Spheres of isolation: adaptation of isolation levels to transactional workflow

In Workflow Management Systems (WFMSs), transaction isolation is managed most of the time by the underlying database system using ANSI SQL strategies. These strategies do not take sufficiently into account process aspects. Our work consists in studying with more depth the relation between isolation strategy and process dimension as well as the real isolation needs in workflow environments. To carry out these needs, we define `spheres of isolation' inspired from `spheres of control' proposed by C. T. Davies. Spheres of isolation take into account real workflow isolation needs with separation of concerns between workflow design and the specification of its transactional properties

3D protein structure matching by patch signatures

For determining functionality dependencies between two proteins, both represented as 3D structures, it is an essential condition that they have one or more matching structural regions called patches. As 3D structures for proteins are large, complex and constantly evolving, it is computationally expensive and very time-consuming to identify possible locations and sizes of patches for a given protein against a large protein database. In this paper, we address a vector space based representation for protein structures, where a patch is formed by the vectors within the region. Based on our previews work, a compact representation of the patch named patch signature is applied here. A similarity measure of two patches is then derived based on their signatures. To achieve fast patch matching in large protein databases, a match-and-expand strategy is proposed. Given a query patch, a set of small k-sized matching patches, called candidate patches, is generated in match stage. The candidate patches are further filtered by enlarging k in expand stage. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate encouraging performances with respect to this biologically critical but previously computationally prohibitive problem

Strengthening mechanisms in polycrystalline multimodal nickel-base superalloys

Polycrystalline γ-γ′ superalloys with varying grain sizes and unimodal, bimodal, or trimodal distributions of precipitates have been studied. To assess the contributions of specific features of the microstructure to the overall strength of the material, a model that considers solid-solution strengthening, Hall-Petch effects, precipitate shearing in the strong and weak pair-coupled modes, and dislocation bowing between precipitates has been developed and assessed. Cross-slip-induced hardening of the Ni3Al phase and precipitate size distributions in multimodal microstructures are also considered. New experimental observations on the contribution of precipitate shearing to the peak in flow stress at elevated temperatures are presented. Various alloys having comparable yield strengths were investigated and were found to derive their strength from different combinations of microconstituents (mechanisms). In all variants of the microstructure, there is a strong effect of antiphase boundary (APB) energy on strength. Materials subjected to heat treatments below the γ′ solvus temperature benefit from a strong Hall-Petch contribution, while supersolvus heat-treated materials gain the majority of their strength from their resistance to precipitate shearing. © The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society and ASM International 2009