Enhancing Energy Production with Exascale HPC Methods

High Performance Computing (HPC) resources have become the key actor for achieving more ambitious challenges in many disciplines. In this step beyond, an explosion on the available parallelism and the use of special purpose processors are crucial. With such a goal, the HPC4E project applies new exascale HPC techniques to energy industry simulations, customizing them if necessary, and going beyond the state-of-the-art in the required HPC exascale simulations for different energy sources. In this paper, a general overview of these methods is presented as well as some specific preliminary results.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme (2014-2020) under the HPC4E Project (www.hpc4e.eu), grant agreement n° 689772, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the CODEC2 project (TIN2015-63562-R), and from the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation through Rede Nacional de Pesquisa (RNP). Computer time on Endeavour cluster is provided by the Intel Corporation, which enabled us to obtain the presented experimental results in uncertainty quantification in seismic imagingPostprint (author's final draft

Critical Evaluation of Application Porting in Mobile Platforms

Smart phone has become increasingly popular and sales numbers from the third quarter of 2010 reported that an estimated 80.5 million smart phones were sold worldwide. The statistics expresses that mobile applications have grown significantly and mobile devices have become a part of the user’s everyday life. As companies would like to see their mobile applications reaching a broader audience, the demand for porting applications is necessary before or after developing a software product. Software productions should make sure their products can be easily implemented in several environments, since it will allow the product to reach larger parts of the market in a cost-effective way. This becomes increasingly important when the target market is diverse, and is not eminently dominated by one software environment, such as the mobile market. However, the methods for making applications portable are often very unofficial and ad-hoc based with many constraints and difficulties. In this paper, we critically evaluated the current issues of mobile application porting from various angles. Then, we proposed a standard methodology with proper tools and techniques to overcome the difficulties of mobile application porting and increase the portability of mobile applications.

Towards Product Lining Model-Driven Development Code Generators

A code generator systematically transforms compact models to detailed code. Today, code generation is regarded as an integral part of model-driven development (MDD). Despite its relevance, the development of code generators is an inherently complex task and common methodologies and architectures are lacking. Additionally, reuse and extension of existing code generators only exist on individual parts. A systematic development and reuse based on a code generator product line is still in its infancy. Thus, the aim of this paper is to identify the mechanism necessary for a code generator product line by (a) analyzing the common product line development approach and (b) mapping those to a code generator specific infrastructure. As a first step towards realizing a code generator product line infrastructure, we present a component-based implementation approach based on ideas of variability-aware module systems and point out further research challenges.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, pp. 539-545, Angers, France, SciTePress, 201

Candoia: a platform for building and sharing mining software repositories tools as apps

We propose Candoia, a novel platform and ecosystem for building and sharing Mining Software Repositories (MSR) tools. Using Candoia, MSR tools are built as apps and Candoia ecosystem, acting as an appstore, allows effective sharing. Candoia platform provides, data extraction tools for curating custom datasets for user projects, and data abstractions for enabling uniform access to MSR artifacts from disparate sources, which makes apps portable and adoptable across diverse software project settings of MSR researchers and practitioners. The structured design of a Candoia app and the languages selected for building various components of a Candoia app promotes easy customization. To evaluate Candoia we have built over two dozen MSR apps for analyzing bugs, software evolution, project management aspects, and source code and programming practices showing the applicability of the platform for building a variety of MSR apps. For testing portability of apps across diverse project settings, we tested the apps using ten popular project repositories, such as Apache Tomcat, JUnit, Node.js, etc, and found that apps required no changes to be portable. We performed a user study to test customizability and we found that five of eight Candoia users found it very easy to customize an existing app. Candoia is available for download

Use of Open Software for Information Literacy in Academic Libraries: Issues and Challenges

One of the ways to sustain the relevancy of libraries in this electronics era is to prove its stakeholders that a library is still very much useful for acquiring knowledge and virtues. Librarians in Malaysia, specifically in academic libraries, have been initiating proactive approaches in marketing library services & resources for users to access it in a more efficient and effective way. One of the approaches done is by conducting information literacy workshop to educate them on how to use the library online resources, i.e. online databases and e-books, as well as on how to locate physical materials in the library premise. This study is conducted to address current issues and challenges faced by the librarians while using ‘zero cost’ open software as a tool for interactive teaching, evaluating performance and registration process for information literacy workshop. It is also done to explore on which open software that are currently use for their information literacy workshop. From this point, a list of open software that is/are commonly used by these academic libraries is revealed. A survey is distributed to a group of librarians from selected public and private universities to gather the information. Based on the analysis, the most feasible and reliable open software for information literacy is recommended

Performance comparison of single-precision SPICE Model-Evaluation on FPGA, GPU, Cell, and multi-core processors

Automated code generation and performance tuning techniques for concurrent architectures such as GPUs, Cell and FPGAs can provide integer factor speedups over multi-core processor organizations for data-parallel, floating-point computation in SPICE model-evaluation. Our Verilog AMS compiler produces code for parallel evaluation of non-linear circuit models suitable for use in SPICE simulations where the same model is evaluated several times for all the devices in the circuit. Our compiler uses architecture specific parallelization strategies (OpenMP for multi-core, PThreads for Cell, CUDA for GPU, statically scheduled VLIW for FPGA) when producing code for these different architectures. We automatically explore different implementation configurations (e.g. unroll factor, vector length) using our performance-tuner to identify the best possible configuration for each architecture. We demonstrate speedups of 3- 182times for a Xilinx Virtex5 LX 330T, 1.3-33times for an IBM Cell, and 3-131times for an NVIDIA 9600 GT GPU over a 3 GHz Intel Xeon 5160 implementation for a variety of single-precision device models

Program specialization using the OMOS system

technical reportAbstraction and modularity provide many software engineering benefits. Hiding details of module internals can, however, prevent system implementors from being able to provide anything but a highly general implementation of a given module. We describe OMOS, a programmable linker/loader and system server that manages module implementations. OMOS allows system builders to describe system architectures in high-level terms, via a module construction scripting language. Using scripts, system implementors can provide modules that can test and react to both their static and run time environments. These modules, which we refer to as electric libraries, can produce implementations that are optimized at link or run time, without sacrificing modularity, expanding interfaces, or requiring changes in client programs. We identify and implement three types of specializations that OMOS can perform, and quantify the impact of two of them on a few standard Unix utilities: performance improvements ranged from 6% to 47%.

Some Controversial Opinions on Software-Defined Data Plane Services

Several recent proposals, namely Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Network Service Chaining (NSC), aim to transform the network into a programmable platform, focusing respectively on the control plane (SDN) and on the data plane (NFV/NSC). This paper sits on the same line of the NFV/NSC proposals but with a more long-term horizon, and it presents its considerations on some controversial aspects that arise when considering the programmability of the data plane. Particularly, this paper discusses the relevance of data plane vs control plane services, the importance of the hardware platform, and the necessity to standardize northbound and southbound interfaces in future software-defined data plane service

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed