Realizing the Hydrogen Economy through Semantic Web Technologies

The FUSION (Fuel Cell Understanding through Semantic Inferencing, Ontologies and Nanotechnology) project applies, extends, and combines Semantic Web technologies and image analysis techniques to develop a knowledge management system to optimize the design of fuel cells

On the support of versioning in distributed key-value stores

The ability to access and query data stored in multiple versions is an important asset for many applications, such as Web graph analysis, collaborative editing platforms, data forensics, or correlation mining. The storage and retrieval of versioned data requires a specific API and support from the storage layer. The choice of the data structures used to maintain versioned data has a fundamental impact on the performance of insertions and queries. The appropriate data structure also depends on the nature of the versioned data and the nature of the access patterns. In this paper we study the design and implementation space for providing versioning support on top of a distributed key-value store (KVS). We define an API for versioned data access supporting multiple writers and show that a plain KVS does not offer the necessary synchronization power for implementing this API. We leverage the support for listeners at the KVS level and propose a general construction for implementing arbitrary types of data structures for storing and querying versioned data. We explore the design space of versioned data storage ranging from a flat data structure to a distributed sharded index. The resulting system, \system, is implemented on top of an industrial-grade open-source KVS, Infinispan. Our evaluation, based on real-world Wikipedia access logs, studies the performance of each versioning mechanisms in terms of load balancing, latency and storage overhead in the context of different access scenarios

Procesamiento distribuido y paralelo de bajo costo basado en cloud&movil

Actualmente el procesamiento intensivo se realiza a través de estructuras HPC híbridas (Grid, Cluster, Cloud) utilizando procesadores de arquitectura x86 y GPUs Nvidia, AMD o Intel, incurriendo en altísimos costos económicos y energéticos. Sin embargo, gracias a la evolución constante del hardware y con el advenimiento de los dispositivos móviles/microcomputadores con CPUs/GPUs ARM acompañado de la masividad de los mismos es posible pensar en una solución de bajo costo y consumo energético para solventar este tipo de problemas. Estos dispositivos incrementan su capacidad, eficiencia, estabilidad y potencia a diario, mientras ganan mercado, conservando un bajo costo, tamaño y consumo energético. A su vez, presentan lapsos de ociosidad, lo que representa una gran capacidad de recursos desaprovechados. Por tal motivo, el objetivo de este trabajo es presentar un prototipo de arquitectura distribuida dinámica, escalable y redundante geográficamente para explotar esta disponibilidad y realizar procesamiento intensivo aprovechando recursos y reduciendo costos.XVIII Workshop de Procesamiento Distribuido y Paralelo (WPDP

Social Media, Gender and the Mediatisation of War: Exploring the German Armed Forces’ Visual Representation of the Afghanistan Operation on Facebook

Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. The article examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the German armed forces’ official Facebook page. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the frame of visibility and what remains out of its view

Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg

this paper. 1 Timin

Coulouris, Dollimore and Kindberg

this paper. 1 Timin

Coarse-Grained Network Simulation for

Evaluating the performance of large-scale wide-area applications such as content distribution networks and replicated Internet services through simulation presents formidable challenges. Among them is the need to balance competing needs: ensuring accuracy by choosing an appropriate level of detail, and making these large-scale simulations tractable by minimizing required computational resources. As an alternative to packet-level simulation, we evaluate the applicability of coarse-grain transfer-level simulation to wide-area networked applications and services, and discuss the tradeoffs inherent to such an approach. We introduce GUTS,a high-level wide-area network simulator whose goal is to enable simulation of realistic Internet-scale topologies, under a range of realistic workloads