Using fast and accurate simulation to explore hardware/software trade-offs in the multi-core era

Writing well-performing parallel programs is challenging in the multi-core processor era. In addition to achieving good per-thread performance, which in itself is a balancing act between instruction-level parallelism, pipeline effects and good memory performance, multi-threaded programs complicate matters even further. These programs require synchronization, and are affected by the interactions between threads through sharing of both processor resources and the cache hierarchy. At the Intel Exascience Lab, we are developing an architectural simulator called Sniper for simulating future exascale-era multi-core processors. Its goal is twofold: Sniper should assist hardware designers to make design decisions, while simultaneously providing software designers with a tool to gain insight into the behavior of their algorithms and allow for optimization. By taking architectural features into account, our simulator can provide more insight into parallel programs than what can be obtained from existing performance analysis tools. This unique combination of hardware simulator and software performance analysis tool makes Sniper a useful tool for a simultaneous exploration of the hardware and software design space for future high-performance multi-core systems

Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Rationale and rationale management have been playing an increasingly prominent role in software system development mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering.

A performance of 2 dimensional ultrasonic vibration assisted milling in cutting force reduction, on aluminium AL6061

This paper were investigate a performance of 2 Dimensional Ultrasonic Vibration assisted Milling (UVAM) toward Aluminium Al 6061. The focus is to find the performance of reduction of cutting force compared to the conventional machining in the industries shop floor. Due to the major effect of cutting force of production in industries, the excessive cutting force problem must be investigated deeply as it will cause shortens tool life and reduces the production rate. A scientific approach has been found in order to reduce the cutting force during machining which is integrating the ultrasonic concept into workpiece. The modelling of vibration cutting ratio has been simulated to find the time force contact and non-contact. Thus, less cutting force could be found. The ultrasonic vibration platform that generated by XY25XS from Cedrat Technologies is travelled in X direction as a feed movement. Thus, the X and Y axis vibration actuate along the workpiece for the machining process. The performance of UVAM in cutting force reduction found the superior benefits of UVAM is come from the alternating cycle’s between tool and workpiece. The comparison between UVAM and conventional machining in reduction of cutting force is 32%. The potential of the UVAM tool wear and tool life will be discussed deeply in finding and next in the conclusion section

Visualising Emotional Landmarks in Cities

Different people and cultures associate different emotional states to different parts and spaces of cities. These vary according to individuals, their cultures and also to the time of day, day of week, season, special occasions and more. Recurring patterns may occur in correspondence of the places in which people work, study, entertain themselves, consume, relate, wait or just take a break. What can we learn from these patterns? Trying to find possible answers to this question passes through the possibility to visualize and represent the configurations of emotional expressions in urban spaces, across time, geography, theme, cultures and other dimensions. We have developed ways in which it is possible to harvest people's geo-located (or geo-locatable) emotional expressions from major social networks and to visualize them according to a variety of different modalities. In this paper we will present a series of these types of visualizations, and the ways in which they can be used to gain better understandings of these emotional patterns as they arise, from points of view which derive from anthropology, urbanism, sociology, politics and also arts and poetics. The paper will focus on the ways in which the data is harvested from different social networks, then categorized and annotated with meta-data describing the emotional states, the languages in which people express themselves, the geographic locations, the themes expressed. A methodology for representing this information across a variety of domains (time, space, emotion, theme) will then be presented in detail. A reflection on possible usage cases for anthropology, urbanism, policy-making, arts and design will end the contribution, as well as the description of series of open issues and the indication of possible next-steps for research.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, IV2014 Conference Proceeding

Construction safety and digital design: a review

As digital technologies become widely used in designing buildings and infrastructure, questions arise about their impacts on construction safety. This review explores relationships between construction safety and digital design practices with the aim of fostering and directing further research. It surveys state-of-the-art research on databases, virtual reality, geographic information systems, 4D CAD, building information modeling and sensing technologies, finding various digital tools for addressing safety issues in the construction phase, but few tools to support design for construction safety. It also considers a literature on safety critical, digital and design practices that raises a general concern about ‘mindlessness’ in the use of technologies, and has implications for the emerging research agenda around construction safety and digital design. Bringing these strands of literature together suggests new kinds of interventions, such as the development of tools and processes for using digital models to promote mindfulness through multi-party collaboration on safet

Visualisation of semantic architectural information within a game engine environment

Because of the importance of graphics and information within the domain of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), an appropriate combination of visualisation technology and information management technology is of utter importance in the development of appropriately supporting design and construction applications. We therefore started an investigation of two of the newest developments in these domains, namely game engine technology and semantic web technology. This paper documents part of this research, containing a review and comparison of the most prominent game engines and documenting our architectural semantic web. A short test-case illustrates how both can be combined to enhance information visualisation for architectural design and construction

Shifting Core and Slipping Foundation: An Uncertain Future of Landscape Architecture in European Universities

Faced with the dual and often conflicting necessity to be scientific and design practices the discipline of landscape architecture today is challenged to re-examine its core and intellectual foundation. There is a growing trend toward design as reflective practice. The discipline is maturing and needs autonomous theories and methods. Global and social externalities favor attention to landscape and landscape-based design. Landscape is not only an integrative and evolving concept and practice but also a trans-disciplinary cultural concern. Under such circumstances the core of landscape architecture is shifting and its intellectual foundation is questione