SPP: A data base processor data communications protocol

The design and implementation of a data communications protocol for the Intel Data Base Processor (DBP) is defined. The protocol is termed SPP (Service Port Protocol) since it enables data transfer between the host computer and the DBP service port. The protocol implementation is extensible in that it is explicitly layered and the protocol functionality is hierarchically organized. Extensive trace and performance capabilities have been supplied with the protocol software to permit optional efficient monitoring of the data transfer between the host and the Intel data base processor. Machine independence was considered to be an important attribute during the design and implementation of SPP. The protocol source is fully commented and is included in Appendix A of this report

DBPQL: A view-oriented query language for the Intel Data Base Processor

An interactive query language (BDPQL) for the Intel Data Base Processor (DBP) is defined. DBPQL includes a parser generator package which permits the analyst to easily create and manipulate the query statement syntax and semantics. The prototype language, DBPQL, includes trace and performance commands to aid the analyst when implementing new commands and analyzing the execution characteristics of the DBP. The DBPQL grammar file and associated key procedures are included as an appendix to this report

The evaluation of the far-field integral in the Green's function representation for steady Oseen flow

Consider the Green's function representation of an exterior problem in steady Oseen flow. The far-field integral in the formulation is shown to be zero

Engaging sport students in assessment and formative feedback

Sport as a discipline in higher education is grappling with the challenge of providing authentic and relevant assessment that engages students in their learning. The centrality of assessment to the student experience is now well accepted within the research literature (Brown and Knight, 1994; Rust, 2002). In particular, formative assessment, or assessment that creates feedback to support future teaching and learning experiences, can be a powerful tool for enhancing learning (see Black and Wiliam, 1998). Given that feedback is most effective if it is considered or reflected upon, one of the key challenges is to actively engage sport students in formative assessment processes. This guide offers advice in designing and facilitating sport students’ involvement in assessment and enhancing their engagement with the feedback they receive. The aim is to support sport programme teams by taking a pragmatic approach, combining a clear academic rationale based on assessment for learning principles with case study examples of successful formative assessment exercises emphasising innovative approaches to giving feedback. The guide consists of three key sections focused on: 1) Providing staff in HLST with background knowledge of formative assessment and formative feedback and how it relates to their subject. 2) Providing case study examples of how to effectively engage sport students with assessment feedback so that it feeds-forward to aid learning. 3) Providing a resource of references and sources of support for tutors wishing to further their learning in this area

Ontology engineering for simulation component reuse

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry, although they have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architectures provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontologies to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

Exploring the modelling and simulation knowledge base through journal co-citation analysis

“The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1136-zCo-citation analysis is a form of content analysis that can be applied in the context of scholarly publications with the purpose of identifying prominent articles, authors and journals being referenced to by the citing authors. It identifies co-cited references that occur in the reference list of two or more citing articles, with the resultant co-citation network providing insights into the constituents of a knowledge domain (e.g., significant authors and papers). The contribution of the paper is twofold; (a) the demonstration of the added value of using co-citation analysis, and for this purpose the underlying dataset that is chosen is the peer-reviewed publication of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS)—SIMULATION; (b) the year 2012 being the 60th anniversary of the SCS, the authors hope that this paper will lead to further acknowledgement and appreciation of the Society in charting the growth of Modeling and Simulation (M&S) as a discipline

A fast hybrid time-synchronous/event appraach to parallel discrete event simulation of queuing networks

The trend in computing architectures has been toward multicore central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). An affordable and highly parallelizable GPU is practical example of Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) architectures oriented toward stream processing. While the GPU architectures and languages are fairly easily employed for inherently time-synchronous based simulation models, it is less clear if or how one might employ them for queuing model simulation, which has an asynchronous behavior. We have derived a two-step process that allows SIMD-style simulation on queuing networks, by initially performing SIMD computation over a cluster and following this research with a GPU experiment. The two-step process simulates approximate time events synchronously and then reduces the error in output statistics by compensating for it based on error analysis trends. We present our findings to show that, while the outputs are approximate, one may obtain reasonably accurate summary statistics quickly.