A Methodology for Implementing the Standardized Statistical Measures and Metrics for Public Services in Archival Repositories and Special Collections Libraries

The Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Society for American Archivists (SAA) joint standard, Standardized Statistical Measures and Metrics for Public Services in Archival Repositories and Special Collections Libraries, provides a shared vocabulary and set of statistical measures that help archival and special collections repositories articulate their value as they share concrete evidence demonstrating the impact of their services. The standard is specifically designed to be system agnostic so that all repositories can use it. Many of the standard’s recommended measures, particularly those related to users and circulation, however, are challenging to implement without the use of a reading room management software system. This case study explores the adaptation of an existing quantitative assessment program to incorporate the measures and metrics suggested by the new RBMS/SAA standard without the use of specialized reading room management software

Virtual Machine Support for Many-Core Architectures: Decoupling Abstract from Concrete Concurrency Models

The upcoming many-core architectures require software developers to exploit concurrency to utilize available computational power. Today's high-level language virtual machines (VMs), which are a cornerstone of software development, do not provide sufficient abstraction for concurrency concepts. We analyze concrete and abstract concurrency models and identify the challenges they impose for VMs. To provide sufficient concurrency support in VMs, we propose to integrate concurrency operations into VM instruction sets. Since there will always be VMs optimized for special purposes, our goal is to develop a methodology to design instruction sets with concurrency support. Therefore, we also propose a list of trade-offs that have to be investigated to advise the design of such instruction sets. As a first experiment, we implemented one instruction set extension for shared memory and one for non-shared memory concurrency. From our experimental results, we derived a list of requirements for a full-grown experimental environment for further research

The Virtual Monte Carlo

The concept of Virtual Monte Carlo (VMC) has been developed by the ALICE Software Project to allow different Monte Carlo simulation programs to run without changing the user code, such as the geometry definition, the detector response simulation or input and output formats. Recently, the VMC classes have been integrated into the ROOT framework, and the other relevant packages have been separated from the AliRoot framework and can be used individually by any other HEP project. The general concept of the VMC and its set of base classes provided in ROOT will be presented. Existing implementations for Geant3, Geant4 and FLUKA and simple examples of usage will be described.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 8 pages, LaTeX, 6 eps figures. PSN THJT006. See http://root.cern.ch/root/vmc/VirtualMC.htm