Performance analysis of active schedules in identical parallel machine

Active schedule is one of the most basic and popular concepts in production scheduling research. For identical parallel machine scheduling with jobs’ dynamic arrivals, the tight performance bounds of active schedules under the measurement of four popular objectives are respectively given in this paper. Similar analysis method and conclusions can be generalized to static identical parallel machine and single machine scheduling problem.     

时态数据挖掘研究进展

Temporal data mining is one of the important braches of data mining.In this paper with the present documents first we systematically classify the present research on temporal data mining.Next,we give our generalizations and analyses to the main braches.Finally problems of the current research of temporal data mining are pointed out and solutions are prposed.     

Progress and Challenges in High Performance Computer Technology

High performance computers provide strategic computing power in the construction of national economy and defense, and become one of symbols of the country＇s overall strength. Over 30 years, with the supports of governments, the technology of high performance computers is in the process of rapid development, during which the computing performance increases nearly 3 million times and the processors number expands over 10 hundred thousands times. To solve the critical issues related with parallel efficiency and scalability, scientific researchers pursued extensive theoretical studies and technical innovations. The paper briefly looks back the course of building high performance computer systems both at home and abroad, and summarizes the significant breakthroughs of international high performance computer technology. We also overview the technology progress of China in the area of parallel computer architecture, parallel operating system and resource management, parallel compiler and performance optimization, environment for parallel programming and network computing. Finally, we examine the challenging issues, ＂memory wall＂, system scalability and ＂power wall＂, and discuss the issues of high productivity computers, which is the trend in building next generation high performance computers.     

Performance analysis of active schedules in identical parallel machine

Active schedule is one of the most basic and popular concepts in production scheduling research. For identical parallel machine scheduling with jobs’ dynamic arrivals, the tight performance bounds of active schedules under the measurement of four popular objectives are respectively given in this paper. Similar analysis method and conclusions can be generalized to static identical parallel machine and single machine scheduling problem.     

Study on Parallel Computing

In this paper, we present a general survey on parallel computing. The main contents include parallel computer system which is the hardware platform of parallel computing, parallel algorithm which is the theoretical base of parallel computing, parallel programming which is the software support of parallel computing. After that, we also introduce some parallel applications and enabling technologies. We argue that parallel computing research should form an integrated methodology of ＂architecture algorithm programming application＂. Only in this way, parallel computing research becomes continuous development and more realistic.     

Low-Complexity Tools in AVS Part 7

Audio Video coding Standard （AVS） is established by the AVS Working Group of China. The main goal of AVS part 7 is to provide high compression performance with relatively low complexity for mobility applications. There are 3 main low-complexity tools： deblocking filter, context-based adaptive 2D-VLC and direct intra prediction. These tools are presented and analyzed respectively. Finally, we compare the performance and the decoding speed of AVS part 7 and H.264 baseline profile. The analysis and results indicate that AVS part 7 achieves similar performance with lower cost.     

面向网格的性能工具的研究

Performance is one of the key problems in either high performance computing or GRID application.Performance data must be collected and analyzed for co-allocating resource efficiently,obtaining high performance and fault toleration.Furthermore,with the development of Internet and GRID,the exchange of data between virtual organiz-tions is becoming more and more important,and the type of performance is increasing following the increasing of the resource type,which requires a proper representation of the performance data.This paper does some research on the collection,analysis and representation of the performance data,and presents a Grid-oriented performance tool prototype:THGPT,which can achieve the runtime performance data,describe the data in XML,and implement a browserbased visualization tool of performance data analysis.     

Cooperative control and communication of intelligent swarms: a survey

Individuals exchange information, experience and strategy based on communication. Communication is the basis for individuals to form swarms and the bridge of swarms to realize cooperative control. In this paper, the multi-robot swarm and its cooperative control and communication methods are reviewed, and we summarize these methods from the task, control, and perception levels. Based on the research, the cooperative control and communication methods of intelligent swarms are divided into the following four categories: task assignment based methods (divided into market-based methods and alliance based methods), bio-inspired methods (divided into biochemical information inspired methods, vision based methods and self-organization based methods), distributed sensor fusion and reinforcement learning based methods, and we briefly define each method and introduce its basic ideas. Based on WOS database, we divide the development of each method into several stages according to the time distribution of the literature, and outline the main research content of each stage. Finally, we discuss the communication problems of intelligent swarms and the key issues, challenges and future work of each method.     

Massive Storage Systems

To accommodate the explosively increasing amount of data in many areas such as scientific computing and e-Business, physical storage devices and control components have been separated from traditional computing systems to become a scalable, intelligent storage subsystem that, when appropriately designed, should provide transparent storage interface, effective data allocation, flexible and efficient storage management, and other impressive features. The design goals and desirable features of such a storage subsystem include high performance, high scalability, high availability, high reliability and high security. Extensive research has been conducted in this field by researchers all over the world, yet many issues still remain open and challenging. This paper studies five different online massive storage systems and one offline storage system that we have developed with the research grant support from China. The storage pool with multiple network-attached RAIDs avoids expensive store-and-forward data copying between the server and storage system, improving data transfer rate by a factor of 2-3 over a traditional disk array. Two types of high performance distributed storage systems for local-area network storage are introduced in the paper. One of them is the Virtual Interface Storage Architecture (VISA) where VI as a communication protocol replaces the TCP/IP protocol in the system. VISA's performance is shown to achieve better than that of IP SAN by designing and implementing the vSCSI (Vl-attached SCSI) protocol to support SCSI commands in the VI network. The other is a fault-tolerant parallel virtual file system that is designed and implemented to provide high I/O performance and high reliability. A global distributed storage system for wide-area network storage is discussed in detail in the paper, where a Storage Service Provider is added to provide storage service and plays the role of user agent for the storage system. Object based Storage Systems not only store data but also adopt the attributes and methods of objects that encapsulate the data. The adaptive policy triggering mechanism (APTM), which borrows proven machine learning techniques to improve the scalability of object storage systems, is the embodiment of the idea about smart storage device and facilitates the self-management of massive storage systems. A typical offline massive storage system is used to backup data or store documents, for which the tape virtualization technology is discussed. Finally, a domain-based storage management framework for different types of storage systems is presented in the paper.     

Parallel solution for finite element linear systems of equations on workstation cluster

With the advances in the high speed computers network technologies, a workstation cluster is becoming the main environment for parallel processing. Finite element linear systems of equations are common throughout structural analysis in Civil Engineering. The preconditioned conjugate gradient method （PCGM） is an iterative method used to solve the finite element systems of equations with symmetric positive definite system matrices. In this paper, the algorithm of PCGM is parallelized and implemented on DELL workstation cluster. Optimization techniques for the sparse matrix vector multiplication are adopted in programming. The storage scheme is analyzed in detail. The experiment result shows that the designed parallel algorithm has high speedup and good efficiency on the high performance workstation cluster. This illustrates the power of parallel computing in solving large problems much faster than on a single processor.     

Assessing Ideational and Evaluative Skills and Creative Styles and Attitudes

This article describes the rationale for the multiphase creative problem solving process, and reports the findings from an empirical investigation conducted to facilitate the problem solving of managers. The ideational skills of the managers were assessed before and after training in a complete process of creative problem solving, along with their ideational attitudes, creative problem solving style (i.e., generator, conceptualizer, optimizer, or implementor), and evaluative skill (i.e., ability to recognize original ideas). The most important findings indicated that the training had a significant impact on the evaluative accuracy of the managers. They were significantly more accurate in their judgments about original ideas after training, both in their identification of original ideas and their recognition of unoriginal ideas. After training, the managers also gave more solutions and more original solutions to problems. Finally, several variables (e.g., the “preference for active divergence” attitude, and the conceptualizer process style) seemed to moderate the impact of training. Training was therefore effective, with specific effects that can be predicted from pre-training individual differences in attitudes and process style.     

Rank and select revisited and extended

The deep connection between the Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT) and the so-called rank and select data structures for symbol sequences is the basis of most successful approaches to compressed text indexing. Rank of a symbol at a given position equals the number of times the symbol appears in the corresponding prefix of the sequence. Select is the inverse, retrieving the positions of the symbol occurrences. It has been shown that improvements to rank/select algorithms, in combination with the BWT, turn into improved compressed text indexes.     

Semantics and verification of monitors and systems of monitors and processes

In this paper we present a sound and complete semantics for the monitor concept of C.A.R. Hoare. First a method for specification of monitors, introduced by O.-J. Dahl, is reviewed. This method is based on the relation between the historic sequence of monitor procedure calls and the historic sequence of monitor procedure exits. Based on such specifications and our new monitor semantics we present a method by which it is possible to prove that a concrete monitor is an implementation of an abstract one. In the last part of the paper an axiomatic semantics for systems of concurrent processes and monitors is introduced. The method supports verification by separation of concerns: Properties of the communication to and from each process are proven in isolation by a usual Hoare style axiomatic semantics, while abstract monitors are also specified in isolation by the method reviewed in the first part of the paper. These properties of the components of the system are then used in a new proof rule to conclude properties of the complete system. Stein Gjessing received a Ph.D. (actually a Dr. philos.) from the University of Oslo (Norway) in 1985. Presently he is an Associate Professor at the Institute of informatics, University of Oslo, Norway. Dr. Gjessings research interests are in the area of concurrent and distributed programming, operating systems, formal specification and verification and programming languages.     

Integrating and automating analysis and optimization

The development of an interface coupling program on personal computers for an analysis software system such as ANSYS, SAP, etc. and an optimization software system, MOST, is presented. By controlling and directing the communications the interface coupler integrates the two programs while retaining their versatility and interactive features. The integrated system is used to solve a numerical example of active noise control for a three-dimensional enclosure, in which an energy density level of control points is minimized by adding the sound source to cancel the unwanted noise. The interface coupling program automates with relatively low cost the iterative process for designing an engineering system, remaining flexible in acoustical modelling and efficient in equation solving. Also, the coupling interface is developed in a general-purpose way so that it can be expanded easily to integrate more analysis software packages of different kinds.