Frame selection for OCR from video stream of book flipping

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in video stream of flipping pages is a challenging task because flipping at random speed causes difficulties in identifying...     

Container-based cluster orchestration systems: A taxonomy and future directions

Containers, enabling lightweight environment and performance isolation, fast and flexible deployment, and fine-grained resource sharing, have gained popularity in better application management and deployment in addition to hardware virtualization. They are being widely used by organizations to deploy their increasingly diverse workloads derived from modern-day applications such as web services, big data, and internet of things in either proprietary clusters or private and public cloud data centers. This has led to the emergence of container orchestration platforms, which are designed to manage the deployment of containerized applications in large-scale clusters. These systems are capable of running hundreds of thousands of jobs across thousands of machines. To do so efficiently, they must address several important challenges including scalability, fault tolerance and availability, efficient resource utilization, and request throughput maximization among others. This paper studies these management systems and proposes a taxonomy that identifies different mechanisms that can be used to meet the aforementioned challenges. The proposed classification is then applied to various state-of-the-art systems leading to the identification of open research challenges and gaps in the literature intended as future directions for researchers.     

Electrochemical fabrication of Rh–Pd particles and electrocatalytic applications

Electrochemical deposition method was employed for the fabrication of rhodium–palladium (Rh–Pd) particles on the glassy carbon electrode (GCE) and indium tin oxide (ITO) electrode surface. Surface morphological analysis of Rh–Pd film has been carried out using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis. Here, the electrodeposited Rh–Pd particles were found in the average size range of 30–200 nm. The electrochemical activities of the Rh–Pd film have been investigated using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopic (EIS) analysis. The Rh–Pd particles-modified GCE successfully detects the hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) (in pH 7.0 phosphate buffer solution (PBS)) in the linear range in the lab (10–460 μM) and real samples (10–340 μM). The Rh–Pd particles-modified GCE possesses the good sensitivity and selectivity for the detection of H₂O₂ in lab and real samples.     

A taxonomy of market‐based resource management systems for utility‐driven cluster computing

In utility‐driven cluster computing, cluster Resource Management Systems (RMSs) need to know the specific needs of different users in order to allocate resources according to their needs. This in turn is vital to achieve service‐oriented Grid computing that harnesses resources distributed worldwide based on users' objectives. Recently, numerous market‐based RMSs have been proposed to make use of real‐world market concepts and behavior to assign resources to users for various computing platforms. The aim of this paper is to develop a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies how market‐based RMSs can support utility‐driven cluster computing in practice. The taxonomy is then mapped to existing market‐based RMSs designed for both cluster and other computing platforms to survey current research developments and identify outstanding issues. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.     

Scour below a High Vertical Drop

Experimental results on scour below a high vertical drop (drop height/critical depth >1) in uniform sands and gravels are presented. The experimental results are used to describe the effects of important parameters, identified from the dimensional analysis, on equilibrium scour depth. The important observations are that the equilibrium scour depth increases with increase in densimetric Froude number, whereas the scour depth decreases with increase in sediment size and tailwater depth. The time scale of scour depth that follows an exponential law is determined. The nondimensional time scale decreases with increase in densimetric Froude number.     

Double auction-inspired meta-scheduling of parallel applications on global grids

Meta-schedulers map jobs to computational resources that are part of a Grid, such as clusters, that in turn have their own local job schedulers. Existing Grid meta-schedulers either target system-centric metrics, such as utilisation and throughput, or prioritise jobs based on utility metrics provided by the users. The system-centric approach gives less importance to users’ individual utility, while the user-centric approach may have adverse effects such as poor system performance and unfair treatment of users. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel meta-scheduler, based on the well-known double auction mechanism that aims to satisfy users’ service requirements as well as ensuring balanced utilisation of resources across a Grid. We have designed valuation metrics that commodify both the complex resource requirements of users and the capabilities of available computational resources. Through simulation using real traces, we compare our scheduling mechanism with other common mechanisms widely used by both existing market-based and traditional meta-schedulers. The results show that our meta-scheduling mechanism not only satisfies up to 15% more user requirements than others, but also improves system utilisation through load balancing.     

Enhancing performance of failure-prone clusters by adaptive provisioning of cloud resources

In this paper, we investigate Cloud computing resource provisioning to extend the computing capacity of local clusters in the presence of failures. We consider three steps in the resource provisioning including resource brokering, dispatch sequences, and scheduling. The proposed brokering strategy is based on the stochastic analysis of routing in distributed parallel queues and takes into account the response time of the Cloud provider and the local cluster while considering computing cost of both sides. Moreover, we propose dispatching with probabilistic and deterministic sequences to redirect requests to the resource providers. We also incorporate checkpointing in some well-known scheduling algorithms to provide a fault-tolerant environment. We propose two cost-aware and failure-aware provisioning policies that can be utilized by an organization that operates a cluster managed by virtual machine technology, and seeks to use resources from a public Cloud provider. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed policies improve the response time of users’ requests by a factor of 4.10 under a moderate load with a limited cost on a public Cloud.     

FireFly: a cross-layer platform for real-time embedded wireless networks

We propose a cross-layer approach with tightly-coupled time synchronization for real-time support and predictable lifetime in battery-operated sensor networks. Our design spans a sensor hardware platform with hardware-based global time synchronization, a TDMA link layer protocol with collision-free multi-hop support and node scheduling algorithms for maximum concurrency and streaming. Our dual-radio sensor platform, FireFly, features an IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver and supports global time synchronization indoors by using an AM radio carrier-current method and an atomic clock receiver for outdoors. A TDMA-based link protocol, RT-Link, leverages the hardware for fixed and mobile nodes with a near-optimal and predictable node lifetime of over 2 years. It outperforms comparable sensor network link protocols such as B-MAC and S-MAC in terms of end-to-end latency and throughput and node lifetime across all duty cycle ratios. Operating over RT-Link is MAX, a scheduling framework which offers optimal transmission concurrency and bandwidth management for networks with regular structure. Through analysis and experiments we show that global time sync is a robust, economical and scalable alternative to in-band software-based techniques. To illustrate the capabilities and flexibility of our platform, we describe our experiences with two-way voice streaming over multiple hops. We have deployed a 42-node network with sub-100 μs synchronization accuracy in the NIOSH experimental coal mine for people-tracking and voice communication.

Microwave sintering of copper–graphite composites

Microwave processing is a distinctive and alternative technique when compared with the available processes such as material synthesis, sintering, and processing utilizing the conventional heating sources. Owing to microwave–material molecular interaction, microwave heating is of internal and faster. This results in improved quality of the product with time and energy savings. Metal at its bulk form reflects microwaves; however in its powder form, it couples with microwaves. This work emphasizes on the development of copper–graphite metal matrix composite for electrical sliding contact applications through microwave hybrid heating (2.45 GHz, 3.2 kW). The fabricated composites were tested for their mechanical properties such as porosity, relative density and hardness. Microstructural aspects were studied through SEM.