A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Better quality score compression through sequence-based quality smoothing

Current NGS techniques are becoming exponentially cheaper. As a result, there is an exponential growth of genomic data unfortunately not followed by an exponential growth of storage, leading to the necessity of compression. Most of the entropy of NGS data lies in the quality values associated to each read. Those values are often more diversified than necessary. Because of that, many tools such as Quartz or GeneCodeq, try to change (smooth) quality scores in order to improve compressibility without altering the important information they carry for downstream analysis like SNP calling

CPA WebTrust practitioners\u27 guide

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1788/thumbnail.jp

The Third NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies

This report contains copies of nearly all of the technical papers and viewgraphs presented at the Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies held in October 1993. The conference served as an informational exchange forum for topics primarily relating to the ingestion and management of massive amounts of data and the attendant problems involved. Discussion topics include the necessary use of computers in the solution of today's infinitely complex problems, the need for greatly increased storage densities in both optical and magnetic recording media, currently popular storage media and magnetic media storage risk factors, data archiving standards including a talk on the current status of the IEEE Storage Systems Reference Model (RM). Additional topics addressed System performance, data storage system concepts, communications technologies, data distribution systems, data compression, and error detection and correction

A software based mentor system

This thesis describes the architecture, implementation issues and evaluation of Mentor - an educational support system designed to mentor students in their university studies. Students can ask (by typing) natural language questions and Mentor will use several educational paradigms to present information from its Knowledge Base or from data-mined online Web sites to respond. Typically the questions focus on the student’s assignments or in their preparation for their examinations. Mentor is also pro-active in that it prompts the student with questions such as "Have you started your assignment yet?". If the student responds and enters into a dialogue with Mentor, then, based upon the student’s questions and answers, it guides them through a Directed Learning Path planned by the lecturer, specific to that assessment. The objectives of the research were to determine if such a system could be designed, developed and applied in a large-scale, real-world environment and to determine if the resulting system was beneficial to students using it. The study was significant in that it provided an analysis of the design and implementation of the system as well as a detailed evaluation of its use. This research integrated the Computer Science disciplines of network communication, natural language parsing, user interface design and software agents, together with pedagogies from the Computer Aided Instruction and Intelligent Tutoring System fields of Education. Collectively, these disciplines provide the foundation for the two main thesis research areas of Dialogue Management and Tutorial Dialogue Systems. The development and analysis of the Mentor System required the design and implementation of an easy to use text based interface as well as a hyper- and multi-media graphical user interface, a client-server system, and a dialogue management system based on an extensible kernel. The multi-user Java-based client-server system used Perl-5 Regular Expression pattern matching for Natural Language Parsing along with a state-based Dialogue Manager and a Knowledge Base marked up using the XML-based Virtual Human Markup Language. The kernel was also used in other Dialogue Management applications such as with computer generated Talking Heads. The system also enabled a user to easily program their own knowledge into the Knowledge Base as well as to program new information retrieval or management tasks so that the system could grow with the user. The overall framework to integrate and manage the above components into a usable system employed suitable educational pedagogies that helped in the student’s learning process. The thesis outlines the learning paradigms used in, and summarises the evaluation of, three course-based Case Studies of university students’ perception of the system to see how effective and useful it was, and whether students benefited from using it. This thesis will demonstrate that Mentor met its objectives and was very successful in helping students with their university studies. As one participant indicated: ‘I couldn’t have done without it.

How did university departments interweave the web: a study of connectivity and underlying factors.

Interacting with Computers, 10 (4): pp. 353-373.This paper presents two studies of the use of the WWW in Scottish universities and American land-grant universities. First, we investigated the relationship between the organisational profile of a university department in Scotland and its structural connectivity on the WWW. A Spearman rank order correlation analysis revealed a number of strong correlation relationships between structural connectivity measures and the organisational profile based on research assessment exercise ratings, teaching quality assessments, student–staff ratios and funding levels. Linkage patterns from 13 Scottish academic sites to commercial sites in Britain and America highlighted the impact of culture and the appropriateness of information technologies on the acceptance of the WWW. The second study is a content survey of WWW-based education activities in American land-grant universities to investigate successful applications of these enabling techniques in education. The two studies together highlighted cultural, political and technological interactions in the use of the WWW

Reproduced and Emergent Genres of Communication on the World-Wide Web

The World-Wide Web is growing quickly and being applied to many new types of communications. As a basis for studying organizational communications, Yates and Orlikowski [1, 2] proposed using genres. They defined genres as, “typified communicative actions characterized by similar substance and form and taken in response to recurrent situations” [1, p. 299]. They further suggested that communications in a new media will show both reproduction or adaptation of existing communicative genres as well as the emergence of new genres. We studied this phenomena on the World-Wide Web by examining randomly selected Web pages (100 in one sample and 1000 in a second) and categorizing the type of genre represented. Perhaps most interestingly, we saw examples of genres being adapted to take advantage of the linking and interactivity of the new medium, such as solicitations for help and genealogies. We suggest that Web site designers consider the genres that are appropriate for their situation and attempt to reuse familiar genres

Multi-sensor Evolution Analysis: an advanced GIS for interactive time series analysis and modelling based on satellite data

Archives of Earth remote sensing data, acquired from orbiting satellites, contain large amounts of information that can be used both for research activities and decision support. Thematic categorization is one method to extract from satellite data meaningful information that humans can directly comprehend. An interactive system that permits to analyse geo-referenced thematic data and its evolution over time is proposed as a tool to efficiently exploit such vast and growing amount of data. This thesis describes the approach used in building the system, the data processing methodology, details architectural elements and graphical interfaces. Finally, this thesis provides an evaluation of potential uses of the features provided, performance levels and usability of an implementation hosting an archive of 15 years moderate resolution (1 Km, from the ATSR instrument) thematic data

Helmholtz Portfolio Theme Large-Scale Data Management and Analysis (LSDMA)

The Helmholtz Association funded the "Large-Scale Data Management and Analysis" portfolio theme from 2012-2016. Four Helmholtz centres, six universities and another research institution in Germany joined to enable data-intensive science by optimising data life cycles in selected scientific communities. In our Data Life cycle Labs, data experts performed joint R&D together with scientific communities. The Data Services Integration Team focused on generic solutions applied by several communities

Software Reuse Donor Cards

The purpose of this study was to determine the feasibility of designing the equivalent of an organ donor card for software reuse artifacts. Organ donor cards have helped spur the implementation of a national organ transplantation distribution system. Large scale reuse efforts have government or corporate support for the tools and personnel necessary to run a program for reuse-in-the-Iarge, but support for reuse-in-thesmall is generally lacking. A simple docwnent, similar to an organ donor card, included with source code (e.g., when distributed over the Internet) would ease reuse for developers not involved with large, well-financed projects. The design of a software reuse card is proposed using a metadata form at. The design includes the equivalent functionality of an organ donor card as well as data specific to software reuse concerns. The proposed reuse donor card was tested using a variety of software artifacts ranging from abstract design patterns to source code fragments and functions. The card is designed to support automation in both generation and retrieval while being simple enough so as to not discourage its use. The donor card was evaluated by a number of professional programmers