Synthesis in Distributed Environments

Most approaches to the synthesis of reactive systems study the problem in terms of a two-player game with complete observation. In many applications, however, the system\u27s environment consists of several distinct entities, and the system must actively communicate with these entities in order to obtain information available in the environment. In this paper, we model such environments as a team of players and keep track of the information known to each individual player. This allows us to synthesize programs that interact with a distributed environment and leverage multiple interacting sources of information. The synthesis problem in distributed environments corresponds to solving a special class of Petri games, i.e., multi-player games played over Petri nets, where the net has a distinguished token representing the system and an arbitrary number of tokens representing the environment. While, in general, even the decidability of Petri games is an open question, we show that the synthesis problem in distributed environments can be solved in polynomial time for nets with up to two environment tokens. For an arbitrary but fixed number of three or more environment tokens, the problem is NP-complete. If the number of environment tokens grows with the size of the net, the problem is EXPTIME-complete

On the Automated Synthesis of Enterprise Integration Patterns to Adapt Choreography-based Distributed Systems

The Future Internet is becoming a reality, providing a large-scale computing environments where a virtually infinite number of available services can be composed so to fit users' needs. Modern service-oriented applications will be more and more often built by reusing and assembling distributed services. A key enabler for this vision is then the ability to automatically compose and dynamically coordinate software services. Service choreographies are an emergent Service Engineering (SE) approach to compose together and coordinate services in a distributed way. When mismatching third-party services are to be composed, obtaining the distributed coordination and adaptation logic required to suitably realize a choreography is a non-trivial and error prone task. Automatic support is then needed. In this direction, this paper leverages previous work on the automatic synthesis of choreography-based systems, and describes our preliminary steps towards exploiting Enterprise Integration Patterns to deal with a form of choreography adaptation.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2015, arXiv:1512.0694

Remote voice training: A case study on space shuttle applications, appendix C

The Tile Automation System includes applications of automation and robotics technology to all aspects of the Shuttle tile processing and inspection system. An integrated set of rapid prototyping testbeds was developed which include speech recognition and synthesis, laser imaging systems, distributed Ada programming environments, distributed relational data base architectures, distributed computer network architectures, multi-media workbenches, and human factors considerations. Remote voice training in the Tile Automation System is discussed. The user is prompted over a headset by synthesized speech for the training sequences. The voice recognition units and the voice output units are remote from the user and are connected by Ethernet to the main computer system. A supervisory channel is used to monitor the training sequences. Discussions include the training approaches as well as the human factors problems and solutions for this system utilizing remote training techniques

Spherical Sampling by Archimedes\u27 Theorem

In this paper we present a simple and efficient algorithm for generating uniformaly distributed samples on the unit sphere based on an Archimedes\u27 theorem. The implementation is straightforward and may be easily extended to include stratified sampling for variance reduction. Applications in image synthesis include solid angle measurement, irradiance computation, and rendering equation solution for geometrically complex environments

mkite: A distributed computing platform for high-throughput materials simulations

Advances in high-throughput simulation (HTS) software enabled computational databases and big data to become common resources in materials science. However, while computational power is increasingly larger, software packages orchestrating complex workflows in heterogeneous environments are scarce. This paper introduces mkite, a Python package for performing HTS in distributed computing environments. The mkite toolkit is built with the server-client pattern, decoupling production databases from client runners. When used in combination with message brokers, mkite enables any available client to perform calculations without prior hardware specification on the server side. Furthermore, the software enables the creation of complex workflows with multiple inputs and branches, facilitating the exploration of combinatorial chemical spaces. Software design principles are discussed in detail, highlighting the usefulness of decoupling simulations and data management tasks to diversify simulation environments. To exemplify how mkite handles simulation workflows of combinatorial systems, case studies on zeolite synthesis and surface catalyst discovery are provided. Finally, key differences with other atomistic simulation workflows are outlined. The mkite suite can enable HTS in distributed computing environments, simplifying workflows with heterogeneous hardware and software, and helping deployment of calculations at scale.Comment: preprint; code available soo

WSRT Ultra-Deep Neutral Hydrogen Imaging of Galaxy Clusters at z=0.2, a Pilot Survey of Abell 963 and Abell 2192

A pilot study with the powerful new backend of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) of two galaxy clusters at z=0.2 has revealed neutral hydrogen emission from 42 galaxies. The WSRT probes a total combined volume of 3.4x10^4 Mpc^3 at resolutions of 54x86 kpc^2 and 19.7 km/s, surveying both clusters and the large scale structure in which they are embedded. In Abell 963, a dynamically relaxed, lensing Butcher-Oemler cluster with a high blue fraction, most of the gas-rich galaxies are located between 1 and 3 Mpc in projection, northeast from the cluster core. Their velocities are slightly redshifted with respect to the cluster, and this is likely a background group. None of the blue galaxies in the core of Abell 963 are detected in HI, although they have similar colors and luminosities as the HI detected galaxies in the cluster outskirts and field. Abell 2192 is less massive and more diffuse. Here, the gas-rich galaxies are more uniformly distributed. The detected HI masses range from 5x10^9 to 4x10^10 Msun. Some galaxies are spatially resolved, providing rudimentary rotation curves useful for detailed kinematic studies of galaxies in various environments. This is a pilot for ultra-deep integrations down to HI masses of 8x10^8 Msun, providing a complete survey of the gas content of galaxies at z=0.2, probing environments ranging from cluster cores to voids.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures + 1 Plate, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letter

Technology Advances for Space Shuttle Processing

The Space Systems Integration and Operations Research Applications (SIORA) Program was initiated in late 1986 as a cooperative applications research effort between Stanford University, NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and Lockheed Space Operations Company (LSOC). One of the major initial SIORA tasks was the application of automation and robotics technology to all aspects of the Shuttle tile processing and inspection system. This effort has adopted a systems engineering approach consisting of an integrated set of rapid prototyping testbeds in which a government/university/industry team of users, technologists, and engineers test and evaluate new concepts and technologies within the operational world of Shuttle. These integrated testbeds include speech recognition and synthesis, LASER imaging systems, distributed Ada programming environments, distributed relational database architectures, distributed computer network architectures, multi-media workbenches, and human factors considerations

A semi-automatic parallelization tool for Java based on fork-join synchronization patterns

Because of the increasing availability of multi-core machines, clusters, Grids, and combinations of these environments, there is now plenty of computational power available for executing compute intensive applications. However, because of the overwhelming and rapid advances in distributed and parallel hardware and environments, today?s programmers are not fully prepared to exploit distribution and parallelism. In this sense, the Java language has helped in handling the heterogeneity of such environments, but there is a lack of facilities and tools to easily distributing and parallelizing applications. One solution to mitigate this problem and make some progress towards producing general tools seems to be the synthesis of semi-automatic parallelism and Parallelism as a Concern (PaaC), which allows parallelizing applications along with as little modifications on sequential codes as possible. In this paper, we discuss a new approach that aims at overcoming the drawbacks of current Java-based parallel and distributed development tools, which precisely exploit these new conceptsFil: Hirsch, Matias. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico - CONICET - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software; Argentina;Fil: Zunino, Alejandro. Consejo Nacional de Invest.cientif.y Tecnicas. Ctro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software;Fil: Mateos Diaz, Cristian Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico - CONICET - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingenieria del Software

InLoc: Indoor Visual Localization with Dense Matching and View Synthesis

We seek to predict the 6 degree-of-freedom (6DoF) pose of a query photograph with respect to a large indoor 3D map. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we develop a new large-scale visual localization method targeted for indoor environments. The method proceeds along three steps: (i) efficient retrieval of candidate poses that ensures scalability to large-scale environments, (ii) pose estimation using dense matching rather than local features to deal with textureless indoor scenes, and (iii) pose verification by virtual view synthesis to cope with significant changes in viewpoint, scene layout, and occluders. Second, we collect a new dataset with reference 6DoF poses for large-scale indoor localization. Query photographs are captured by mobile phones at a different time than the reference 3D map, thus presenting a realistic indoor localization scenario. Third, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art indoor localization approaches on this new challenging data