Exploring the Discourses of Marriage, Family, and Fatherhood in Married Gay Parents\u27 Relational Talk

The historic 2015 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges—which extended marriage equality to every state nationwide—coupled with an increase in the number of reported same-sex parent households in America (Gates, 2013) has resulted in greater social, political, and academic visibility for same-sex families in recent years (Breshears & Braithwaite, 2014). Despite this increased cultural visibility, because gay parent families (GPFs) fall outside the parameters of the traditional family model (i.e., a married heterosexual husband and wife couple raising biological children) (Baxter, 2014a), they necessarily rely more heavily on discourse to manage their nontraditional family identity (Galvin, 2006; 2014). To date, little is known about how married gay male parents discursively create and sustain family identity and how they position their families in relation to the dominant heteronormative discourses of traditional marriage, family, and fatherhood. Framed by Baxter’s (2011) relational dialectics theory—a heuristic communication theory useful for investigating the meaning-making process—this study explored the meaning(s) of marriage, family, and fatherhood in married gay fathers’ relational talk. I interviewed 13 married gay parent dyads twice to collect data from the couples across time as well as member check initial results during secondary interviews. Using contrapuntal analysis, I identified the following discourses at the three sites of meaning-making in the data: the discourses of marriage as symbolic and marriage as practical ; the discourses of traditional family structure and nontraditional family structure ; and the discourses of gay culture and gay fatherhood in addition to the discourses of heteronormative fatherhood and co-parenting. I argue that the couples’ talk reflected discursive struggles and, in one case, transformation, to generate relational meanings for their family identities

File system metadata virtualization

The advance of computing systems has brought new ways to use and access the stored data that push the architecture of traditional file systems to its limits, making them inadequate to handle the new needs. Current challenges affect both the performance of high-end computing systems and its usability from the applications perspective. On one side, high-performance computing equipment is rapidly developing into large-scale aggregations of computing elements in the form of clusters, grids or clouds. On the other side, there is a widening range of scientific and commercial applications that seek to exploit these new computing facilities. The requirements of such applications are also heterogeneous, leading to dissimilar patterns of use of the underlying file systems. Data centres have tried to compensate this situation by providing several file systems to fulfil distinct requirements. Typically, the different file systems are mounted on different branches of a directory tree, and the preferred use of each branch is publicised to users. A similar approach is being used in personal computing devices. Typically, in a personal computer, there is a visible and clear distinction between the portion of the file system name space dedicated to local storage, the part corresponding to remote file systems and, recently, the areas linked to cloud services as, for example, directories to keep data synchronized across devices, to be shared with other users, or to be remotely backed-up. In practice, this approach compromises the usability of the file systems and the possibility of exploiting all the potential benefits. We consider that this burden can be alleviated by determining applicable features on a per-file basis, and not associating them to the location in a static, rigid name space. Moreover, usability would be further increased by providing multiple dynamic name spaces that could be adapted to specific application needs. This thesis contributes to this goal by proposing a mechanism to decouple the user view of the storage from its underlying structure. The mechanism consists in the virtualization of file system metadata (including both the name space and the object attributes) and the interposition of a sensible layer to take decisions on where and how the files should be stored in order to benefit from the underlying file system features, without incurring on usability or performance penalties due to inadequate usage. This technique allows to present multiple, simultaneous virtual views of the name space and the file system object attributes that can be adapted to specific application needs without altering the underlying storage configuration. The first contribution of the thesis introduces the design of a metadata virtualization framework that makes possible the above-mentioned decoupling; the second contribution consists in a method to improve file system performance in large-scale systems by using such metadata virtualization framework; finally, the third contribution consists in a technique to improve the usability of cloud-based storage systems in personal computing devices.Postprint (published version

Indiana University's Advanced Cyberinfrastructure

This is an archived document. The most current version may be found at http://pti.iu.edu/ciThe purpose of this document is to introduce researchers to Indiana University’s cyberinfrastructure – to clarify what these facilities make possible, to discuss how to use them and the professional staff available to work with you. The resources described here are complex and varied, among the most advanced in the world. The intended audience is anyone unfamiliar with IU’s cyberinfrastructure

Integration of a parallel efficiency monitoring tool into an HPC production system

This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an extension of a library called TALP for tracing useful computation and performance metrics in MPI-based applications (Message Passing Interface). The extension also integrates the tool with a web portal called UserPortal. They are both developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The library captures information about communication patterns and computation performed by MPI applications, and makes this information available to users. The extension developed in this project adds the functionality of reading PAPI (Performance Application Programming Interface) counters, allowing users to know the instructions per cycle of their application and identify bottlenecks in their code. UserPortal provides an easy-to-use interface for visualizing and analyzing the captured information and allows users to easily monitor the status of their jobs, such as memory usage, CPU usage, and their evolution over time. The integration of the library with the BSC system involves several stages of design and development, including a software wrapper, a modulefile, scripts for retrieving and processing data, and web development to display the data on the UserPortal. However, users must be educated in performance analysis in order to effectively make a good reading and interpretation of the reported metrics and optimize their codes. A public documentation has been developed as well as a reference on how to use these tools on BSC machines, along with links to educational resources on related topics. Overall, this work provides a valuable tool for developers and researchers working with MPI-based applications, making performance optimization more approachable and efficient.Aquesta tesi presenta el disseny, la implementació i l'avaluació d'una extensió d'una llibreria anomenada TALP per traçar el càlcul útil i les mètriques de rendiment en aplicacions basades en MPI (Message Programming Interface por les seves sigles en anglès). L'extensió també integra l'eina amb un portal web anomenat UserPortal. Tots dos són desenvolupats al Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). La llibreria captura informació sobre patrons de comunicació i càlcul realitzat per aplicacions MPI i posa aquesta informació a disposició dels usuaris. L'extensió desenvolupada en aquest projecte afegeix la funcionalitat de llegir comptadors PAPI (Performance Application Programming Interface), permetent als usuaris saber les instruccions per cicle de la seva aplicació i identificar colls d'ampolla en el seu codi. UserPortal proporciona una interfície fàcil d'utilitzar per visualitzar i analitzar la informació capturada i permet als usuaris monitoritzar fàcilment l'estat dels seus treballs, com ara l'ús de la memòria, l'ús de la CPU i la seva evolució en el temps. La integració de la llibreria amb el sistema del BSC implica diverses etapes de disseny i desenvolupament, incloent un envolupador de programari, un modulefile, scripts per recuperar i processar dades i desenvolupament web per mostrar les dades en el UserPortal. No obstant, els usuaris han de ser educats en l'anàlisi de rendiment per tal de fer una lectura i interpretació efectiva de les mètriques reportades i ser capaços d'optimitzar els seus codis. S'ha desenvolupat una documentació pública així com una referència sobre com utilitzar aquestes eines en les màquines BSC, juntament amb enllaços a recursos educatius sobre temes relacionats. En general, aquest treball proporciona una eina valuosa per als desenvolupadors i investigadors que treballen amb aplicacions basades en MPI, fent que l'optimització del rendiment sigui més accessible i eficient

Audits of state and local governmental units with conforming changes as of May 1, 1992; Audit and accounting guide:

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_indev/1298/thumbnail.jp

A shared-disk parallel cluster file system

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Informática Pela Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaToday, clusters are the de facto cost effective platform both for high performance computing (HPC) as well as IT environments. HPC and IT are quite different environments and differences include, among others, their choices on file systems and storage: HPC favours parallel file systems geared towards maximum I/O bandwidth, but which are not fully POSIX-compliant and were devised to run on top of (fault prone) partitioned storage; conversely, IT data centres favour both external disk arrays (to provide highly available storage) and POSIX compliant file systems, (either general purpose or shared-disk cluster file systems, CFSs). These specialised file systems do perform very well in their target environments provided that applications do not require some lateral features, e.g., no file locking on parallel file systems, and no high performance writes over cluster-wide shared files on CFSs. In brief, we can say that none of the above approaches solves the problem of providing high levels of reliability and performance to both worlds. Our pCFS proposal makes a contribution to change this situation: the rationale is to take advantage on the best of both – the reliability of cluster file systems and the high performance of parallel file systems. We don’t claim to provide the absolute best of each, but we aim at full POSIX compliance, a rich feature set, and levels of reliability and performance good enough for broad usage – e.g., traditional as well as HPC applications, support of clustered DBMS engines that may run over regular files, and video streaming. pCFS’ main ideas include: · Cooperative caching, a technique that has been used in file systems for distributed disks but, as far as we know, was never used either in SAN based cluster file systems or in parallel file systems. As a result, pCFS may use all infrastructures (LAN and SAN) to move data. · Fine-grain locking, whereby processes running across distinct nodes may define nonoverlapping byte-range regions in a file (instead of the whole file) and access them in parallel, reading and writing over those regions at the infrastructure’s full speed (provided that no major metadata changes are required). A prototype was built on top of GFS (a Red Hat shared disk CFS): GFS’ kernel code was slightly modified, and two kernel modules and a user-level daemon were added. In the prototype, fine grain locking is fully implemented and a cluster-wide coherent cache is maintained through data (page fragments) movement over the LAN. Our benchmarks for non-overlapping writers over a single file shared among processes running on different nodes show that pCFS’ bandwidth is 2 times greater than NFS’ while being comparable to that of the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS), both requiring about 10 times more CPU. And pCFS’ bandwidth also surpasses GFS’ (600 times for small record sizes, e.g., 4 KB, decreasing down to 2 times for large record sizes, e.g., 4 MB), at about the same CPU usage.Lusitania, Companhia de Seguros S.A, Programa IBM Shared University Research (SUR

An Explainable Model for Fault Detection in HPC Systems

Large supercomputers are composed of numerous components that risk to break down or behave in unwanted manners. Identifying broken components is a daunting task for system administrators. Hence an automated tool would be a boon for the systems resiliency. The wealth of data available in a supercomputer can be used for this task. In this work we propose an approach to take advantage of holistic data centre monitoring, system administrator node status labeling and an explainable model for fault detection in supercomputing nodes. The proposed model aims at classifying the different states of the computing nodes thanks to the labeled data describing the supercomputer behaviour, data which is typically collected by system administrators but not integrated in holistic monitoring infrastructure for data center automation. In comparison the other method, the one proposed here is robust and provide explainable predictions. The model has been trained and validated on data gathered from a tier-0 supercomputer in production

Proposed statement of position : audits of state and local governmental entities receiving federal financial assistance ;Audits of state and local governmental entities receiving federal financial assistance; Exposure draft (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants), 1991, July 31

This proposed statement of position (SOP) supersedes chapter 3, paragraphs 3.1-3.4, and chapters 21-23 of the AICPA Audit and Accounting Guide Audits of State and Local Governmental Units and example 23 of SOP 89-6, Auditors\u27 Reports in Audits of State and Local Governmental Units, and provides additional guidance on compliance auditing and single audits. The SOP updates the guide to reflect the following standards affecting the audits of federal financial assistance programs under the Single Audit Act: 1. Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No. 55, Consideration of the Internal Control Structure in a Financial Statement Audit; 2. SAS No. 60, Communication of Internal Control Structure Related Matters Noted in an Audit; 3. SAS No. 63, Compliance Auditing Applicable to Governmental Entities and Other Recipients of Governmental Financial Assistance; 4. The 1988 revision of Government Auditing Standards, issued by the Comptroller General of the United States. The recommendations in this SOP are effective for audits done in accordance with the Single Audit Act for fiscal years beginning on or after January 1, 1991. Earlier application is permissible.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_sop/1553/thumbnail.jp

ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review Report

This draft report summarizes and details the findings, results, and recommendations derived from the ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review meeting held in June, 2015. The main conclusions are as follows. 1) Larger, more capable computing and data facilities are needed to support HEP science goals in all three frontiers: Energy, Intensity, and Cosmic. The expected scale of the demand at the 2025 timescale is at least two orders of magnitude -- and in some cases greater -- than that available currently. 2) The growth rate of data produced by simulations is overwhelming the current ability, of both facilities and researchers, to store and analyze it. Additional resources and new techniques for data analysis are urgently needed. 3) Data rates and volumes from HEP experimental facilities are also straining the ability to store and analyze large and complex data volumes. Appropriately configured leadership-class facilities can play a transformational role in enabling scientific discovery from these datasets. 4) A close integration of HPC simulation and data analysis will aid greatly in interpreting results from HEP experiments. Such an integration will minimize data movement and facilitate interdependent workflows. 5) Long-range planning between HEP and ASCR will be required to meet HEP's research needs. To best use ASCR HPC resources the experimental HEP program needs a) an established long-term plan for access to ASCR computational and data resources, b) an ability to map workflows onto HPC resources, c) the ability for ASCR facilities to accommodate workflows run by collaborations that can have thousands of individual members, d) to transition codes to the next-generation HPC platforms that will be available at ASCR facilities, e) to build up and train a workforce capable of developing and using simulations and analysis to support HEP scientific research on next-generation systems.Comment: 77 pages, 13 Figures; draft report, subject to further revisio