Comparative study of the factors affecting the generativity of office spaces

This study investigated the categories of generative and conservative offices by using syntactic theories and conducting a comparativean alysis of two different layout configurations. Generativity depends on several features that include but are not limited to spatial criteria. Generativity is also affected by aspects that extend beyond the physical, such as the symbolic relationship between the social organism of an organization and the internal structure of a workplace. Results show that no consistent relationship exists between spatial variables and behaviors even though the examined layouts satisfy an organization's basi ccultural require-ments, including privacy, territoriality, and hierarchy. Spatial parameters increase the potential for generativity, but such increase is not guaranteed without necessary changes in the attitudes, programs, and policies of organizations. Recognizing the limits of spatial variables requires evidence-based field research on office settings to determine operational and tailor-made solutions.     

Art and technology interactions in Islamic and Christian context: Historical approach to architectural globalization

Efficient interaction between art and technology enabled Islamic architecture to actively experience early globalization, but today's separation between these domains and technolo-gical hegemony have presented challenges to Islamic architecture. Accordingly, this research was aimed at illuminating art and technology interactions in Islamic architecture during early globalization when it flourished along with Christian architecture. To this end, logical reasoning and qualitative data analysis were performed in parallel on 12 chains of mostly worship-oriented artworks, such as mosques and churches. The results indicated that art and technology interactions in Islamic and Christian architecture were underlain by the same nature and sequential pattern of beginning from primitive technology and ending with innovative technology (art). The cultural and technological value of these architectural styles eventually crossed geographical boundaries. Therefore, the beneficial interactions between art and technology enabled Islamic and Christian architecture to participate in globalization through the conveyance of their value to other regions even as differences existed in the measures implemented for such transmission.     

Chemical kinetics simulation of deposition and sp2/sp3 bond ratio of diamond-like carbon film in plasma

In this work a theoretical model for the simulation of diamond-like carbon (DLC) film deposition in thermal plasma will be investigated. A chemical kinetics model for the most important molecular processes occurring in the gas-phase and gas-surface will be presented. This investigation is focused on the molecular processes in the gas and the elementary interactions of activated gas species with the deposited surface. The model quantitatively predicts the kinetics concentration of important plasma activated species. Also the net rate of the production of gas, surface, and bulk phase species will be calculated. Finally the growth rate of DLC film and the sp²/sp³ growth ratio under different reactor conditions (temperature, gas flow rate and reactor pressure) will be calculated and verified with literature data.     

Power reduction in HPC data centers: a joint server placement and chassis consolidation approach

Size and number of high-performance data centers are rapidly growing all around the world in recent years. The growth in the leakage power consumption of servers along with its exponential dependence on the ever increasing process variation in nanometer technologies has made it inevitable to move toward variation-aware power reduction strategies in data centers. In this paper, we address the problem of joint server placement and chassis consolidation to minimize power consumption of high-performance computing data centers under process variation. To this end, we introduce two variation-aware server placement heuristics as well as an integer linear programming (ILP)-based server placement method to find the best location of each server in the data center based on its power consumption and the data center heat recirculation model. We then incorporate a novel ILP-based variation-aware chassis consolidation technique to find the optimum task assignment solution under the obtained server placement approach to minimize total power consumption. Experimental results show that by applying the proposed joint variation-aware server placement and chassis consolidation techniques, up to 14.6 % improvement can be obtained at common data center utilization rates compared to state-of-the-art variation-unaware approaches.     

Design and implementation of a practical semi‐lumped high power low‐pass filter

In this article, a compact, semi‐lumped and high power low‐pass filter in VHF band frequency is designed, fabricated, and measured. A semi‐lumped structure is used to decrease the size of the filter and improve its power handling. In high power analysis, all effects of critical points in distributed and lumped structures are considered. The experimental measurements show close agreement with the simulation results. This filter has a cut off frequency at 180 MHz, 0.02 dB ripples in pass band, return loss better than 21 dB in the pass band, 0.2 dB insertion losses, 1.6 dB/MHz shape factor, a 75% miniaturization against conventional structures with distributed elements, and wide out of band rejection. Moreover, 10 and 1 KW are the peak power and the average power handling of the filter. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:605–614, 2014.     

Limitations of LDD types of structures in deep-submicrometer MOStechnology

Lightly doped drain (LDD) types of MOSFET structures have been analyzed in detail in order to understand the issues and trade-offs in the application of these structures to deep-submicrometer technology (L _gate⩽0.35 μm) in which the minimum feature size of the technology is exploited as the total gate length of the device. Because of considerable channel doping compensation resulting from the desired graded-drain profile of the N^- region, larger and unacceptable charge-sharing effects are encountered. The problem can be avoided if the LDD N^- region is shallow and steeply profiled. However, this leads to unacceptably high hot-carrier generation rates. This major conflict in design requirements (suppression of charge sharing as well as reduction of hot-carrier effects) results in serious limitations on the applicability of LDD MOSFETs to deep-submicrometer technology     

Electron and hole quantization and their impact on deep submicronsilicon p- and n-MOSFET characteristics

A first-principles approach to inversion layer quantization, valid for arbitrarily complex band structures, has been developed. This has allowed, for the first time, hole quantization and its effects on p-MOSFET device characteristics to be studied. In addition, electron quantization effects are revisited, improving on previous, simpler approaches. In particular, the impact of quantization on the threshold voltages and “effective” gate oxide thicknesses of p- and n-MOSFETs is investigated. A simple compact model is provided to quantitatively describe the threshold voltage shifts at 300 K as a function of the doping concentration and the oxide thickness. The significance of hole quantization for buried channel p-MOS structures is also studied. The results can be used to both identify and model these effects using popular device simulators     

Improved parallelism and scheduling in multi-core software routers

Recent technological advances in commodity server architectures, with multiple multi-core CPUs, integrated memory controllers, high-speed interconnects, and enhanced network interface cards, provide substantial computational capacity, and thus an attractive platform for packet forwarding. However, to exploit this available capacity, we need a suitable software platform that allows effective parallel packet processing and resource management. In this paper, we at first introduce an improved forwarding architecture for software routers that enhances parallelism by exploiting hardware classification and multi-queue support, already available in recent commodity network interface cards. After evaluating the original scheduling algorithm of the widely-used Click modular router, we propose solutions for extending this scheduler for improved fairness, throughput, and more precise resource management. To illustrate the potential benefits of our proposal, we implement and evaluate a few key elements of our overall design. Finally, we discuss how our improved forwarding architecture and resource management might be applied in virtualized software routers.     

Global minimization of multi-funnel functions using particle swarm optimization

In this paper, we consider the problem of finding the global minimum of multi-funnel-shaped functions with many local minima, which is a well-known and interesting problem in computational biology. First, the particle swarm optimization algorithms are briefly reviewed. Then, we have applied a variant of it with linear decreasing inertia weight to solve the underlying global optimization problem. Our computational experiments on several known test problems show the efficiency of the particle swarm optimization algorithm in comparison with global convex quadratic underestimator algorithms that are widely used in the literature.