MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture

Mobile agents mean both a technology and a programming paradigm. They allow for a flexible approach which can alleviate a number of issues present in distributed and Grid-based systems, by means of features such as migration, cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms. In this paper we describe an architecture (MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture) we have designed and we are currently developing to support programming and execution of mobile agent based application upon Grid systems

The spread of Caulerpa cylindracea in Calabria (Italy) and the effects of shipping activities

A survey to state the spread of Caulerpa cylindracea in the Calabrian Tyrrhenian coasts has been undertaken. The research aims to value the role of shipping activities in the ten-year’s study from 1999 to 2009, as a vector in the spreading of the species. The outcome of this study has shown that, during the last ten years, the species has colonized most of the regional coastline, on all kinds of substrata, in areas closed to harbours and subjected to high rate of sedimentation. The main effects of Caulerpa cylindracea colonization have resulted in a gradual decrease of crustose species while the turf ones have increased their abundance, altering the native structure of the macroalgal assemblages. These results confirm the extremely invasive behaviour of this strain in the Calabrian Tyrrhenian coasts and, more generally, in the Mediterranean Sea

The alien alga Caulerpa taxifolia (Vahl) C. Agardh var. distichophylla (Sonder) Verlaque, Huisman and Procaccini move their northern and western limits.

Caulerpa taxifolia (Vahl) C. Agardh var. distichophylla (Sonder) Verlaque, Huisman and Procacini is a green invasive alga recently reported in the Mediterranean Sea for the first time in 2007. The first record was in Turkey in 2007 and later it has been reported in Sicily (Italy, in 2009), Cyprus (in 2013), Malta (in 2015), Rhodes (in 2016) and Lybia (2017). In the current study we present additional records of this species which expanding its range into the Eastern and Western Mediterranean Sea (Eastern and Western Sicilian shoreline, Calabrian Tyrrhenian coast, Sardinia and Tunisia) as well as in the eastern Mediterranean basin. Our specimens were collected on various substrates and were identified trough morphological methods

Half-Wave Dipolar Metal-Semiconductor Laser

Nano-scale lasers harnessing metallic plasmons hold promise across physical sciences and industrial applications. Plasmons are categorized as surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) and localized surface plasmons (LSP). While SPP has gained popularity for nano-lasers by fitting a few cycles of SPP waves into resonators, achieving LSP lasing in single nanoparticles remains an elusive goal. Here, we highlight the equivalence of LSP and SPP within resonant systems and present lasers oscillating in the lowest-order LSP or, equivalently, half-cycle SPP. This diffraction-limited dipolar emitter is realized through strong coupling of plasmonic oscillation in gold and dielectric resonance in high-gain III-V semiconductor in the near infrared away from surface plasmon frequencies. The resulting single-mode stimulated emission peak exhibits linewidth Q factors over 50 at room temperature, with wide tunability spanning from 1190 to 1460 nm determined by resonator sizes ranging from 190 to 280 nm. A semiconductor laser model elucidates the temporal and spectral buildup dynamics under optical pumping. Notably, linewidth Q values surpassing 250 are attained from higher-order, isolated laser particles within live biological cells. These results offer fresh perspectives in nanophotonics and indicate promising opportunities for multiplexed biological applications

Re-designing Dynamic Content Delivery in the Light of a Virtualized Infrastructure

We explore the opportunities and design options enabled by novel SDN and NFV technologies, by re-designing a dynamic Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. Our system, named MOSTO, provides performance levels comparable to that of a regular CDN, but does not require the deployment of a large distributed infrastructure. In the process of designing the system, we identify relevant functions that could be integrated in the future Internet infrastructure. Such functions greatly simplify the design and effectiveness of services such as MOSTO. We demonstrate our system using a mixture of simulation, emulation, testbed experiments and by realizing a proof-of-concept deployment in a planet-wide commercial cloud system.Comment: Extended version of the paper accepted for publication in JSAC special issue on Emerging Technologies in Software-Driven Communication - November 201

Material recognition by feature classification using time-of-flight camera

We propose a method for solving one of the significant open issues in computer vision: material recognition. A time-of-flight range camera has been employed to analyze the characteristics of different materials. Starting from the information returned by the depth sensor, different features of interest have been extracted using transforms such as Fourier, discrete cosine, Hilbert, chirp-z, and Karhunen-Loève. Such features have been used to build a training and a validation set useful to feed a classifier (J48) able to accomplish the material recognition step. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology has been experimentally tested. Good predictive accuracies of materials have been obtained. Moreover, experiments have shown that the combination of multiple transforms increases the robustness and reliability of the computed features, although the shutter value can heavily affect the prediction rates

A HIERARCHICAL DISTRIBUTED SHARED MEMORY PARALLEL BRANCH & BOUND APPLICATION WITH PVM AND OPENMP FOR MULTIPROCESSOR CLUSTERS

Branch&Bound (B&B) is a technique widely used to solve combinatorial optimization problems in physics and engineering science. In this paper we show how the combined use of PVM and OpenMP libraries can be a promising approach to exploit the intrinsic parallel nature of this class of application and to obtain efficient code for hybrid computational architectures. We described how both the shared memory and the distributed memory programming models can be applied to implement the same algorithm for the inter-nodes and intra-node parallelization. Some experimental tests on a local area network (LAN) of workstations are finally discussed