On the tailoring of CAST-32A certification guidance to real COTS multicore architectures

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multicores in real-time industry is on the rise due to multicores' potential performance increase and energy reduction. Yet, the unpredictable impact on timing of contention in shared hardware resources challenges certification. Furthermore, most safety certification standards target single-core architectures and do not provide explicit guidance for multicore processors. Recently, however, CAST-32A has been presented providing guidance for software planning, development and verification in multicores. In this paper, from a theoretical level, we provide a detailed review of CAST-32A objectives and the difficulty of reaching them under current COTS multicore design trends; at experimental level, we assess the difficulties of the application of CAST-32A to a real multicore processor, the NXP P4080.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal grant RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

"The Fallacy of the Revised Bretton Woods Hypothesis: Why TodayÕs International Financial System Is Unsustainable"

The stability of the international financial system is in doubt. Analysis of the system has focused mainly on the sustainability of financing the U.S. trade deficit and has failed to understand the microeconomics of transactions within the system. According to this brief by Thomas I. Palley, the international financial system is unsustainable for reasons of demand, not supply. He recommends a global system of managed exchange rates to replace the current system before it crashes, along with the U.S. economy. East Asian economies are pursuing export-led growth and running huge trade surpluses with the United States by actively pursuing policies aimed at maintaining undervalued exchange rates. Their governments continue to accumulate U.S. financial assets in order to support and stabilize the international financial system.While East Asian policymakers are correct in their belief that they can improve economic outcomes through exchange rate intervention, the system is undermining the structure of income and aggregate demand and eroding U.S. manufacturing capacity.

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe purpose of the present research was to investigate text; comprehension of narrative text;s at varying levels of comprehension and examine how metacomprehension varies as a function of the level of comprehension when making retrospective (posttest) confidence judgments of performance. Using Kintsch's construction-integration theory of text; comprehension, three types of question were developed to probe text;base and situation model levels of text; representation at three levels of difficulty: (a) text;base, literal (easiest), (b) situation model, temporal ordering (low difficulty inferences), and (c) situation model, propositional logic (high difficulty inferences). Differences in percent correct, response time in milliseconds per character, and max amplitude of pupil size confirmed the predicted difficulty of the three question types, except that there was no significant difference in pupil size between the literal and temporal ordering questions. The three types of questions were then used to examine the effect of question difficulty on metacomprehension judgments of confidence, absolute accuracy (calibration accuracy and bias), and relative accuracy (Goodman-Kruskal gamma coefficient or G). Results showed that readers were sensitive to different levels of comprehension and showed different levels of metacomprehension confidence and accuracy depending on the type of question. As predicted, absolute accuracy showed the effects of anchoringand-adjustment when making these judgments across question type. That is, subjects appeared to be anchoring on a moderate estimate of success that corresponded most closely in this study to performance on literal questions and adjusted their confidence for temporal ordering and propositional logic questions. The results related to bias provided support for the hard-easy effect, with propositional logic questions (i.e., hard questions) showing overconfidence and literal questions (i.e., easy questions) showing no significant bias, although bias scores did not discriminate between temporal ordering and propositional logic questions. As predicted, relative accuracy (G) appeared to be stable across question types with no significant differences by question type. As with previous studies, the differences in the results concerning absolute versus relative accuracy suggest that the two types of accuracy are measuring different components of metacomprehension

Reforming German Labor Market Institutions: A Dual Path to Flexibility

Germany has always been one of the prime examples of institutional complementarities between social insurance, a rather passive welfare state, strong employment protection and collective bargaining that stabilize diversified quality production. This institutional arrangement was criticized for being the main cause of inferior labor market performance and increasing fiscal pressure on the welfare state while at the same time inhibiting institutional change. However, over the last 15 years, a sequence of institutional reforms has fundamentally modified the functioning of the German labor market and increased both flexibility and job creation capacities through two intimately linked processes that redefined the line between inactivity, the flexible and the standard segment of the labor market. On the one hand, policy changes facilitated the expansion of flexible or 'atypical' jobs, whereas increasing flexibility of the standard employment relationship resulted from wage moderation and working time flexibility. While at the outset of this reform sequence German had a small, but relatively egalitarian labor market, the number of jobs, but also their diversity has increased.Germany, labor market reforms, atypical employment, standard employment relationship

Taming Energy Costs of Large Enterprise Systems Through Adaptive Provisioning

One of the most pressing concerns in modern datacenter management is the rising cost of operation. Therefore, reducing variable expense, such as energy cost, has become a number one priority. However, reducing energy cost in large distributed enterprise system is an open research topic. These systems are commonly subjected to highly volatile workload processes and characterized by complex performance dependencies. This paper explicitly addresses this challenge and presents a novel approach to Taming Energy Costs of Larger Enterprise Systems (Tecless). Our adaptive provisioning methodology combines a low-level technical perspective on distributed systems with a high-level treatment of workload processes. More concretely, Tecless fuses an empirical bottleneck detection model with a statistical workload prediction model. Our methodology forecasts the system load online, which enables on-demand infrastructure adaption while continuously guaranteeing quality of service. In our analysis we show that the prediction of future workload allows adaptive provisioning with a power saving potential of up 25 percent of the total energy cost