4,826 research outputs found
Simulating the Formation of Massive Protostars: I. Radiative Feedback and Accretion Disks
We present radiation hydrodynamic simulations of collapsing protostellar
cores with initial masses of 30, 100, and 200 M. We follow their
gravitational collapse and the formation of a massive protostar and
protostellar accretion disk. We employ a new hybrid radiative feedback method
blending raytracing techniques with flux-limited diffusion for a more accurate
treatment of the temperature and radiative force. In each case, the disk that
forms becomes Toomre-unstable and develops spiral arms. This occurs between
0.35 and 0.55 freefall times and is accompanied by an increase in the accretion
rate by a factor of 2-10. Although the disk becomes unstable, no other stars
are formed. In the case of our 100 and 200 M simulation, the star
becomes highly super-Eddington and begins to drive bipolar outflow cavities
that expand outwards. These radiatively-driven bubbles appear stable, and
appear to be channeling gas back onto the protostellar accretion disk.
Accretion proceeds strongly through the disk. After 81.4 kyr of evolution, our
30 M simulation shows a star with a mass of 5.48 M and a
disk of mass 3.3 M, while our 100 M simulation forms a 28.8
M mass star with a 15.8 M disk over the course of 41.6 kyr,
and our 200 M simulation forms a 43.7 M star with an 18
M disk in 21.9 kyr. In the absence of magnetic fields or other forms
of feedback, the masses of the stars in our simulation do not appear limited by
their own luminosities.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures. Accepted to The Astrophysical Journa
MapReduce analysis for cloud-archived data
Public storage clouds have become a popular choice for archiving certain classes of enterprise data - for example, application and infrastructure logs. These logs contain sensitive information like IP addresses or user logins due to which regulatory and security requirements often require data to be encrypted before moved to the cloud. In order to leverage such data for any business value, analytics systems (e.g. Hadoop/MapReduce) first download data from these public clouds, decrypt it and then process it at the secure enterprise site. We propose VNCache: an efficient solution for MapReduceanalysis of such cloud-archived log data without requiring an apriori data transfer and loading into the local Hadoop cluster. VNcache dynamically integrates cloud-archived data into a virtual namespace at the enterprise Hadoop cluster. Through a seamless data streaming and prefetching model, Hadoop jobs can begin execution as soon as they are launched without requiring any apriori downloading. With VNcache's accurate pre-fetching and caching, jobs often run on a local cached copy of the data block significantly improving performance. When no longer needed, data is safely evicted from the enterprise cluster reducing the total storage footprint. Uniquely, VNcache is implemented with NO changes to the Hadoop application stack. © 2014 IEEE
TechNews digests: Jan - Nov 2008
TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month
LogBase: A Scalable Log-structured Database System in the Cloud
Numerous applications such as financial transactions (e.g., stock trading)
are write-heavy in nature. The shift from reads to writes in web applications
has also been accelerating in recent years. Write-ahead-logging is a common
approach for providing recovery capability while improving performance in most
storage systems. However, the separation of log and application data incurs
write overheads observed in write-heavy environments and hence adversely
affects the write throughput and recovery time in the system. In this paper, we
introduce LogBase - a scalable log-structured database system that adopts
log-only storage for removing the write bottleneck and supporting fast system
recovery. LogBase is designed to be dynamically deployed on commodity clusters
to take advantage of elastic scaling property of cloud environments. LogBase
provides in-memory multiversion indexes for supporting efficient access to data
maintained in the log. LogBase also supports transactions that bundle read and
write operations spanning across multiple records. We implemented the proposed
system and compared it with HBase and a disk-based log-structured
record-oriented system modeled after RAMCloud. The experimental results show
that LogBase is able to provide sustained write throughput, efficient data
access out of the cache, and effective system recovery.Comment: VLDB201
SKIRT: hybrid parallelization of radiative transfer simulations
We describe the design, implementation and performance of the new hybrid
parallelization scheme in our Monte Carlo radiative transfer code SKIRT, which
has been used extensively for modeling the continuum radiation of dusty
astrophysical systems including late-type galaxies and dusty tori. The hybrid
scheme combines distributed memory parallelization, using the standard Message
Passing Interface (MPI) to communicate between processes, and shared memory
parallelization, providing multiple execution threads within each process to
avoid duplication of data structures. The synchronization between multiple
threads is accomplished through atomic operations without high-level locking
(also called lock-free programming). This improves the scaling behavior of the
code and substantially simplifies the implementation of the hybrid scheme. The
result is an extremely flexible solution that adjusts to the number of
available nodes, processors and memory, and consequently performs well on a
wide variety of computing architectures.Comment: 21 pages, 20 figure
FIRI - a Far-Infrared Interferometer
Half of the energy ever emitted by stars and accreting objects comes to us in
the FIR waveband and has yet to be properly explored. We propose a powerful
Far-InfraRed Interferometer mission, FIRI, to carry out high-resolution imaging
spectroscopy in the FIR. This key observational capability is essential to
reveal how gas and dust evolve into stars and planets, how the first luminous
objects in the Universe ignited, how galaxies formed, and when super-massive
black holes grew. FIRI will disentangle the cosmic histories of star formation
and accretion onto black holes and will trace the assembly and evolution of
quiescent galaxies like our Milky Way. Perhaps most importantly, FIRI will
observe all stages of planetary system formation and recognise Earth-like
planets that may harbour life, via its ability to image the dust structures in
planetary systems. It will thus address directly questions fundamental to our
understanding of how the Universe has developed and evolved - the very
questions posed by ESA's Cosmic Vision.Comment: Proposal developed by a large team of astronomers from Europe, USA
and Canada and submitted to the European Space Agency as part of "Cosmic
Vision 2015-2025
Quasar Jets and their Fields
Observations of jets from quasars and other types of accreting black hole are
briefly summarized. The importance of beaming and -ray observations for
understanding the origin of these jets is emphasised. It is argued that both
the power source and the collimation are likely to be magnetic in origin,
although the details remain controversial. Ultrarelativistic jets may be formed
by the spinning hole and collimated by a hydromagnetic disc wind. Progress in
understanding jets has been handicapped by our inadequate knowledge of how
magnetic field really behaves under cosmic conditions. Fortunately, significant
insights are coming from solar observations, numerical simulation and
laboratory plasma experiments. Some possible, evolutionary ramifications are
briefly discussed and it is suggested that it is the mass of the black hole
relative to that of the galaxy which determines the eventual galaxy morphology.Comment: Latex. 17pages Proc Discusison Meeting on Magnetic Activity in Stars,
Discs and Quasars. Ed. D. Lynden-Bell, E. R. Priest and N. O. Weiss. To
appear in Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc.
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