Understanding Next-Generation VR: Classifying Commodity Clusters for Immersive Virtual Reality

Commodity clusters offer the ability to deliver higher performance computer graphics at lower prices than traditional graphics supercomputers. Immersive virtual reality systems demand notoriously high computational requirements to deliver adequate real-time graphics, leading to the emergence of commodity clusters for immersive virtual reality. Such clusters deliver the graphics power needed by leveraging the combined power of several computers to meet the demands of real-time interactive immersive computer graphics.However, the field of commodity cluster-based virtual reality is still in early stages of development and the field is currently adhoc in nature and lacks order. There is no accepted means for comparing approaches and implementers are left with instinctual or trial-and-error means for selecting an approach.This paper provides a classification system that facilitates understanding not only of the nature of different clustering systems but also the interrelations between them. The system is built from a new model for generalized computer graphics applications, which is based on the flow of data through a sequence of operations over the entire context of the application. Prior models and classification systems have been too focused in context and application whereas the system described here provides a unified means for comparison of works within the field

Cloudbus Toolkit for Market-Oriented Cloud Computing

This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds, in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii) internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference pape

D-STREAMON: from middlebox to distributed NFV framework for network monitoring

Many reasons make NFV an attractive paradigm for IT security: lowers costs, agile operations and better isolation as well as fast security updates, improved incident responses and better level of automation. On the other side, the network threats tend to be increasingly complex and distributed, implying huge traffic scale to be monitored and increasingly strict mitigation delay requirements. Considering the current trend of the net- working and the requirements to counteract to the evolution of cyber-threats, it is expected that also network monitoring will move towards NFV based solutions. In this paper, we present D- StreaMon an NFV-capable distributed framework for network monitoring realized to face the above described challenges. It relies on the StreaMon platform, a solution for network monitoring originally designed for traditional middleboxes. An evolution path which migrates StreaMon from middleboxes to Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) has been realized.Comment: Short paper at IEEE LANMAN 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1608.0137

Exploration of Reaction Pathways and Chemical Transformation Networks

For the investigation of chemical reaction networks, the identification of all relevant intermediates and elementary reactions is mandatory. Many algorithmic approaches exist that perform explorations efficiently and automatedly. These approaches differ in their application range, the level of completeness of the exploration, as well as the amount of heuristics and human intervention required. Here, we describe and compare the different approaches based on these criteria. Future directions leveraging the strengths of chemical heuristics, human interaction, and physical rigor are discussed.Comment: 48 pages, 4 figure

RLFC: Random Access Light Field Compression using Key Views and Bounded Integer Encoding

We present a new hierarchical compression scheme for encoding light field images (LFI) that is suitable for interactive rendering. Our method (RLFC) exploits redundancies in the light field images by constructing a tree structure. The top level (root) of the tree captures the common high-level details across the LFI, and other levels (children) of the tree capture specific low-level details of the LFI. Our decompressing algorithm corresponds to tree traversal operations and gathers the values stored at different levels of the tree. Furthermore, we use bounded integer sequence encoding which provides random access and fast hardware decoding for compressing the blocks of children of the tree. We have evaluated our method for 4D two-plane parameterized light fields. The compression rates vary from 0.08 - 2.5 bits per pixel (bpp), resulting in compression ratios of around 200:1 to 20:1 for a PSNR quality of 40 to 50 dB. The decompression times for decoding the blocks of LFI are 1 - 3 microseconds per channel on an NVIDIA GTX-960 and we can render new views with a resolution of 512X512 at 200 fps. Our overall scheme is simple to implement and involves only bit manipulations and integer arithmetic operations.Comment: Accepted for publication at Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '19