FINJ: A Fault Injection Tool for HPC Systems

We present FINJ, a high-level fault injection tool for High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems, with a focus on the management of complex experiments. FINJ provides support for custom workloads and allows generation of anomalous conditions through the use of fault-triggering executable programs. FINJ can also be integrated seamlessly with most other lower-level fault injection tools, allowing users to create and monitor a variety of highly-complex and diverse fault conditions in HPC systems that would be difficult to recreate in practice. FINJ is suitable for experiments involving many, potentially interacting nodes, making it a very versatile design and evaluation tool.Comment: To be presented at the 11th Resilience Workshop in the 2018 Euro-Par conferenc

The Biological Standard of Living in the two Germanies.

Physical stature is used as a proxy for the biological standard of living in the two Germanies before and after unification in an analysis of a cross-sectional sample (1998) of adult heights, as well as among military recruits of the 1990s. West Germans tended to be taller than East Germans throughout the period under consideration. Contrary to official proclamations of a classless society, there were substantial social differences in physical stature in East-Germany. Social differences in height were greater in the East among females, and less among males than in the West. The difficulties experienced by the East-German population after 1961 is evident in the increase in social inequality of physical stature thereafter, as well as in the increasing gap relative to the height of the West-German population. After unification, however, there is a tendency for East-German males, but not of females, to catch up with their West-German counterparts

The Unintended Consequences of a European Neighbourhood Policy without Russia

After Russia’s retreat from the European Neighbourhood Policy, the EU’s policy towards its eastern neighbours was split up. The internal unintended consequence of the EU’s choice to leave its policy unaltered was a tension between the objective of privileged relations with ENP countries and a promise to recognise the interests of Russia as an equal partner. Externally, the unintended outcome was that this fostered two opposing strategic environments: a cooperative one for the EaP and a competitive one with Russia. In terms of the management of unintended consequences, the EU has actively sought to reinforce its normative hegemony towards EaP countries, while at the same time mitigating certain negative unintended effects

The Re-Emerging Role of the State in Contemporary Russia

I examine ownership structure of Russian firms during the 1998-2006 period, where a greater emphasis is placed on motivations behind increased government ownership in the latter years, when oligarchs' opportunistic influence on the firm diminished as state ownership correspondingly increased. As this phenomenon is also correlated with improved corporate growth during the period, I argue that state participation in corporate governance acted as an effective substitute mechanism to constrain wealth-tunnelling behaviour of corporate insiders and local bureaucrats in a country defined by a weak property rights system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag

Constructing a new understanding of the environment under postsocialism

This paper introduces a special grouping of papers on the theme of the environment and postsocialism. After the collapse of state socialism in Europe between 1989 and 1991, many immediate approaches to environmental reconstruction assumed that economic liberalisation and democratisation would alleviate problems. Since then, critics have argued that these proposed solutions were themselves problematic, and too closely reflected Western European and North American conceptions of environmental quality and democracy. The result has been a counterreaction focusing on detail and specificity at national levels and below. In this paper, we summarise debates about the environment and postsocialism since the period 1989 - 91. In particular, we examine whether an essentialistic link can be made between state socialism and environmental problems, and how far civil society -- or environmentalism -- may result in an improvement in perceived environmental quality. Finally, we consider the possibility for developing an approach to the environment and postsocialism that lies between crude generalisation and microscale studies

Europe and the political: from axiological monism to pluralistic dialogism

“The political” represents a moment in which actors recognise autonomy and equality as constitutive values in the agonistic search for appropriate open-ended political outcomes. The tutelary, pedagogical and disciplinary practices of the depoliticised European Union (EU) undermine the foundations of equality in diplomatic and political engagement between continental actors. The relationship becomes axiological, where issues are deemed to have been resolved through some sort of anterior pre-political arrangement. This is a type of ahistorical political monism that ultimately claims to speak for all of Europe. The return of “the political” allows a more generous and pluralistic politics to emerge based on genuine dialogical foundations in which self and other engage as equals and are mutually transformed by that engagement

Attitudes towards privatisation in Russia

From the viewpoint of liberal economic theory, which underlies the Russian government's economic programme, privatisation should have at least two positive effects. First, it should produce an improvement in the performance of the privatised enterprises by making them economically accountable for their own performance and by providing an economic incentive for more efficient management. Second, it should give a broad segment of the Russian population a stake in the process of economic transformation through the transfer into their hands of some share of enterprise ownership on the basis of the issue of vouchers. The present article explores the second broad goal of Russian privatisation policy, namely the creation of a popular constituency for the government's market reform policy. Of particular interest is the impact of the process on employees of enterprises which have undergone privatisation. This group was more directly affected by the process than the general public and stood to experience the impact of the process in two ways. First, the compromise privatisation law which was finally adopted in 1992 offered each citizen the opportunity to gain a modest share in the process through use of a privatisation voucher. While this opportunity was available to all citizens, the details of the privatisation law gave enterprise employees an additional advantage, since the most popular of the three privatisation options offered to enterprises in the law permitted the enterprise collective to gain a majority (51%) of the shares in the newly privatised joint-stock companies. In this way enterprise employees could choose to use their vouchers to define a new relationship with their own employing organisation. A second impact of the privatisation process on this group derived directly from being employed by the privatising enterprise; here, employees, based on their own experience, could make a judgement about whether the process brought an improvement in enterprise operations. One task of this article is to examine whether this judgement has been a positive one and whether attitudes of those in privatised enterprises differ from attitudes of those who have not personally experienced the effects of privatisation. Survey data from December 1993 indicated that most Russian employees had unclear expectations about the likely impact of privatisation on their enterprise; just under 40% felt it was necessary, the same percentage were uncertain, and 20% felt it was unnecessary. Expectations about possible personal benefit were also divided. The article also explores other factors that have affected how Russians assess the privatisation process. This analysis will allow an assessment of whether the government's policy has succeeded in generating self-sustaining support for the privatisation impetus