9,959 research outputs found
Complementary approaches to understanding the plant circadian clock
Circadian clocks are oscillatory genetic networks that help organisms adapt
to the 24-hour day/night cycle. The clock of the green alga Ostreococcus tauri
is the simplest plant clock discovered so far. Its many advantages as an
experimental system facilitate the testing of computational predictions.
We present a model of the Ostreococcus clock in the stochastic process
algebra Bio-PEPA and exploit its mapping to different analysis techniques, such
as ordinary differential equations, stochastic simulation algorithms and
model-checking. The small number of molecules reported for this system tests
the limits of the continuous approximation underlying differential equations.
We investigate the difference between continuous-deterministic and
discrete-stochastic approaches. Stochastic simulation and model-checking allow
us to formulate new hypotheses on the system behaviour, such as the presence of
self-sustained oscillations in single cells under constant light conditions.
We investigate how to model the timing of dawn and dusk in the context of
model-checking, which we use to compute how the probability distributions of
key biochemical species change over time. These show that the relative
variation in expression level is smallest at the time of peak expression,
making peak time an optimal experimental phase marker. Building on these
analyses, we use approaches from evolutionary systems biology to investigate
how changes in the rate of mRNA degradation impacts the phase of a key protein
likely to affect fitness. We explore how robust this circadian clock is towards
such potential mutational changes in its underlying biochemistry. Our work
shows that multiple approaches lead to a more complete understanding of the
clock
A Genetic Algorithm for Power-Aware Virtual Machine Allocation in Private Cloud
Energy efficiency has become an important measurement of scheduling algorithm
for private cloud. The challenge is trade-off between minimizing of energy
consumption and satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g. performance or
resource availability on time for reservation request). We consider resource
needs in context of a private cloud system to provide resources for
applications in teaching and researching. In which users request computing
resources for laboratory classes at start times and non-interrupted duration in
some hours in prior. Many previous works are based on migrating techniques to
move online virtual machines (VMs) from low utilization hosts and turn these
hosts off to reduce energy consumption. However, the techniques for migration
of VMs could not use in our case. In this paper, a genetic algorithm for
power-aware in scheduling of resource allocation (GAPA) has been proposed to
solve the static virtual machine allocation problem (SVMAP). Due to limited
resources (i.e. memory) for executing simulation, we created a workload that
contains a sample of one-day timetable of lab hours in our university. We
evaluate the GAPA and a baseline scheduling algorithm (BFD), which sorts list
of virtual machines in start time (i.e. earliest start time first) and using
best-fit decreasing (i.e. least increased power consumption) algorithm, for
solving the same SVMAP. As a result, the GAPA algorithm obtains total energy
consumption is lower than the baseline algorithm on simulated experimentation.Comment: 10 page
Phase transitions in Pareto optimal complex networks
The organization of interactions in complex systems can be described by
networks connecting different units. These graphs are useful representations of
the local and global complexity of the underlying systems. The origin of their
topological structure can be diverse, resulting from different mechanisms
including multiplicative processes and optimization. In spatial networks or in
graphs where cost constraints are at work, as it occurs in a plethora of
situations from power grids to the wiring of neurons in the brain, optimization
plays an important part in shaping their organization. In this paper we study
network designs resulting from a Pareto optimization process, where different
simultaneous constraints are the targets of selection. We analyze three
variations on a problem finding phase transitions of different kinds. Distinct
phases are associated to different arrangements of the connections; but the
need of drastic topological changes does not determine the presence, nor the
nature of the phase transitions encountered. Instead, the functions under
optimization do play a determinant role. This reinforces the view that phase
transitions do not arise from intrinsic properties of a system alone, but from
the interplay of that system with its external constraints.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure
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