Metacomputing across intercontinental networks

An intercontinental network of supercomputers spanning more than 10 000 miles and running challenging scientific applications was realized at the Supercomputing ’99 (SC99) conference in Portland, OR using PACX-MPI and ATM PVCs. In this paper, we describe how we constructed the heterogeneous cluster of supercomputers, the problems we confronted in terms of multi-architecture and the way several applications handled the specific requirements of a metacomputer.     

Information agent technology for the Internet: A survey

The vast amount of heterogeneous information sources available on the Internet demands advanced solutions for acquiring, mediating, and maintaining relevant information for the common user. Intelligent information agents are autonomous computational software entities that are especially meant to (1) provide pro-active resource discovery, (2) resolve information impedance of information consumers and providers, and (3) offer value-added information services and products. These agents are supposed to cope with the difficulties associated with the information overload of the user, preferably just in time.

Based on a systematic classification of intelligent information agents, this paper presents an overview of the basic key enabling technologies needed to build such agents, and respective examples of information agent systems currently deployed on the Internet.     

Vc: A C++ library for explicit vectorization

It is an established trend that CPU development takes advantage of Moore's Law to improve in parallelism much more than in scalar execution speed. This results in higher hardware thread counts (MIMD) and improved vector units (SIMD), of which the MIMD developments have received the focus of library research and development in recent years. To make use of the latest hardware improvements, SIMD must receive a stronger focus of API research and development because the computational power can no longer be neglected and often auto‐vectorizing compilers cannot generate the necessary SIMD code, as will be shown in this paper. Nowadays, the SIMD capabilities are sufficiently significant to warrant vectorization of algorithms requiring more conditional execution than was originally expected for Streaming SIMD Extension to handle. The Vc library ( http://compeng.uni‐frankfurt.de/?vc ) was designed to support developers in the creation of portable vectorized code. Its capabilities and performance have been thoroughly tested. Vc provides portability of the source code, allowing full utilization of the hardware's SIMD capabilities, without introducing any overhead. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A method to align the coordinate system of accelerometers to the axes of a human body: The depitch algorithm

One of the key problems in accelerometry based gait analyses is that it may not be possible to attach an accelerometer to the lower trunk so that its axes are perfectly aligned to the axes of the subject. In this paper we will present an algorithm that was designed to virtually align the axes of the accelerometer to the axes of the subject during walking sections. This algorithm is based on a physically reasonable approach and built for measurements in unsupervised settings, where the test persons are applying the sensors by themselves. For evaluation purposes we conducted a study with 6 healthy subjects and measured their gait with a manually aligned and a skewed accelerometer attached to the subject's lower trunk. After applying the algorithm the intra-axis correlation of both sensors was on average 0.89±0.1 with a mean absolute error of 0.05g. We concluded that the algorithm was able to adjust the skewed sensor node virtually to the coordinate system of the subject.     

SEON: a pyramid of ontologies for software evolution and its applications

The Semantic Web provides a standardized, well-established framework to define and work with ontologies. It is especially apt for machine processing. However, researchers in the field of software evolution have not really taken advantage of that so far. In this paper, we address the potential of representing software evolution knowledge with ontologies and Semantic Web technology, such as Linked Data and automated reasoning. We present Seon, a pyramid of ontologies for software evolution, which describes stakeholders, their activities, artifacts they create, and the relations among all of them. We show the use of evolution-specific ontologies for establishing a shared taxonomy of software analysis services, for defining extensible meta-models, for explicitly describing relationships among artifacts, and for linking data such as code structures, issues (change requests), bugs, and basically any changes made to a system over time. For validation, we discuss three different approaches, which are backed by Seon and enable semantically enriched software evolution analysis. These techniques have been fully implemented as tools and cover software analysis with web services, a natural language query interface for developers, and large-scale software visualization.     

Composite indicator for railway infrastructure management

Railway Engineering Science - The assessment and analysis of railway infrastructure capacity is an essential task in railway infrastructure management carried out to meet the required quality and...     

Josephson effect of a superconducting ferromagnet

A point contact tunneling technique has been used to investigate the existence of superconductivity in a long-range, magnetically ordered phase in the reentrant pseudoternary system (Er_{1 – x}Ho_x)Rh₄B₄ in the vicinity of the lower critical temperature T _{c 2}. In this experiment, Josephson-like current-voltage characteristics could be observed in a Nb-Nb oxide-(Er_0.58Ho_0.42)Rh₄B₄ junction even in a temperature region below T _{c 2} (1.8–1.96 K), that is, in the magnetically ordered phase.This work was carried out while on leave of absence.Sponsored by Suisse National Science Foundation.Work in La Jolla sponsored by the National Science Foundation under contract No. NSF/DMR77-08469.     

Cover Picture: Metallodielectric Two‐Dimensional Photonic Structures Made by Electric‐Field Microstructuring of Nanocomposite Glasses (Adv. Mater. 24/2005)

Nanocomposite glasses containing metallic nanoparticles can be microstructured by electric‐field assisted dissolution of the embedded particles. As reported by Graener and co‐workers on p. 2983, any pattern of the electrode—down to the nanoscale—can be transferred onto the nanocomposite glass, giving 2D metallodielectric microstructures. The cover image shows as the background a regular array of squares with 2 μm periodicity produced using macroporous silicon as an electrode. The insets show the base material, the electrode, a representation of the dissolution process, and an enlarged view of the remaining silver nanoparticles.     

Towards Efficient Execution of MPI Applications on the Grid: Porting and Optimization Issues

The message passing interface (MPI) is a standard used by many parallel scientific applications. It offers the advantage of a smoother migration path for porting applications from high performance computing systems to the Grid. In this paper Grid-enabled tools and libraries for developing MPI applications are presented. The first is MARMOT, a tool that checks the adherence of an application to the MPI standard. The second is PACX-MPI, an implementation of the MPI standard optimized for Grid environments. Besides the efficient development of the program, an optimal execution is of paramount importance for most scientific applications. We therefore discuss not only performance on the level of the MPI library, but also several application specific optimizations, e.g., for a sparse, parallel equation solver and an RNA folding code, like latency hiding, prefetching, caching and topology-aware algorithms.