Prospectus for a Remote PASM Execution and Debugging Environment - PDB

This document describes four design alternatives for a remote debugging and execution environment for the PASM Parallel Processing System Prototype in the School of EE at Purdue. Two alternatives involve acquisition of modest hardware for system enhancement, while the others are software-only solutions. All solutions involve use of a high-resolution bit-mapped graphics device, mouse and keyboard input, and a broad-band Ethernet-like communication medium. These latter components are currently available. The goal of this environment is to support any type of debugging which is currently supported by using the front panel of the machine and several terminals which are manually multiplexed between PEs and other resource management processors of the system. The environment will support voluntary output of processor activity from, and input to, any of the 30 processors of the PASM prototype. This configuration represents a step toward multiprogramming of the machine and will support development of software tools, languages and additional applications. Debugging information will be in the form of textual (or other) output displayed on virtual windows of a high-resolution device such as a SUN 3/50

Programmable Multi-Dose Intranasal Drug Delivery Device

An apparatus and method for the self-administration of a plurality of doses of an intranasal liquid pharmaceutical composition, including opioid analgesics, that includes a drug delivery device containing a plurality of sealed vials, each vial containing a predetermined volume of the pharmaceutical composition, a pump assembly for conveying the liquid pharmaceutical composition from the interior of the vial and discharging it as a nasal spray in response to manual activation by the patient, and programmable means for sequentially advancing a vial to the ready position after passage of a prescribed time interval following the last activation of the delivery device

Linear Actuator Using Shape Memory Wire with Controller

A linear actuator is provided, comprising a housing defining an interior channel, a stop extending from the housing and displaceable relative to the housing, and at least one wire formed of a shape-memory alloy, the wire being attached at a first end to the stop and at a second end to the housing. When heated to a predetermined temperature, the wire applies a pulling force to the stop to cause the stop to slide in a first direction into the housing interior channel. A spring located in the housing interior channel applies a biasing force to the stop in a second direction counter to the first direction when the wire cools, thereby returning the stop to the unactuated position. A wire heater is provided, which may be an electrical source for resistive heating of the wire. Multiple actuators of the present invention may be configured in parallel to increase the force generated by the wires. In yet another embodiment the actuators of the invention may be arranged in a serial configuration for controlling a rotary or carousel dispenser

Programmable Multi-Dose Intransal Drug Delivery Device

An apparatus and method for the self-administration of a plurality of doses of an intranasal liquid pharmaceutical composition, including opioid analgesics, that includes a drug delivery device containing a plurality of sealed vials, each vial containing a predetermined volume of the pharmaceutical composition, a pump assembly for conveying the liquid pharmaceutical composition from the interior of the vial and discharging it as a nasal spray in response to manual activation by the patient, and programmable means for sequentially advancing a vial to the ready position after passage of a prescribed time interval following the last activation of the delivery device

System and Device for Characterizing Shape Memory Alloy Wires

Instruments and methods for measuring a property of a shape memory alloy are provided. The instrument includes a base plate, a non-contact movable mass, a force gauge, an actuator, a biasing spring, a heater for heating the shape memory alloy, and a non-contact displacement detector. The biasing spring and the shape memory alloy are disposed whereby a force applied thereby is applied substantially through a center of stiffness of the movable mass. The displacement detector measures a displacement of the movable mass in a colinear direction with a direction of movement of the movable mass and with a direction of the force applied by the biasing spring and the shape memory alloy. The linear motion stage comprises a housing and at least one guide bar, and wherein a calculated axial expansion of the guide bar is substantially equal to a calculated axial expansion of the base plate

A User-level Checkpointing Library for POSIX Threads Programs

Several user-level checkpointing libraries that checkpoint Unix processes have been developed. However, they do not support multithreaded programs. This paper describes a user-level checkpointing library to checkpoint multithreaded programs that use the POSIX threads library provided by Solaris 2. Experiments with programs from the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite showed a 3% to 10% increase in execution time with checkpointing enabled, plus an additional overhead for saving the program's state. The checkpointing library described here is available at http://www.dcs.uky.edu/chkpt/. 1. Introduction A multithreaded program's state can be divided into private state and shared state. A thread's private state includes its program counter, stack pointer, and registers. Its shared state includes everything common to all threads in the process, such as the address space and open file state. A multithreaded checkpointing library must save and recover the program's shared state and each thread's priva..