The Role of the State in Economic Transformation: Comparing the Transition Experiences of Russia and China

This paper will examine the transition experiences of Russia and China, with the aim of drawing lessons about the relative effectiveness of the neoliberal and the state directed transition strategies. Section 2 considers Russia=s economic transition since 1992, which has been guided by the neoliberal strategy. Section 3 examines China=s economic experience since 1978, when it began a transition based on a different approach from the neoliberal one. Section 4 considers why, in countries that successfully pursue a state directed strategy, such as China, pressure builds up over time to shift to a neoliberal strategy. Section 5 offers concluding comments.

Interfaces for Disk-Directed I/O

In other papers I propose the idea of disk-directed I/O for multiprocessor file systems. Those papers focus on the performance advantages and capabilities of disk-directed I/O, but say little about the application-programmer\u27s interface or about the interface between the compute processors and I/O processors. In this short note I discuss the requirements for these interfaces, and look at many existing interfaces for parallel file systems. I conclude that many of the existing interfaces could be adapted for use in a disk-directed I/O system

Throughput of Existing Multiprocessor File Systems (An Informal Study)

Fast file systems are critical for high-performance scientific computing, since many scientific applications have tremendous I/O requirements. Many parallel supercomputers have only recently obtained fully parallel I/O architectures and file systems, which are necessary for scalable I/O performance. Scalability aside, I show here that many systems lack sufficient absolute performance. I do this by surveying the performance reported in the literature, summarized in an informal table

Disk-directed I/O for MIMD Multiprocessors

Many scientific applications that run on today\u27s multiprocessors are bottlenecked by their file I/O needs. Even if the multiprocessor is configured with sufficient I/O hardware, the file-system software often fails to provide the available bandwidth to the application. Although libraries and improved file-system interfaces can make a significant improvement, we believe that fundamental changes are needed in the file-server software. We propose a new technique, disk-directed I/O, that flips the usual relationship between server and client to allow the disks (actually, disk servers) to determine the flow of data for maximum performance. Our simulations show that tremendous performance gains are possible. Indeed, disk-directed I/O provided consistent high performance that was largely independent of data distribution, and close to the maximum disk bandwidth

Introduction to Multiprocessor I/O Architecture

The computational performance of multiprocessors continues to improve by leaps and bounds, fueled in part by rapid improvements in processor and interconnection technology. I/O performance thus becomes ever more critical, to avoid becoming the bottleneck of system performance. In this paper we provide an introduction to I/O architectural issues in multiprocessors, with a focus on disk subsystems. While we discuss examples from actual architectures and provide pointers to interesting research in the literature, we do not attempt to provide a comprehensive survey. We concentrate on a study of the architectural design issues, and the effects of different design alternatives

Disk-Directed I/O for MIMD Multiprocessors

Many scientific applications that run on today\u27s multiprocessors are bottlenecked by their file I/O needs. Even if the multiprocessor is configured with sufficient I/O hardware, the file-system software often fails to provide the available bandwidth to the application. Although libraries and improved file-system interfaces can make a significant improvement, we believe that fundamental changes are needed in the file-server software. We propose a new technique, \em disk-directed I/O, that flips the usual relationship between server and client to allow the disks (actually, disk servers) to determine the flow of data for maximum performance. Our simulations show that tremendous performance gains are possible. Indeed, disk-directed I/O provided consistent high performance that was largely independent of data distribution, and close to the maximum disk bandwidth

Department of Computer Science Activity 1998-2004

This report summarizes much of the research and teaching activity of the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College between late 1998 and late 2004. The material for this report was collected as part of the final report for NSF Institutional Infrastructure award EIA-9802068, which funded equipment and technical staff during that six-year period. This equipment and staff supported essentially all of the department\u27s research activity during that period

Disk-directed I/O for an Out-of-Core Computation

New file systems are critical to obtain good I/O performance on large multiprocessors. Several researchers have suggested the use of collective file-system operations, in which all processes in an application cooperate in each I/O request. Others have suggested that the traditional low-level interface (read, write, seek) be augmented with various higher-level requests (e.g., read matrix), allowing the programmer to express a complex transfer in a single (perhaps collective) request. Collective, high-level requests permit techniques like two-phase I/O and disk-directed I/O to significantly improve performance over traditional file systems and interfaces. Neither of these techniques have been tested on anything other than simple benchmarks that read or write matrices. Many applications, however, intersperse computation and I/O to work with data sets that cannot fit in main memory. In this paper, we present the results of experiments with an ``out-of-core\u27\u27 LU-decomposition program, comparing a traditional interface and file system with a system that has a high-level, collective interface and disk-directed I/O. We found that a collective interface was awkward in some places, and forced additional synchronization. Nonetheless, disk-directed I/O was able to obtain much better performance than the traditional system

A Threat Taxonomy for mHealth Privacy

Networked mobile devices have great potential to enable individuals (and their physicians) to better monitor their health and to manage medical conditions. In this paper, we examine the privacy-related threats to these so-called \emphmHealth\/ technologies. We develop a taxonomy of the privacy-related threats, and discuss some of the technologies that could support privacy-sensitive mHealth systems. We conclude with a brief summary of research challenges

Developed economies are not suffering from the consequences of a financial crash, but from a structural crisis of neoliberal capitalism

Several economies across the world, most notably in the Eurozone, continue to show only weak signs of recovery from the financial crisis which began in 2008. David M. Kotz argues that developed economies are not merely suffering from the consequences of a financial crash or a severe recession, but from a structural crisis of ‘neoliberal capitalism’. Drawing on ‘social structure of accumulation’ theory, he writes that similar crises have occurred at other points throughout modern history and that the only route to returning to growth is to facilitate the emergence of a new institutional form of capitalism