalk-80 with extensions for concurrency, is developed to describe concurrent data structures. CST allows the programmer to specify objects that are distributed over the nodes of a concurrent computer. These distributed objects have many constituent objects and thus can process many messages simultaneously. They are the foundation upon which concurrent data structures are built. The balanced cube is a concurrent data structure for ordered sets. The set is distributed by a balanced recursive partition that maps to the subcubes of a binary 7lrcube using a Gray code. A search algorithm, VW search, based on the distance properties of the Gray code, searches a balanced cube in O(log N) time. Because it does not have the root bottleneck that limits all tree-based data structures to 0(1) concurrency, the balanced cube achieves 0C.: N) con currency. Considering graphs as concurrent data structures, graph algorithms are pre sented for the shortest path problem, the max-flow problem, and graph parti tioning. These algorithms introduce new synchronization techniques to achieve better performance than existing algorithms."
Mastering interoperability in a computing environment consisting of different operating systems and hardware architectures is a key requirement which faces system engineers building distributed information systems. Distributed applications are a necessity in most central application sectors of the contemporary computerized society, for instance, in office automation, banking, manufacturing, telecommunication and transportation. This book focuses on the techniques available or under development, with the goal of easing the burden of constructing reliable and maintainable interoperable information systems. The topics covered in this book include: * Management of distributed systems; * Frameworks and construction tools; * Open architectures and interoperability techniques; * Experience with platforms like CORBA and RMI; * Language interoperability (e.g. Java); * Agents and mobility; * Quality of service and fault tolerance; * Workflow and object modelling issues; and * Electronic commerce .The book contains the proceedings of the International Working Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems II (DAIS'99), which was held June 28-July 1, 1999 in Helsinki, Finland. It was sponsored by the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP). The conference program presents the state of the art in research concerning distributed and interoperable systems. This is a topical research area where much activity is currently in progress. Interesting new aspects and innovative contributions are still arising regularly. The DAIS series of conferences is one of the main international forums where these important findings are reported.
Workstation and computer users have an ever increasing need for solutions that offer high performance, low cost, small footprints (space requirements), and ease of use. Also, the availability of a wide range of software and hardware options (from a variety of independent vendors) is important because it simplifies the task of expanding existing applications and stretching into new ones. The SBus has been designed and optimized within this framework, and it represents a next-generation approach to a system's I/O intercon nect needs. This book is a collection of information intended to ease the task of developing and integrating new SBus-based products. The focus is primarily on hardware, due to the author's particular expertise, but firmware and software concepts are also included where appropriate. This book is based on revision B.O of the SBus Specification. This revision has been a driving force in the SBus market longer than any other, and is likely to remain a strong influence for some time to come. As of this writing there is currently an effort (desig nated P1496) within the IEEE to produce a new version of the SBus specification that conforms to that group's policies and requirements. This might result in some changes to the specifica tion, but in most cases these will be minor. Most of the information this book contains will remain timely and applicable. To help ensure this, the author has included key information about pro posed or planned changes."
Architecture-independent programming and automatic parallelisation have long been regarded as two different means of alleviating the prohibitive costs of parallel software development. Building on recent advances in both areas, Architecture-Independent Loop Parallelisation proposes a unified approach to the parallelisation of scientific computing code. This novel approach is based on the bulk-synchronous parallel model of computation, and succeeds in automatically generating parallel code that is architecture-independent, scalable, and of analytically predictable performance.
The sheer complexity of computer systems has meant that automated reasoning, i.e. the ability of computers to perform logical inference, has become a vital component of program construction and of programming language design. This book meets the demand for a self-contained and broad-based account of the concepts, the machinery and the use of automated reasoning. The mathematical logic foundations are described in conjunction with practical application, all with the minimum of prerequisites. The approach is constructive, concrete and algorithmic: a key feature is that methods are described with reference to actual implementations (for which code is supplied) that readers can use, modify and experiment with. This book is ideally suited for those seeking a one-stop source for the general area of automated reasoning. It can be used as a reference, or as a place to learn the fundamentals, either in conjunction with advanced courses or for self study.
The book presents the best contributions, extracted from the theses written by the students who have attended the second edition of the Master in Microelectronics and Systems that has been organized by the Universita degli Studi di Catania and that has been held at the STMicroelectronics Company (Catania Site) from May 2000 to January 2001. In particular, the mentioned Master has been organized among the various ac tivities of the "Istituto Superiore di Catania per la Formazione di Eccellenza." The Institute is one of the Italian network of universities selected by MURST (Ministry University Research Scientific Technology). The first aim of tl;te Master in Microelectronics and Systems is to increase the skills of the students with the Laurea Degree in Physics or Electrical Engineering in the more advanced areas as VLSI system design, high-speed low-voltage low-power circuitS and RF systems. The second aim has been to involve in the educational program companies like STMicroelectronics, ACCENT and ITEL, interested in emergent microelectronics topics, to cooperate with the University in developing high-level research projects. Besides the tutorial activity during the teaching hours, provided by national and international researchers, a significant part of the School has been dedicated to the presentation of specific CAD tools and experiments in order to prepare the students to solve specific problems during the stage period and in the thesis work."
The advent of multimedia technology is creating a number of new problems in the fields of computer and communication systems. Perhaps the most important of these problems in communication, and certainly the most interesting, is that of designing networks to carry multimedia traffic, including digital audio and video, with acceptable quality. The main challenge in integrating the different services needed by the different types of traffic into the same network (an objective that is made worthwhile by its obvious economic advantages) is to satisfy the performance requirements of continuous media applications, as the quality of audio and video streams at the receiver can be guaranteed only if bounds on delay, delay jitters, bandwidth, and reliability are guaranteed by the network. Since such guarantees cannot be provided by traditional packet-switching technology, a number of researchers and research groups during the last several years have tried to meet the challenge by proposing new protocols or modifications of old ones, to make packet-switching networks capable of delivering audio and video with good quality while carrying all sorts of other traffic. The focus of this book is on HeiTS (the Heidelberg Transport System), and its contributions to integrated services network design. The HeiTS architecture is based on using the Internet Stream Protocol Version 2 (ST-II) at the network layer. The Heidelberg researchers were the first to implement ST-II. The author documents this activity in the book and provides thorough coverage of the improvements made to the protocol. The book also includes coverage of HeiTP as used in error handling, error control, congestion control, and the full specification of ST2+, a new version of ST-II. The ideas and techniques implemented by the Heidelberg group and their coverage in this volume apply to many other approaches to multimedia networking.
Widespread use of parallel processing will become a reality only if the process of porting applications to parallel computers can be largely automated. Usually it is straightforward for a user to determine how an application can be mapped onto a parallel machine; however, the actual development of parallel code, if done by hand, is typically difficult and time consuming. Parallelizing compilers, which can gen erate parallel code automatically, are therefore a key technology for parallel processing. In this book, Ping-Sheng Tseng describes a parallelizing compiler for systolic arrays, called AL. Although parallelizing compilers are quite common for shared-memory parallel machines, the AL compiler is one of the first working parallelizing compilers for distributed memory machines, of which systolic arrays are a special case. The AL compiler takes advantage of the fine grain and high bandwidth interprocessor communication capabilities in a systolic architecture to generate efficient parallel code. xii Foreword While capable of handling an important class of applications, AL is not intended to be a general-purpose parallelizing compiler."
It has been widely recognized that artificial intelligence computations offer large potential for distributed and parallel processing. Unfortunately, not much is known about designing parallel AI algorithms and efficient, easy-to-use parallel computer architectures for AI applications. The field of parallel computation and computers for AI is in its infancy, but some significant ideas have appeared and initial practical experience has become available. The purpose of this book has been to collect in one volume contributions from several leading researchers and pioneers of AI that represent a sample of these ideas and experiences. This sample does not include all schools of thought nor contributions from all leading researchers, but it covers a relatively wide variety of views and topics and in this sense can be helpful in assessing the state ofthe art. We hope that the book will serve, at least, as a pointer to more specialized literature and that it will stimulate interest in the area of parallel AI processing. It has been a great pleasure and a privilege to cooperate with all contributors to this volume. They have my warmest thanks and gratitude. Mrs. Birgitta Knapp has assisted me in the editorial task and demonstrated a great deal of skill and patience. Janusz S. Kowalik vii INTRODUCTION Artificial intelligence (AI) computer programs can be very time-consuming.
Automatic Performance Prediction of Parallel Programs presents a unified approach to the problem of automatically estimating the performance of parallel computer programs. The author focuses primarily on distributed memory multiprocessor systems, although large portions of the analysis can be applied to shared memory architectures as well. The author introduces a novel and very practical approach for predicting some of the most important performance parameters of parallel programs, including work distribution, number of transfers, amount of data transferred, network contention, transfer time, computation time and number of cache misses. This approach is based on advanced compiler analysis that carefully examines loop iteration spaces, procedure calls, array subscript expressions, communication patterns, data distributions and optimizing code transformations at the program level; and the most important machine specific parameters including cache characteristics, communication network indices, and benchmark data for computational operations at the machine level. The material has been fully implemented as part of P3T, which is an integrated automatic performance estimator of the Vienna Fortran Compilation System (VFCS), a state-of-the-art parallelizing compiler for Fortran77, Vienna Fortran and a subset of High Performance Fortran (HPF) programs. A large number of experiments using realistic HPF and Vienna Fortran code examples demonstrate highly accurate performance estimates, and the ability of the described performance prediction approach to successfully guide both programmer and compiler in parallelizing and optimizing parallel programs. A graphical user interface is described and displayed that visualizes each program source line together with the corresponding parameter values. P3T uses color-coded performance visualization to immediately identify hot spots in the parallel program. Performance data can be filtered and displayed at various levels of detail. Colors displayed by the graphical user interface are visualized in greyscale. Automatic Performance Prediction of Parallel Programs also includes coverage of fundamental problems of automatic parallelization for distributed memory multicomputers, a description of the basic parallelization strategy and a large variety of optimizing code transformations as included under VFCS.
It is universally accepted today that parallel processing is here to stay but that software for parallel machines is still difficult to develop. However, there is little recognition of the fact that changes in processor architecture can significantly ease the development of software. In the seventies the availability of processors that could address a large name space directly, eliminated the problem of name management at one level and paved the way for the routine development of large programs. Similarly, today, processor architectures that can facilitate cheap synchronization and provide a global address space can simplify compiler development for parallel machines. If the cost of synchronization remains high, the pro gramming of parallel machines will remain significantly less abstract than programming sequential machines. In this monograph Bob Iannucci presents the design and analysis of an architecture that can be a better building block for parallel machines than any von Neumann processor. There is another very interesting motivation behind this work. It is rooted in the long and venerable history of dataflow graphs as a formalism for ex pressing parallel computation. The field has bloomed since 1974, when Dennis and Misunas proposed a truly novel architecture using dataflow graphs as the parallel machine language. The novelty and elegance of dataflow architectures has, however, also kept us from asking the real question: "What can dataflow architectures buy us that von Neumann ar chitectures can't?" In the following I explain in a round about way how Bob and I arrived at this question."
Interoperability has been a requirement in NATO ever since the Alliance came into being - an obvious requirement when 16 independent Nations agree to allocate national resources for the achievement of a common goal: to maintain peace. With the appearance of data processing in the command and control pro cess of the armed forces, the requirement for interoperability expanded into the data processing field. Although problems of procedural and operational interoperability had been constantly resolved to some extent as they arose over the years, the introduction of data proces sing increased the problems of technical interoperability. The increase was partially due to the natural desire of nations to support their own national industries. But it was definetely also due to the lack of time and resources needed to solve the problems. During the mid- and late -1970s the International Standards Organisa tion (ISO) decided to develop a concept ("model") which would allow "systems" to intercommunicate. The famous ISO 7-layer model for Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) was born. The OSI model was adopted by NATO in 1983 as thi basis for standardization of data communications in NATO. The very successful (first) Symposium on Interoperability of ADP Sys tems, held in November 1982 at the SHAPE Technical Centre (STC), gave an exten ive overview of the work carried out on the lower layers of the model and revealed some intriguing ideas about the upper layers. The first Symposium accurately reflected the state-of-the-art at that point in time."
As more and more devices become interconnected through the Internet of Things (IoT), there is an even greater need for this book,which explains the technology, the internetworking, and applications that are making IoT an everyday reality. The book begins with a discussion of IoT "ecosystems" and the technology that enables them, which includes: Wireless Infrastructure and Service Discovery Protocols Integration Technologies and Tools Application and Analytics Enablement Platforms A chapter on next-generation cloud infrastructure explains hosting IoT platforms and applications. A chapter on data analytics throws light on IoT data collection, storage, translation, real-time processing, mining, and analysis, all of which can yield actionable insights from the data collected by IoT applications. There is also a chapter on edge/fog computing. The second half of the book presents various IoT ecosystem use cases. One chapter discusses smart airports and highlights the role of IoT integration. It explains how mobile devices, mobile technology, wearables, RFID sensors, and beacons work together as the core technologies of a smart airport. Integrating these components into the airport ecosystem is examined in detail, and use cases and real-life examples illustrate this IoT ecosystem in operation. Another in-depth look is on envisioning smart healthcare systems in a connected world. This chapter focuses on the requirements, promising applications, and roles of cloud computing and data analytics. The book also examines smart homes, smart cities, and smart governments. The book concludes with a chapter on IoT security and privacy. This chapter examines the emerging security and privacy requirements of IoT environments. The security issues and an assortment of surmounting techniques and best practices are also discussed in this chapter.
This book constitutes the refereeds proceedings of the International Conference on High Performance Architecture and Grid Computing, HPAGC 2011, held in Chandigarh, India, in July 2011. The 87 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 240 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on grid and cloud computing; high performance architecture; information management and network security.
Distributed and Parallel Systems: Cluster and Grid Computing is the proceedings of the fourth Austrian-Hungarian Workshop on Distributed and Parallel Systems organized jointly by Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria and the MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute. The papers in this volume cover a broad range of research topics presented in four groups. The first one introduces cluster tools and techniques, especially the issues of load balancing and migration. Another six papers deal with grid and global computing including grid infrastructure, tools, applications and mobile computing. The next nine papers present general questions of distributed development and applications. The last four papers address a crucial issue in distributed computing: fault tolerance and dependable systems. This volume will be useful to researchers and scholars interested in all areas related to parallel and distributed computing systems.
Distributed Sensor Networks is the first book of its kind to examine solutions to this problem using ideas taken from the field of multiagent systems. The field of multiagent systems has itself seen an exponential growth in the past decade, and has developed a variety of techniques for distributed resource allocation. Distributed Sensor Networks contains contributions from leading, international researchers describing a variety of approaches to this problem based on examples of implemented systems taken from a common distributed sensor network application; each approach is motivated, demonstrated and tested by way of a common challenge problem. The book focuses on both practical systems and their theoretical analysis, and is divided into three parts: the first part describes the common sensor network challenge problem; the second part explains the different technical approaches to the common challenge problem; and the third part provides results on the formal analysis of a number of approaches taken to address the challenge problem.
This volume contains a selection of papers that focus on the state-of the-art in formal specification and verification of real-time computing systems. Preliminary versions of these papers were presented at a workshop on the foundations of real-time computing sponsored by the Office of Naval Research in October, 1990 in Washington, D. C. A companion volume by the title Foundations of Real-Time Computing: Scheduling and Resource Management complements this hook by addressing many of the recently devised techniques and approaches for scheduling tasks and managing resources in real-time systems. Together, these two texts provide a comprehensive snapshot of current insights into the process of designing and building real time computing systems on a scientific basis. The notion of real-time system has alternative interpretations, not all of which are intended usages in this collection of papers. Different communities of researchers variously use the term real-time to refer to either very fast computing, or immediate on-line data acquisition, or deadline-driven computing. This text is concerned with the formal specification and verification of computer software and systems whose correct performance is dependent on carefully orchestrated interactions with time, e. g., meeting deadlines and synchronizing with clocks. Such systems have been enabled for a rapidly increasing set of diverse end-uses by the unremitting advances in computing power per constant-dollar cost and per constant-unit-volume of space. End use applications of real-time computers span a spectrum that includes transportation systems, robotics and manufacturing, aerospace and defense, industrial process control, and telecommunications."
This single source reference offers a pragmatic and accessible approach to the basic methods and procedures used in the manufacturing and design of modern electronic products. Providing a stategic yet simplified layout, this handbook is set up with an eye toward maximizing productivity in each phase of the eletronics manufacturing process. Not only does this handbook inform the reader on vital issues concerning electronics manufacturing and design, it also provides practical insight and will be of essential use to manufacturing and process engineers in electronics and aerospace manufacturing. In addition, electronics packaging engineers and electronics manufacturing managers and supervisors will gain a wealth of knowledge.
There is an increasing demand for dynamic systems to become safer and more reliable. This requirement extends beyond the normally accepted safety-critical systems such as nuclear reactors and aircraft, where safety is of paramount importance, to systems such as autonomous vehicles and process control systems where the system availability is vital. It is clear that fault diagnosis is becoming an important subject in modern control theory and practice. Robust Model-Based Fault Diagnosis for Dynamic Systems presents the subject of model-based fault diagnosis in a unified framework. It contains many important topics and methods; however, total coverage and completeness is not the primary concern. The book focuses on fundamental issues such as basic definitions, residual generation methods and the importance of robustness in model-based fault diagnosis approaches. In this book, fault diagnosis concepts and methods are illustrated by either simple academic examples or practical applications. The first two chapters are of tutorial value and provide a starting point for newcomers to this field.The rest of the book presents the state of the art in model-based fault diagnosis by discussing many important robust approaches and their applications. This will certainly appeal to experts in this field. Robust Model-Based Fault Diagnosis for Dynamic Systems targets both newcomers who want to get into this subject, and experts who are concerned with fundamental issues and are also looking for inspiration for future research. The book is useful for both researchers in academia and professional engineers in industry because both theory and applications are discussed. Although this is a research monograph, it will be an important text for postgraduate research students world-wide. The largest market, however, will be academics, libraries and practicing engineers and scientists throughout the world.
The primary audience for this book are advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Computer architecture, as it happened in other fields such as electronics, evolved from the small to the large, that is, it left the realm of low-level hardware constructs, and gained new dimensions, as distributed systems became the keyword for system implementation. As such, the system architect, today, assembles pieces of hardware that are at least as large as a computer or a network router or a LAN hub, and assigns pieces of software that are self-contained, such as client or server programs, Java applets or pro tocol modules, to those hardware components. The freedom she/he now has, is tremendously challenging. The problems alas, have increased too. What was before mastered and tested carefully before a fully-fledged mainframe or a closely-coupled computer cluster came out on the market, is today left to the responsibility of computer engineers and scientists invested in the role of system architects, who fulfil this role on behalf of software vendors and in tegrators, add-value system developers, R&D institutes, and final users. As system complexity, size and diversity grow, so increases the probability of in consistency, unreliability, non responsiveness and insecurity, not to mention the management overhead. What System Architects Need to Know The insight such an architect must have includes but goes well beyond, the functional properties of distributed systems.
Cooperative Computer-Aided Authoring and Learning: A Systems Approach describes in detail a practical system for computer assisted authoring and learning. Drawing from the experiences gained during the Nestor project, jointly run between the Universities of Karlsruhe, Kaiserslautern and Freiburg and the Digital Equipment Corp. Center for Research and Advanced Development, the book presents a concrete example of new concepts in the domain of computer-aided authoring and learning. The conceptual foundation is laid by a reference architecture for an integrated environment for authoring and learning. This overall architecture represents the nucleus, shell and common denominator for the R&D activities carried out. From its conception, the reference architecture was centered around three major issues: * Cooperation among and between authors and learners in an open, multimedia and distributed system as the most important attribute; * Authoring/learning as the central topic; * Laboratory as the term which evoked the most suitable association with the envisioned authoring/learning environment.Within this framework, the book covers four major topics which denote the most important technical domains, namely: * The system kernel, based on object orientation and hypermedia; * Distributed multimedia support; * Cooperation support, and * Reusable instructional design support. Cooperative Computer-Aided Authoring and Learning: A Systems Approach is a major contribution to the emerging field of collaborative computing and is essential reading for researchers and practitioners alike. Its pedagogic flavor also makes it suitable for use as a text for a course on the subject.
The understanding of parallel processing and of the mechanisms underlying neural networks in the brain is certainly one of the most challenging problems of contemporary science. During the last decades significant progress has been made by the combination of different techniques, which have elucidated properties at a cellular and molecular level. However, in order to make significant progress in this field, it is necessary to gather more direct experimental data on the parallel processing occurring in the nervous system. Indeed the nervous system overcomes the limitations of its elementary components by employing a massive degree of parallelism, through the extremely rich set of synaptic interconnections between neurons. This book gathers a selection of the contributions presented during the NATO ASI School "Neuronal Circuits and Networks" held at the Ettore Majorana Center in Erice, Sicily, from June 15 to 27, 1997. The purpose of the School was to present an overview of recent results on single cell properties, the dynamics of neuronal networks and modelling of the nervous system. The School and the present book propose an interdisciplinary approach of experimental and theoretical aspects of brain functions combining different techniques and methodologies.
Disseminating Security Updates at Internet Scale describes a new system, "Revere", that addresses these problems. "Revere" builds large-scale, self-organizing and resilient overlay networks on top of the Internet to push security updates from dissemination centers to individual nodes. "Revere" also sets up repository servers for individual nodes to pull missed security updates. This book further discusses how to protect this push-and-pull dissemination procedure and how to secure "Revere" overlay networks, considering possible attacks and countermeasures. Disseminating Security Updates at Internet Scale presents experimental measurements of a prototype implementation of "Revere" gathered using a large-scale oriented approach. These measurements suggest that "Revere" can deliver security updates at the required scale, speed and resiliency for a reasonable cost. Disseminating Security Updates at Internet Scale will be helpful to those trying to design peer systems at large scale when security is a concern, since many of the issues faced by these designs are also faced by "Revere". The "Revere" solutions may not always be appropriate for other peer systems with very different goals, but the analysis of the problems and possible solutions discussed here will be helpful in designing a customized approach for such systems. |
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