12092083
Accelerated Neighbor Discovery in Bluetooth Based Personal Area Networks
The recent industry standard and specification Bluetooth promises low cost replacement of communication cabling with moderate symbol-rate, short-range wireless links. The same specification also addresses the establishment of point-to-multipoint piconets and the interconnection of several of these piconets into scatternets, enabling Bluetooth to be used as a technology for realizing personal area networks (PAN). In Bluetooth, to establish piconets, nodes have to go through three phases of link activation: i) neighboring device discovery or inquiry, ii) handshake with discovered devices or paging, and iii) negotiation of link parameters. In this paper we are going to investigate the first phase; point out why the current inquiry procedure is inefficient for PAN scenarios, and propose and investigate a novel but backwards Bluetooth compliant modification to the specification with which device discovery can be accelerated.
10614369
PICO: A Middleware Framework for Pervasive Computing
The pervasive information community organization is a framework for creating mission-oriented dynamic communities of autonomous software entities that perform tasks for users and devices. PICO's telemedicine example scenario demonstrates its potential as a simple, unique, and versatile middleware framework for pervasive computing.
6748545
Quality of Service Primitives for Operating System Support of Multimedia Applications
11624555
A Query Algebra for Fragmented XML Stream Data
The increased usage of mobile devices coupled with an unprecedented demand for information has pushed the scalability problem of pull-based data service to the focus. A broadcast model of streaming data over a wireless medium has been proposed as a viable alternative for information dissemination. In the streaming broadcast model, servers broadcast data in an asynchronous and unacknowledged mode while clients process personalized and complex queries locally, relieving the load on the server. We address the query processing of streamed XML data, which is fragmented into manageable chunks for easier synchronization. Although there has been some work done in defining algebras that model XQueries on XML documents, no work has been done in defining query algebras for fragmented XML stream data. We define a model for processing fragmented XML stream data, using the concept of holes and fillers. This model offers the flexibility required by the server to disseminate data in manageable fragments, whenever they become available, and to send repetitions, replacements and removal of fragments. We then present a query algebra for XQuery that operates on this streamed XML data model. The XML fragments are operated upon in a continuous pipelined fashion without the need of materializing the transmitted document at the client site.
6061688
Mobile Agent Connection Establishment and Management (CEMA)—Message Exchange for Pervasive Computing Environments
Pervasive computing is an emerging technology that offers new possibilities to distributed computing and computer networking; it employs a wide variety of smart, ubiquitous devices throughout an individual's working and living environment. Mobile agents are software entities that can migrate between servers (mobile agent environments) of the network accomplishing various tasks on the behalf of their owners. The objective of this paper is to describe a test and prototyping environment for experimenting with mobile agents in pervasive environments. A prototype environment for a novel, proactive infrastructure is described for mobile agent assisted pervasive computing. In addition, a new message passing algorithm is provided for mobile agent connection establishment and management (CEMA). Simulation results show the performance of the proposed approach.
29185449
Performance Analysis and Scalability of the ThreadmanTM Thread Manager
37714806
Parallel Solution of the Three-Dimensional, Time-Dependent Ginzburg-Landau Equation
The recent discovery of superconductivity in a class of copper-oxide compounds (the cuprate superconductors) at liquid nitrogen temperatures has generated a renewed interest in the magnetic properties of type-II superconductors. In our work, we are investigating these properties using the phenomenological time- dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation. This paper describes the parallelization of this equation.
60326384
Operating Systems: A Spiral Approach
Elmasri, Levine, and Carrick's "spiral approach" to teaching operating systems develops student understanding of various OS components early on and helps students approach the more difficult aspects of operating systems with confidence. While operating systems have changed dramatically over the years, most OS books use a linear approach that covers each individual OS component in depth, which is difficult for students to follow and requires instructors to constantly put materials in context. 
Elmasri, Levine, and Carrick do things differently by following an integrative or "spiral" approach to explaining operating systems. The spiral approach alleviates the need for an instructor to "jump ahead" when explaining processes by helping students "completely" understand a simple, working, functional system as a whole in the very beginning. This is more effective pedagogically, and it inspires students to continue exploring more advanced concepts with confidence. 
Table of contents 
 
PART 1: Operating Systems Overview and Background 
1 Getting Started 
2 Operating System Concepts, Components, and Architectures 
PART 2: Building Operating Systems Incrementally: A Breadth-Oriented Spiral Approach 
3 A Simple, Single-Process Operating System 
4 A Single-User Multitasking Operating System 
5 A Single-User Multitasking/Multithreading Operating System 
6 A Multiple-User Operating System 
7 Parallel and Distributed Computing, Clusters, and Grids 
PART 3: CPU and Memory Management 
8 Process Management: Concepts, Threads, and Scheduling 
9 More Process Management: Interprocess Communication, Synchronization, and Deadlocks 
10 Basic Memory Management 
11 Advanced Memory Management 
PART 4: A Depth-Oriented Presentation of OS Concepts: Files Systems and Input/Output 
12 File Systems - Basics 
13 File Systems - Examples and More Features 
14 Disk Scheduling and Input/Output Management 
PART 5: Networks, Distributed Systems, and Security 
15 Introduction to Computer Networks 
16 Protection and Security 
17 Distributed Operating Systems 
PART 6: Case Studies 
18 Windows NT™ through Vista™ 
19 Linux: A Case Study 
20 Palm OS: A Class Case Study 
Appendices 
Appendix A: Overview of Computer System and Architecture Concepts
20665084
Parallel performance of two applications in the Boeing high performance computing benchmark suite
Abstract We describe our work to evaluate the performance of the parallel versions of two floating-point-intensive engineering applications from Boeing's high performance computing benchmark suite (BHPCBS) on emerging RISC parallel systems and PC clusters. The first application is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, OVERFLOW, developed by NASA and used by Boeing for analysis and design of advanced aircraft. The second application is a prototype of a computational electromagnetics (CEM) code, developed by Boeing and used for radar cross-section studies. The distributed memory parallel versions of both applications use the message passing interface (MPI) standard for message passing. The goal of our work was to determine whether RISC parallel systems and PC clusters, which offer high performance at low cost, may be able to meet Boeing's computing requirements in the future. We describe the test environments for the studies, discuss parallelization issues and strategies and present performance data for the two applications.
20578112
The art and science of computer graphics: a very depth-first approach to the non-majors course
This paper describes a course in computer graphics which is designed for students with little or no background in computer science. The course is centered around custom software which was designed with the pedagogical goals in mind. The goals of the course, the software, and some experiences at two institutions are discussed.
2370359
Managing Power Consumption and Performance of Computing Systems Using Reinforcement Learning
Electrical power management in large-scale IT systems such as commercial data-centers is an application area of rapidly growing interest from both an economic and ecological perspective, with billions of dollars and millions of metric tons of CO2 emissions at stake annually. Businesses want to save power without sacrificing performance. This paper presents a reinforcement learning approach to simultaneous online management of both performance and power consumption. We apply RL in a realistic laboratory testbed using a Blade cluster and dynamically varying HTTP workload running on a commercial web applications middleware platform. We embed a CPU frequency controller in the Blade servers' firmware, and we train policies for this controller using a multi-criteria reward signal depending on both application performance and CPU power consumption. Our testbed scenario posed a number of challenges to successful use of RL, including multiple disparate reward functions, limited decision sampling rates, and pathologies arising when using multiple sensor readings as state variables. We describe innovative practical solutions to these challenges, and demonstrate clear performance improvements over both hand-designed policies as well as obvious "cookbook" RL implementations.