6,737 research outputs found
Managing evolution and change in web-based teaching and learning environments
The state of the art in information technology and educational technologies is evolving constantly.
Courses taught are subject to constant change from organisational and subject-specific reasons. Evolution
and change affect educators and developers of computer-based teaching and learning environments alike â
both often being unprepared to respond effectively. A large number of educational systems are designed
and developed without change and evolution in mind. We will present our approach to the design and
maintenance of these systems in rapidly evolving environments and illustrate the consequences of evolution
and change for these systems and for the educators and developers responsible for their implementation and
deployment. We discuss various factors of change, illustrated by a Web-based virtual course, with the
objective of raising an awareness of this issue of evolution and change in computer-supported teaching and
learning environments. This discussion leads towards the establishment of a development and management
framework for teaching and learning systems
Integrating Existing Software Toolkits into VO System
Virtual Observatory (VO) is a collection of interoperating data archives and
software tools. Taking advantages of the latest information technologies, it
aims to provide a data-intensively online research environment for astronomers
all around the world.
A large number of high-qualified astronomical software packages and libraries
are powerful and easy of use, and have been widely used by astronomers for many
years. Integrating those toolkits into the VO system is a necessary and
important task for the VO developers.
VO architecture greatly depends on Grid and Web services, consequently the
general VO integration route is "Java Ready - Grid Ready - VO Ready". In the
paper, we discuss the importance of VO integration for existing toolkits and
discuss the possible solutions. We introduce two efforts in the field from
China-VO project, "gImageMagick" and " Galactic abundance gradients statistical
research under grid environment". We also discuss what additional work should
be done to convert Grid service to VO service.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, will be published in SPIE 2004 conference
proceeding
A Service-Oriented Approach for Network-Centric Data Integration and Its Application to Maritime Surveillance
Maritime-surveillance operators still demand for an integrated maritime picture better supporting international coordination for their operations, as looked for in the European area. In this area, many data-integration efforts have been interpreted in the past as the problem of designing, building and maintaining huge centralized repositories. Current research activities are instead leveraging service-oriented principles to achieve more flexible and network-centric solutions to systems and data integration. In this direction, this article reports on the design of a SOA platform, the Service and Application Integration (SAI) system, targeting novel approaches for legacy data and systems integration in the maritime surveillance domain. We have developed a proof-of-concept of the main system capabilities to assess feasibility of our approach and to evaluate how the SAI middleware architecture can fit application requirements for dynamic data search, aggregation and delivery in the distributed maritime domain
GCC-Plugin for Automated Accelerator Generation and Integration on Hybrid FPGA-SoCs
In recent years, architectures combining a reconfigurable fabric and a
general purpose processor on a single chip became increasingly popular. Such
hybrid architectures allow extending embedded software with application
specific hardware accelerators to improve performance and/or energy efficiency.
Aiding system designers and programmers at handling the complexity of the
required process of hardware/software (HW/SW) partitioning is an important
issue. Current methods are often restricted, either to bare-metal systems, to
subsets of mainstream programming languages, or require special coding
guidelines, e.g., via annotations. These restrictions still represent a high
entry barrier for the wider community of programmers that new hybrid
architectures are intended for. In this paper we revisit HW/SW partitioning and
present a seamless programming flow for unrestricted, legacy C code. It
consists of a retargetable GCC plugin that automatically identifies code
sections for hardware acceleration and generates code accordingly. The proposed
workflow was evaluated on the Xilinx Zynq platform using unmodified code from
an embedded benchmark suite.Comment: Presented at Second International Workshop on FPGAs for Software
Programmers (FSP 2015) (arXiv:1508.06320
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
A reconfigurable component-based problem solving environment
©2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Problem solving environments are an attractive approach to the integration of calculation and management tools for various scientific and engineering applications. These applications often require high performance computing components in order to be computationally feasible. It is therefore a challenge to construct integration technology, suitable for problem solving environments, that allows both flexibility as well as the embedding of parallel and high performance computing systems. Our DISCWorld system is designed to meet these needs and provides a Java-based middleware to integrate component applications across wide-area networks. Key features of our design are the abilities to: access remotely stored data; compose complex processing requests either graphically or through a scripting language; execute components on heterogeneous and remote platforms; reconfigure task sub-graphs to run across multiple servers. Operators in task graphs can be slow (but portable) âpure Javaâ implementations or wrappers to fast (platform specific) supercomputer implementations.K. Hawick, H. James, P. Coddingto
Design and implementation of a holistic framework for data integration in industrial machine and sensor networks
Digitalization and connectivity trends in industrial plants and production equipment create vast and heterogeneous networks of data sources, data sinks and various communication protocols. Data fusion and evaluation of these resources result in high costs for data integration and maintenance. Therefore, we propose a new framework, called MyGateway, enabling effortless integration of heterogeneous data sources, their fusion within the framework and publication to data sinks as needed. For easy integration, deployment, and expansion of the framework we provide an implementation in JAVA using open-source adapters for common industrial protocols and a simple API for usage in user specified setups
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