15987541
Quality-reliability chain modeling for system-reliability analysis of complex manufacturing processes
System reliability of a manufacturing process should address effects of both the manufacturing system (MS) component reliability, and the product quality. In a multi-station manufacturing process (MMP), the degradation of MS components at an upstream station can cause the deterioration of the downstream product quality. At the same time, the system component reliability can be affected by the deterioration of the incoming product quality of upstream stations. This kind of quality & reliability interaction characteristics can be observed in many manufacturing processes such as machining, assembly, and stamping. However, there is no available model to describe this complex relationship between product quality, and MS component reliability. This paper, considering the unique complex characteristics of MMP, proposes a new concept of quality & reliability chain (QR-Chain) effect to describe the complex propagation relationship of the interaction between MS component reliability, and product quality across all stations. Based on this, a general QR-chain model for MMP is proposed to integrate the product quality with the MS component reliability information for system reliability analysis. For evaluation of system reliability, both the exact analytic solution, and a simpler upper bound solution are provided. The upper bound is proved to be equal to the exact solution if the product quality does not have self-improvement, which is generally true in many MMP. Therefore, the developed QR-chain model, and its upper bound solution can be applied to many MMP.
417212
Taxonomy of Data Prefetching for Multicore Processors
Data prefetching is an effective data access latency hiding technique to mask the CPU stall caused by cache misses and to bridge the performance gap between processor and memory. With hardware and/or software support, data prefetching brings data closer to a processor before it is actually needed. Many prefetching techniques have been developed for single-core processors. Recent developments in processor technology have brought multicore processors into mainstream. While some of the single-core prefetching techniques are directly applicable to multicore processors, numerous novel strategies have been proposed in the past few years to take advantage of multiple cores. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art prefetching techniques, and proposes a taxonomy that classifies various design concerns in developing a prefetching strategy, especially for multicore processors. We compare various existing methods through analysis as well.
12297104
CoStore: a reliable and highly available storage system using clusters
The CoStore cluster architecture is proposed to construct a reliable and highly available storage system. A prototype CoStore was implemented and its performance was measured with the cluster being mirrored in various network environments. The preliminary results demonstrate that there is little impact on performance if the cluster is mirrored in efficient campus network environments with high bandwidth and low latency. As a result the CoStore architecture considerably reinforces a storage system's preparedness for disaster recovery without sacrificing performance.
43007315
The impact of smart disks and spatial reuse property on RAID-5 storage systems
RAID storage systems using SCSI and traditional disk drives cannot meet the growing demand of new I/O intensive applications. New technologies such as smart disks and SSA are being proposed to improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of RAID systems. The objective of this work is to investigate the impact of smart disks and SSA's spatial reuse property on the performance of RAID-5 storage systems. In order to perform this work, we have enhanced CMU's RAIDframe simulator so that it accurately models the overhead of current SCSI and SSA protocols, and we have created smart disk models which include on-drive XOR logic and on-drive caches. We observe that neither smart disks alone nor spatial reuse property alone has much impact on RAID system performance. However, if smart disks and spatial reuse property are properly used in combination, RAID-5 system performance and scalability can be further enhanced. In particular, we propose a parity caching approach to improve the performance of small writes.
14925300
A Taxonomy of Data Prefetching Mechanisms
Data prefetching has been considered an effective way to mask data access latency caused by cache misses and to bridge the performance gap between processor and memory. With hardware and/or software support, data prefetching brings data closer to a processor before it is actually needed. Many prefetching techniques have been proposed in the last few years to reduce data access latency by taking advantage of multi-core architectures. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that classifies various design concerns in developing a prefetching strategy. We discuss various prefetching strategies and issues that have to be considered in designing a prefetching strategy for multi-core processors.
61649411
Parallel I/O prefetching using MPI file caching and I/O signatures
Parallel I/O prefetching is considered to be effective in improving I/O performance. However, the effectiveness depends on determining patterns among future I/O accesses swiftly and fetching data in time, which is difficult to achieve in general. In this study, we propose an I/O signature-based prefetching strategy. The idea is to use a predetermined I/O signature of an application to guide prefetching. To put this idea to work, we first derived a classification of patterns and introduced a simple and effective signature notation to represent patterns. We then developed a toolkit to trace and generate I/O signatures automatically. Finally, we designed and implemented a thread-based client-side collective prefetching cache layer for MPI-IO library to support prefetching. A prefetching thread reads I/O signatures of an application and adjusts them by observing I/O accesses at runtime. Experimental results show that the proposed prefetching method improves I/O performance significantly for applications with complex patterns.
2275333
Risk probability estimating based on clustering
Ubiquitous computing environments are highly dynamic, with new unforeseen circumstances and constantly changing environments, which introduces new risks that cannot be assessed through traditional means of risk analysis. Mobile entities in a ubiquitous computing environment require the ability to perform an autonomous assessment of the risk incurred by a specific interaction with another entity in a given context. This assessment will allow a mobile entity to decide whether sufficient evidence exists to mitigate the risk and allow the interaction to proceed. Such evidence might include records of prior experiences, recommendations from a trusted entity or the reputation of the other entity. We propose a dynamic mechanism for estimating the risk probability of a certain interaction in a given environment using hybrid neural networks. We argue that traditional risk assessment models from the insurance industry do not directly apply to ubiquitous computing environments. Instead, we propose a dynamic mechanism for risk assessment, which is based on pattern matching, classification and prediction procedures. This mechanism uses an estimator of risk probability, which is based on the automatic clustering of defining features of the environment and the other entity, which helps avoid subjective judgments as much as possible.
9381578
Numerical complexiton solutions for the complex KdV equation by the homotopy perturbation method
In this paper, the homotopy perturbation method is extended to investigate the numerical complexiton solutions of the complex KdV equation. By constructing special forms of initial conditions, three new types of realistic numerical solutions are obtained: numerical positon solution expressed by the trigonometric functions, numerical negaton solution expressed by the hyperbolic functions and particularly the numerical analytical complexiton solutions expressed by combinations of the two kinds of functions. All these numerical solutions obtained can rapidly converge to the exact solutions obtained by Lou et al. Illustrative numerical figures are exhibited the efficiency of the proposed method.
135957559
Accelerated Publication: A resist for electric imprint lithography
An electrically curable resist has been developed that can make electric imprint lithography (EIL) a reality. The resist is composed of a diaryliodonium salt photo acid generator and a cycloaliphatic epoxy monomer. Its polymerization takes place when an electric potential is applied between a conductive imprint mold and a substrate which sandwich the resist. A proof-of-concept pattern transfer by EIL with a micron-scale resolution has been demonstrated.
9624275
Exact analytical solutions to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation model
A method is developed for constructing a series of exact analytical solutions of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation model (NLSE) with varying dispersion, nonlinearity, and gain or absorption. With the help of symbolic computation, a broad class of analytical solutions of NLSE are obtained. From our results, many previous known results of NLSE obtained by some authors can be recovered by means of some suitable selections of the arbitrary functions and arbitrary constants. Further, the formation, interaction and stability of solitons have been investigated.
8082956
Statistical Neurodynamics for Sequence Processing Neural Networks with Finite Dilution
We extend the statistical neurodynamics to study transient dynamics of sequence processing neural networks with finite dilution, and the theoretical results are supported by extensive numerical simulations. It is found that the order parameter equations are completely equivalent to those of the Generating Functional Method, which means that crosstalk noise follows normal distribution even in the case of failure in retrieval process. In order to verify the gaussian assumption of crosstalk noise, we numerically obtain the cumulants of crosstalk noise, and third- and fourth-order cumulants are found to be indeed zero even in non-retrieval case.