EECluster: An Energy-Efficient Tool for managing HPC Clusters

High Performance Computing clusters have become a very important element in research, academic and industrial communities because they are an excellent platform for solving a wide range of problems through parallel and distributed applications. Nevertheless, this high performance comes at the price of consuming large amounts of energy, which combined with notably increasing electricity prices are having an important economical impact, driving up power and cooling costs and forcing IT companies to reduce operation costs. To reduce the high energy consumptions of HPC clusters we propose a tool, named EECluster, for managing the energy-efficient allocation of the cluster resources, that works with both OGE/SGE and PBS/TORQUE Resource Management Systems (RMS) and whose decision-making mechanism is tuned automatically in a machine learning approach. Experimental studies have been made using actual workloads from the Scientific Modelling Cluster at Oviedo University and the academic-cluster used by the Oviedo University for teaching high performance computing subjects to evaluate the results obtained with the adoption of this tool

ETeach3D: Designing a 3D virtual environment for evaluating the digital competence of preservice teachers

The acquisition of teacher digital competence is a key aspect in the initial training of teachers. However, most existing evaluation instruments do not provide sufficient evidence of this teaching competence. In this study, we describe the design and development process of a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment for evaluating the teacher digital competence of future teachers, through a performance-based, collaborative and contextual evaluation. This environment, named ETeach3D, has been constructed using the educational design research approach. It is based on successive iterative cycles and is in accordance with the criteria of usefulness, validity, and effectiveness. In addition to the research team responsible for the project, participating in this study were 187 Spanish undergraduate students of Education and 22 experts in the field of educational technology. Results show that these environments, in addition to other characteristics, should (a) function smoothly and have simple interfaces, realistic scenes, and interactive activities and (b) follow a systematic evaluation procedure that integrates several strategies and levels of complexity. This research helps to improve the initial training of preservice teachers and contributes to the growing number of educational design research studies that focus in the field of evaluation of the curriculum domain.This research is funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain, SIMUL@B (ref: EDU2013-42223-P), and supported by the Secretary of Universities and Research, Department of Economy and Knowledge, Government of Catalonia. The project is coordinated by the ARGET research group (ref: 2014SGR1399)

Short- to medium-term effects of consumption of quebracho tannins on saliva production and composition in sheep and goats

Eight Merino sheep (49.4 ± 4.23 kg BW) and 8 Alpine goats (53.2 ± 2.51 kg BW) were used to study the effect of ingestion of quebracho tannins on salivation. Four sheep and 4 goats were individually fed a daily allotment of 20 g DM of alfalfa hay/kg BW (Control). Another 4 sheep and 4 goats were also given 20 g DM of alfalfa hay/kg BW supplemented with 50 g of quebracho/kg DM (Tannin) for a period of 64 d. The saliva secretion from the left parotid gland was collected by insertion of a polyvinyl chloride catheter into the parotid duct and the amount of parotid saliva produced recorded over three 48-h periods on d 1 and 2 (P1), d 31 and 32 (P2), and d 61 and 62 (P3) after the tannin feeding was initiated. The total amount of saliva produced was estimated from rumen water kinetics determined on d 4, d 34, and d 64 of the experiment. Experimental design was completely randomized, with repeated measures on each experimental unit, performing separate analysis for sheep and goats. Parotid saliva production was not affected by the sampling period in either animal species receiving the Control diet. Corresponding values for sheep were 2.04, 2.12, and 2.27 L/d (P = 0.89) and for goats 1.65, 1.79, and 1.86 L/d (P = 0.95). Sheep fed the Tannin diet produced 55, 73, and 107% of the amount of saliva recorded in sheep fed the Control diet on P1, P2, or P3, respectively. Corresponding values in goats were 88, 130, and 134% on P1, P2, or P3, respectively. Estimated total saliva production was not affected (P = 0.50 for sheep and P = 0.97 for goats) by the ingestion of quebracho. There was no difference (P > 0.10) in osmotic pressure, P, Mg, Ca, urea, and protein concentrations in parotid saliva. There were, however, differences in Na and K concentrations in response to the ingestion of quebracho tannins, with Na concentrations increasing (P = 0.05) and K concentrations decreasing (P = 0.04) in sheep saliva and pH increasing (P = 0.05) in goat saliva. In conclusion, the inclusion of quebracho at 50 g/kg DM for 64 d does not appear to alter saliva production in sheep and goats

Perfiles de aprendizaje y trabajo colaborativo en entornos de simulación en 3D

3D simulation environments with pedagogical mediation encourage communication and interaction of students of the training activity in the corresponding sequence by promoting their learning. Two types of communication are generated: interaction between participant and object 3D, and interaction between participants, which in practice has demonstrated to be more prolific and spontaneous. There is evidence that the behavior and performance of the Strong-Willed and Bridge profiles are different. The Strong-Willed profile is a learner who is organized, assumes and distributes responsibilities, makes decisions, collaborates, leads the group work, and is persistent and consistent. The Bridge profile is a learner who is communicative, expressive and motivates the group members; relies on the knowledge of the group members to learn and develop his/her activities, and lacks continuity during group work.Los entornos de simulación 3D con mediación pedagógica favorecen la comunicación e interacción de los estudiantes inmersos en la actividad formativa en el contexto de la secuencia pedagógica planteada, promoviendo así de manera natural el aprendizaje de los estudiantes, generándose dos tipos de comunicación: interacción entre participante y objeto 3D, e interacción del tipo participante con otro participante que en la experiencia es la que se desarrolla más espontáneamente y en mayor cantidad. Se evidencia que el comportamiento y la actuación de los perfiles Strong-Willed y Bridge son distintos. El perfil Strong-Willed se caracteriza por organizar, asumir y distribuir responsabilidades, tomar decisiones, colaborar, liderar el trabajo del grupo, ser persistente y constante. Sin embargo, el perfil Bridge se caracteriza por ser comunicativo, expresivo y motivador del grupo; se apoya en el conocimiento de los miembros del grupo para aprender y desarrollar sus actividades y carece de continuidad durante el desarrollo del trabajo grupal

Teachers in the digital society: a proposal based on transformative pedagogy and advanced technology

Este documento presenta una visión transformadora de la docencia en el contexto de una sociedad actual marcada por la complejidad y su componente tecnológico. Esta visión se inspira en la denominada pedagogía transformativa cuyos fundamentos descansan en planteamientos socio-constructivistas y se orientan al desarrollo de un espíritu crítico y de cambio personal a partir de un proceso reflexivo. Estas ideas podrían ayudar a diseñar procesos que promuevan la formación de un profesorado comprometido con una idea transformadora de la acción docente y con una competencia digital que le permita diseñar escenarios de aprendizajes de calidad para sus estudiantes.This paper presents a transformative vision of teaching in the context of a society marked by complexity and a large technological component. This view is based on the so-called transformative pedagogy, whose foundations begins on a socio-constructivist approach and focus on developing critical thinking and personal change from a reflective process. These ideas could be the base to design processes that promote the formation of a faculty committed to a transformative idea of the teaching and a digital competence to design high quality learning environments for their students.Universidad de Granada. Departamento de Didáctica y Organización Escolar. Grupo FORCE (HUM386

EL DOCENTE EN LA SOCIEDAD DIGITAL: UNA PROPUESTA BASADA EN LA PEDAGOGÍA TRANSFORMATIVA Y EN LA TECNOLOGÍA AVANZADA

Resumen:Este documento presenta una visión transformadora de la docencia en el contexto de una sociedad actual marcada por la complejidad y su componente tecnológico. Esta visión se inspira en la denominada pedagogía transformativa cuyos fundamentos descansan en planteamientos socioconstructivistas y se orientan al desarrollo de un espíritu crítico y de cambio personal a partir de un proceso reflexivo. Estas ideas podrían ayudar a diseñar procesos que promuevan la formación de un profesorado comprometido con una idea transformadora de la acción docente y con una competencia digital que le permita diseñar escenarios de aprendizajes de calidad para sus estudiantes. Abstract:This paper presents a transformative vision of teaching in the context of a society marked by complexity and a large technological component. This view is based on the so-called transformative pedagogy, whose foundations begins on a socio-constructivist approach and focus on developing critical thinking and personal change from a reflective process. These ideas could be the base to design processes that promote the formation of a faculty committed to a transformative idea of the teaching and a digital competence to design high quality learning environments for their students

Modelo de visualización analítica basado en ambientes de aprendizaje: Caso Matemática

El presente trabajo de investigación busca recoger, procesar y mostrar información al docente y estudiante de los comportamientos e iteraciones durante la jugabilidad en un serious game, para su respectivo seguimiento y análisis durante el uso de la plataforma Matelogic. Por lo tanto, se propuso un modelo de visualización analítica haciendo uso de una plataforma que integre información útil a los docentes y estudiantes en el logro de las competencias en el área de matemática, para la toma de decisiones. Se realizó un estudio experimental con un diseño pre experimental. Para su análisis se utilizaron dos instrumentos: un cuestionario que midió el comportamiento después de la jugabilidad; y los itinerarios de aprendizaje de los estudiantes. Estos datos fueron procesados a través de Wilcoxon, validando la hipótesis de investigación en la que mediante la visualización analítica del Aprendizaje del videojuego Matelogic permitió mejorar los ambientes de aprendizaje. El hallazgo principal de este trabajo radica en que el juego provocó interés en un 56% y su valoración fue muy bien representado en un 68%. Este estudio abre la posibilidad de usar minería de datos e inteligencia artificial para personalizar estos datos y lograr sistemas de recomendación.Tesi

A Heuristic for Learning Decision Trees and Pruning Them into Classification Rules

Let us consider a set of training examples described by continuous or symbolic attributes with categorical classes. In this paper we present a measure of the potential quality of a region of the attribute space to be represented as a rule condition to classify unseen cases. The aim is to take into account the distribution of the classes of the examples. The resulting measure, called impurity level, is inspired by a similar measure used in the instance-based algorithm IB3 for selecting suitable paradigmatic exemplars that will classify, in a nearestneighbor context, future cases. The features of the impurity level are illustrated using a version of Quinlan's well-known C4.5 where the information-based heuristics are replaced by our measure. The experiments carried out to test the proposals indicate a very high accuracy reached with sets of classification rules as small as those found by Ripper