Online Educational Outcomes Could Exceed Those of the Traditional Classroom

An axiom of online education is that teachers should not mechanically translate existing courses into an online format. If so, how should new or ongoing courses be reshaped for the online environment and why? The answers come both from the opportunities offered by the structure of online education and from a body of research from cognitive psychology and cognitive science that provides insight into the way people actually learn. Freed from the time and space constraints inherent in face-to-face higher education settings as well as the deeply ingrained expectations of both teachers and students, online education provides a more flexible palette upon which evidence-based ideas about learning can be integrated into course structure and design. As a result, online education can potentially deliver learning experiences and outcomes that are superior to typical face-to-face classrooms. The ability to integrate experiences that stimulate real, long lasting learning represents one of online education’s greatest potential benefits

Benchmark Results for Chrysalis Functions

This paper presents the results of benchmarks for the important Chrysalis functions and macros. In most cases, me Chrysalis code that implements the function or the assembly code generated by the macro is analyzed as well. It is intended to help Butterfly programmers choose efficient ways to use Chrysalis, and to guide system programmers in enhancing Chrysalis

A Parallel interleaved file system

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Computer Science, 1990.A computer system is most useful when it has well-balanced processor and I/0 performance. Parallel architectures allow fast computers to be constructed from unsophisticated hardware. The usefulness of these machines is severely limited unless they are fitted with I/O subsystems that match their CPU performance. Most parallel computers have insufficient I/O performance, or use exotic hardware to force enough I/O bandwidth through a uniprocessor file system. This approach is only useful for small numbers of processors. Even a modestly parallel computer cannot be served by an ordinary file system. Only a parallel file system can scale with the processor hardware to meet the I/O demands of a parallel computer. This dissertation introduces the concept of a parallel interleaved file system. This class of file system incorporates three concepts: parallelism, interleaving, and tools. Parallelism appears as a characteristic of the file system program and in the disk hardware. The parallel file system software and hardware allows the file system to scale with the other components of a multiprocessor computer. Interleaving is the rule the file system uses to distribute data among the processors. Interleaved record distribution is the simplest and in many ways the best algorithm for allocating records to processors. Tools are application code that can enter the file system at a level that exposes the parallel structure of the files. In many cases tools decrease interprocessor communication by moving processing to the data instead of moving the data. The thesis of this dissertation is that a parallel interleaved file system will provide scalable high-performance I/O for a wide range of parallel architectures while supporting a comprehensive set of conventional file system facilities. We have confirmed our performance claims experimentally and theoretically. Our experiments show practically linear speedup to the limits of our hardware for file copy, file sort, and matrix transpose on an array of bits stored in a file. Our analysis predicts the measured results and supports a claim that the file system will easily scale to more than 128 processors with disk drives

Computer Science and Engineering Research Review 1987-1988

Table of Contents: Elmwood -An Object-Oriented Multiprocessor Operating System / John Mellor-Crummey, Thomas LeBlanc, Lawrence Crowl, Neal Gafter, Peter Dibble p. 5; Eye Movements and Computer Vision / Dana Ballard, Christopher Brown, David Coombs, Brian Marsh p. 20; Infinite Behavior in Connectionist Models with Asymmetric Weights / Sara Porat p. 28; Covering a Set of Test Patterns by a Cellular Automaton / Sue-Ken Yap, Alexander Albicki p. 35; Faculty p. 40; Publications p. 43; Doctoral and Master's Theses p. 54; Seminars p. 57; Grant Support p. 59; Industrial Support p, 60

Computer Science and Engineering Research Review 1989-1990

Table of Contents: Introduction / p. 5; Animate Vision / Dana H. Ballard, Randal C. Nelson, Brian M. Yamauchi p. 7; On the Representation of Cayley Graphs / Bruce W. Arden, Kit-Ming W. Tang p. 17; External Sorting on a Parallel Interleaved File System / Peter C. Dibble, Michael L. Scott p. 20; A Hardware Assist for Distributed Control Synchronization in a Multiprocessor / Mondher Ben-Ayed, Charles W. Merriam p.28; On the Power of Probabilistic Polynomial Time / Richard Beigel, Lane A. Hemachandra, Gerd Wechsung p. 32; Two Algorithms for Maintaining Order in a List / Paul F. Dietz, Daniel D. Sleator p. 34; A Technique for Combining Voice and Data on Round Robin Networks / Christopher Bucci, Alexander Albicki p. 41; Faculty p. 46; Publications p. 48; Doctoral and Master's Theses p. 57; Seminars p. 64; Grant Support p. 66; Industrial Support p. 67

DARPA Parallel Architecture Benchmark Study

In intensive work over a four-week period in the summer of 1986, seven problems were studied and implemented on the Butterfly. The problems were Inspired by various capabilities in computer vision, and were proposed as benchmarks for a DARPA workshop on parallel architectures. They were: convolution and zero-crossing detection for edges, edge tracking, connected component labeling, hough transform, three computational geometry problems (convex hull, voronoi diagram, and minimum spanning tree), three-dimensional visibility calculations, subgraph isomorphism and minimum cost path calculation. BPRs 10, 11, and 14 are detailed reports on three of the problems. BPR13 contains the conclusions of the study and writeups of the work not covered in other BPRs