Fully heuristic timetabling driven by students' feedback on availability

The optimal schedule of lectures and exams is critical in higher education institutions. But it is a very time consuming task for those who are in charge of planning academic activities. For this reason, a considerable attention has been devoted to automated timetabling. Because timetabling solutions are highly dependent on the way institutions are organized, it is common that each institution develops its own platform. At the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança we have evaluated several existent solutions but we have concluded that no particular solution fulfills the totality of our requirements. That leads us to the development of a new platform in order to handle all constraints we consider relevant and to incorporate all knowledge we have accumulated from manually scheduling lectures for many years. In particular, we are interested in the optimal scheduling of lectures from the students point of view. Our institution enrolls many student workers and many students from outside our region and, in addition, our study plans are composed by a majority of compulsory courses, which makes difficult the scheduling of all lectures in a manner that the majority of students can attend the lectures they want or they have to. Therefore we decided to include students' availability as a soft constraint. The platform we are still improving produces final timetables through an algorithm that implements some heuristic scheduling techniques and runs on an HPC environment. From time to time the system tries to relax students' constraints by asking students to rethink and reintroduce their availability within certain limitations

Gestão da informação científica e repositórios: o caso da Biblioteca Digital do IPB

Os repositórios institucionais são estruturas de apoio à investigação que promovem a integração, a partilha e o acesso aberto à produção científica realizada e produzida pela comunidade académica. São ainda um garante para a preservação da memória intelectual e da investigação aplicada de referência. Os repositórios institucionais revestem-se de uma importância cada vez maior para as instituições enquanto produtoras de ciência e de conhecimento. Servem como plataformas gestoras de informação e contribuem para uma maior visibilidade da instituição, dos autores e da própria produção científica. Acrescem ainda fatores organizacionais, como sejam o da preservação, integração e armazenamento da informação. Graças à tecnologia digital os repositórios podem ser interoperáveis com diversos sistemas. No caso da Biblioteca Digital do Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, existe interoperabilidade com a plataforma de Avaliação do Desempenho do Pessoal Docente

Corporate reputation correlation as a strategic marketing tool in service design management

This paper focused on the scope of the Design Management as a differentiating agent in the use of resources of the design and its interaction with the strategies and goals of a Service Sector, particularly in Higher Education Institutions (HEI). Currently the Reputation of HEI represents an intangible capital and a valuable asset and is recognized an important role in the differentiation and competitive advantage (Ruão, 2008). This competitive environment together with limitations of public resources for Higher Education makes the image an essential part of the strategic management of HEI (Luque-Martinez & Del Barrio Garcia, 2009). Conducting a correlations were obtained in most of the Corporate Character Scale dimensions, which reflects that these are very important when IPB's strong and sustained reputation. However, the presence of strong and positive relationships in dimensions such as ruthlessness, informality and machismo reflect the need to pay more attention to these characteristics in order to contribute to the overall satisfaction of the image perceived by the IPB Community. This paper aims to show that one of the ways to create new communication strategies can be through correlational analysis as a strategic marketing tool in Service Design Management in order to add value to the services, increasing their corporate reputation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Orientação ao recurso: um modelo de comunicação para a computação em clusters

A orientação ao recurso é um novo modelo de comunicação e de computação capaz de tirar partido da comunicação de elevado desempenho, no desenvolvimento de uma classe importante de aplicações paralelas/distribuídas de grande escala. Neste contexto, a biblioteca RoCL, especialmente desenhada para a execução em ambientes cluster, de máquinas SMP, usando múltiplos fios-de-execução, permite a exploração de múltiplas tecnologias de comunicação de elevado desempenho e múltiplos protocolos de comunicação, tais como a Myrinet (GM) e a Gigabit Ethernet (VIA). Os recursos são as abstracções usadas para modelar as entidades aplicacionais que podem ser registadas e localizadas através de um serviço básico de directório, distribuído pelos nodos do cluster

CoR's Faster Route over Myrinet

In this paper we concentrate in the efforts made to exploit the performance of Myrinet to build a faster communication route into CoR1. By accessing the Myrinet interface through GM2, we achieved low latency and high bandwidth message passing without the overhead of a higher level protocol stack, system calls or interrupts. CoR is an ongoing project unique in its design goal of combining multithreading, message passing and distributed shared memory with facilities to dynamically select from different transport media and protocols the one that best fits communication and interaction requirements. The ability to mix CoR and PVM calls in the same program brings numerous benefits to the application developer familiar with PVM, notably: 1) new transport communication layers; PvmRouteMyrinet and PvmRouteUdp; 2) migration mechanisms for exploiting fine grain message passing; 3) thread-safe communication PVM API; 4) object-oriented distributed shared memory

Deploying applications in Multi-SAN SMP clusters

The effective exploitation of multi-SAN SMP clusters and the use of generic clusters to support complex information systems require new approaches. On the one hand, multi-SAN SMP clusters introduce another level of parallelism which is not addressed by conventional programming models that assume a homogeneous cluster. On the other hand, traditional parallel programming environments are mainly used to run scientific computations, using all available resources, and therefore applications made of multiple components, sharing cluster resources or being restricted to a particular cluster partition, are not supported. We present an approach to integrate the representation of physical resources, the modelling of applications and the mapping of application into physical resources. The abstractions we propose allow to combine shared memory, message passing and global memory paradigms

Evaluating applications performance in a multi-networked cluster

Traditionally, a cluster is defined as a collection of homogeneous nodes interconnected by a single high performance communication technology. However, in some cases, cluster nodes may be organized into several partitions – subclusters – internally interconnected by one or more selected SAN technologies. In order to constitute a multi-networked cluster, sub-clusters must share a common SAN technology or a bridge facility must be used. In this paper we show how RoCL – a lightweight user-level communication library designed to support multi-threading in a multi-networked environment – manages to exploit such cluster organization. Performance evaluation results obtained by using two partitions of Myrinet and Gigabit SMP nodes demonstrate the usefulness of our approach both for low-level and high-level operation

Distributed paged Hash tables

In this paper we present the design and implementation of DPH, a storage layer for cluster environments. DPH is a Distributed Data Structure (DDS) based on the distribution of a paged hash table. It combines main memory with file system resources across the cluster in order to implement a distributed dictionary that can be used for the storage of very large data sets with key based addressing techniques. The DPH storage layer is supported by a collection of cluster-aware utilities and services. Access to the DPH interface is provided by a user-level API. A preliminary performance evaluation shows promising results.Supported by PRODEP III (grant 5.3/N/199.006/00) and SAPIENS (grant 41739/CHS/2001

High performance multithreaded message passing on a myrinet cluster

The main purpose of this paper is to present the impact of pCoR thread level message passing facilities on applications running in a Myrinet cluster. To exploit Myrinet technology we use the GM library, which provides a limited number of ports as abstractions to name communication end-points. pCoR communication layer multiplexes GM ports by using a dispatcher thread to handle messages to/from a large number of communication entities (working threads). Our approach combines polling operations executed bymultiple threads to avoid unnecessary context switching; a simple mechanism is used to engage working threads into the polling scheme. We aim to reduce the total number of polling operations required to hold message passing system performance

Toward a dynamically balanced cluster oriented DHT

In this paper, we present a model for a cluster oriented Distributed Hash Table (DHT). It introduces software nodes, virtual nodes and partitions as high level entities that, in conjunction with the definition of a certain number of in variants, provide for the balancement of a DHT across a set of heterogeneous cluster nodes. The model has the following major features: a) the share of the hash table handled by each cluster node is a function of its enrollment level in the DHT; b) the enrollment level of a cluster node in the DHT may change dynamically; c) cluster nodes are allowed to dynamically join or leave the DHT. A preliminary evaluation proved that the quality of the balancement of partitions of the hash table across the cluster, measured by the stan dard deviation with relation to the ideal average, surpass the one achieved by using another well known approach.PRODEP III (grant 5.3/N/199.006/00)SAPIENS (grant 41739/CHS/2001