The distributed ASCI supercomputer project

The Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS) is a homogeneous wide-area distributed system consisting of four cluster computers at different locations. DAS has been used for research on communication software, parallel languages and programming systems, schedulers, parallel applications, and distributed applications. The paper gives a preview of the most interesting research results obtained so far in the DAS project

Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies

Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

Coalition based approach for shop floor agility – a multiagent approach

Dissertation submitted for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, speciality of Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis thesis addresses the problem of shop floor agility. In order to cope with the disturbances and uncertainties that characterise the current business scenarios faced by manufacturing companies, the capability of their shop floors needs to be improved quickly, such that these shop floors may be adapted, changed or become easily modifiable (shop floor reengineering). One of the critical elements in any shop floor reengineering process is the way the control/supervision architecture is changed or modified to accommodate for the new processes and equipment. This thesis, therefore, proposes an architecture to support the fast adaptation or changes in the control/supervision architecture. This architecture postulates that manufacturing systems are no more than compositions of modularised manufacturing components whose interactions when aggregated are governed by contractual mechanisms that favour configuration over reprogramming. A multiagent based reference architecture called Coalition Based Approach for Shop floor Agility – CoBASA, was created to support fast adaptation and changes of shop floor control architectures with minimal effort. The coalitions are composed of agentified manufacturing components (modules), whose relationships within the coalitions are governed by contracts that are configured whenever a coalition is established. Creating and changing a coalition do not involve programming effort because it only requires changes to the contract that regulates it

Active caching for recommender systems

Web users are often overwhelmed by the amount of information available while carrying out browsing and searching tasks. Recommender systems substantially reduce the information overload by suggesting a list of similar documents that users might find interesting. However, generating these ranked lists requires an enormous amount of resources that often results in access latency. Caching frequently accessed data has been a useful technique for reducing stress on limited resources and improving response time. Traditional passive caching techniques, where the focus is on answering queries based on temporal locality or popularity, achieve a very limited performance gain. In this dissertation, we are proposing an ‘active caching’ technique for recommender systems as an extension of the caching model. In this approach estimation is used to generate an answer for queries whose results are not explicitly cached, where the estimation makes use of the partial order lists cached for related queries. By answering non-cached queries along with cached queries, the active caching system acts as a form of query processor and offers substantial improvement over traditional caching methodologies. Test results for several data sets and recommendation techniques show substantial improvement in the cache hit rate, byte hit rate and CPU costs, while achieving reasonable recall rates. To ameliorate the performance of proposed active caching solution, a shared neighbor similarity measure is introduced which improves the recall rates by eliminating the dependence on monotinicity in the partial order lists. Finally, a greedy balancing cache selection policy is also proposed to select most appropriate data objects for the cache that help to improve the cache hit rate and recall further