A methodological proposal and tool support for the HL7 standards compliance in the development of health information systems

Health information systems are increasingly complex, and their development is presented as a challenge for software development companies offering quality, maintainable and interoperable products. HL7 (Health level 7) International, an international non-profit organization, defines and maintains standards related to health information systems. However, the modelling languages proposed by HL7 are far removed from standard languages and widely known by software engineers. In these lines, NDT is a software development methodology that has a support tool called NDT-Suite and is based, on the one hand, on the paradigm of model-driven engineering and, on the other hand, in UML that is a widely recognized standard language. This paper proposes an extension of the NDT methodology called MoDHE (Model Driven Health Engineering) to offer software engineers a methodology capable of modelling health information systems conforming to HL7 using UML domain models

Transformations of High-Level Synthesis Codes for High-Performance Computing

Specialized hardware architectures promise a major step in performance and energy efficiency over the traditional load/store devices currently employed in large scale computing systems. The adoption of high-level synthesis (HLS) from languages such as C/C++ and OpenCL has greatly increased programmer productivity when designing for such platforms. While this has enabled a wider audience to target specialized hardware, the optimization principles known from traditional software design are no longer sufficient to implement high-performance codes. Fast and efficient codes for reconfigurable platforms are thus still challenging to design. To alleviate this, we present a set of optimizing transformations for HLS, targeting scalable and efficient architectures for high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Our work provides a toolbox for developers, where we systematically identify classes of transformations, the characteristics of their effect on the HLS code and the resulting hardware (e.g., increases data reuse or resource consumption), and the objectives that each transformation can target (e.g., resolve interface contention, or increase parallelism). We show how these can be used to efficiently exploit pipelining, on-chip distributed fast memory, and on-chip streaming dataflow, allowing for massively parallel architectures. To quantify the effect of our transformations, we use them to optimize a set of throughput-oriented FPGA kernels, demonstrating that our enhancements are sufficient to scale up parallelism within the hardware constraints. With the transformations covered, we hope to establish a common framework for performance engineers, compiler developers, and hardware developers, to tap into the performance potential offered by specialized hardware architectures using HLS

A Language Description is More than a Metamodel

Within the context of (software) language engineering, language descriptions are considered first class citizens. One of the ways to describe languages is by means of a metamodel, which represents the abstract syntax of the language. Unfortunately, in this process many language engineers forget the fact that a language also needs a concrete syntax and a semantics. In this paper I argue that neither of these can be discarded from a language description. In a good language description the abstract syntax is the central element, which functions as pivot between concrete syntax and semantics. Furthermore, both concrete syntax and semantics should be described in a well-defined formalism

Symbolic framework for linear active circuits based on port equivalence using limit variables

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The multi-faceted use of the OAI-PMH in the LANL Repository

This paper focuses on the multifaceted use of the OAI-PMH in a repository architecture designed to store digital assets at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and to make the stored assets available in a uniform way to various downstream applications. In the architecture, the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language is used as the XML-based format to represent complex digital objects. Upon ingestion, these objects are stored in a multitude of autonomous OAI-PMH repositories. An OAI-PMH compliant Repository Index keeps track of the creation and location of all those repositories, whereas an Identifier Resolver keeps track of the location of individual objects. An OAI-PMH Federator is introduced as a single-point-of-access to downstream harvesters. It hides the complexity of the environment to those harvesters, and allows them to obtain transformations of stored objects. While the proposed architecture is described in the context of the LANL library, the paper will also touch on its more general applicability