Draft Final Report

This report contains reviews of various city ordinances, which include plans to improve design regulations along the overlay zone. Also includes a mention of the Waller Creek Citizens' Advisory Committee.EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Colorado River corridor from Tom Miller Dam, through Lady Bird Lake and then eastward beyond Longhorn Dam is undoubtedly the most significant community asset in central Austin. This incredibly beautiful stretch of river provides a wide range of benefits to our city including fantastic scenic vistas, wonderful urban recreational opportunities, and serene open spaces that gives our center city a unique character among Texas cities. In addition to providing our drinking water, the river and lake are a major economic asset drawing folks to Austin both to work and play downtown. It is also a fragile beauty that can quickly be overwhelmed if development along its shores is not carefully planned and regulated to provide a balance between accommodating growth in the urban core and preserving the character of the river corridor and the lakefront. Development along the banks of the lake in the 1970’s and early 1980’s drew attention to the need to establish a clear vision of what the community wanted along the lakefront. The 1985 Town Lake Corridor Study and the 1986 Waterfront Overlay ordinance gave the task force the necessary planning guidelines and land development tools to assess what would constitute harmonious development along the lakefront preserving the unique quality of this river corridor. While the original Waterfront Overlay ordinance was largely successful, recent development pressure along the shoreline of Lady Bird Lake has brought into question whether the current Waterfront Overlay ordinance is adequate to protect and enhance the lakefront, especially since the 1986 ordinance underwent a code rewrite in 1999 that made some significant changes. In response to this concern, the City Council charged the Waterfront Overlay Taskforce with reviewing the current situation. The essential finding from the Taskforce’s eight month review is that the current code has been significantly weakened by the changes in the ordinance that have been adopted since 1986 and in particular the 1999 recodification of the ordinance has removed significant protections and incentives to promote community benefits and enhancement of the waterfrontWaller Creek Working Grou

Overlay journals, repositories and the evolution of scholarly communication

This paper examines the part overlay journals can play in developing new roles for repositories in the scholarly communication process. This requires that we answer some outstanding questions about the overlay journal model: · How are overlay journals distinct from other overlay services and other journals? · What business models are applicable? · What opportunities do overlay journals offer to repositories? And, perhaps most importantly: · What value can an overlay journal bring to the process of scholarly communication? As a result of the answer to the first of these questions, this paper gives a definition of an overlay journal as an entity that performs all the activities of a scholarly journal and relies on structural links with one or more archives or repositories to perform its activities. It finds that the overlay journals that already exist use a variety of business models, which means that repositories can engage with overlay journals in many different ways. Research and practice show that overlay journals offer new possibilities for publishers, repositories, authors and readers alike, and as such have a great deal to offer to scholarly communication

Understanding the Properties of the BitTorrent Overlay

In this paper, we conduct extensive simulations to understand the properties of the overlay generated by BitTorrent. We start by analyzing how the overlay properties impact the efficiency of BitTorrent. We focus on the average peer set size (i.e., average number of neighbors), the time for a peer to reach its maximum peer set size, and the diameter of the overlay. In particular, we show that the later a peer arrives in a torrent, the longer it takes to reach its maximum peer set size. Then, we evaluate the impact of the maximum peer set size, the maximum number of outgoing connections per peer, and the number of NATed peers on the overlay properties. We show that BitTorrent generates a robust overlay, but that this overlay is not a random graph. In particular, the connectivity of a peer to its neighbors depends on its arriving order in the torrent. We also show that a large number of NATed peers significantly compromise the robustness of the overlay to attacks. Finally, we evaluate the impact of peer exchange on the overlay properties, and we show that it generates a chain-like overlay with a large diameter, which will adversely impact the efficiency of large torrents

An introduction to overlay journals

An overlay journal performs all the activities of a scholarly journal and relies on structural links with one or more archives or repositories to perform its activities. This paper offers a briefing on the contribution overlay journals can make to scholarly communication. It explains what ‘overlay’ services are, how overlay journals have evolved and what makes their contribution to scholarly communication so valuable

End-to-end QoE optimization through overlay network deployment

In this paper an overlay network for end-to-end QoE management is presented. The goal of this infrastructure is QoE optimization by routing around failures in the IP network and optimizing the bandwidth usage on the last mile to the client. The overlay network consists of components that are located both in the core and at the edge of the network. A number of overlay servers perform end-to-end QoS monitoring and maintain an overlay topology, allowing them to route around link failures and congestion. Overlay access components situated at the edge of the network are responsible for determining whether packets are sent to the overlay network, while proxy components manage the bandwidth on the last mile. This paper gives a detailed overview of the end-to-end architecture together with representative experimental results which comprehensively demonstrate the overlay network's ability to optimize the QoE

A Many-Core Overlay for High-Performance Embedded Computing on FPGAs

In this work, we propose a configurable many-core overlay for high-performance embedded computing. The size of internal memory, supported operations and number of ports can be configured independently for each core of the overlay. The overlay was evaluated with matrix multiplication, LU decomposition and Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT) on a ZYNQ-7020 FPGA platform. The results show that using a system-level many-core overlay avoids complex hardware design and still provides good performance results.Comment: Presented at First International Workshop on FPGAs for Software Programmers (FSP 2014) (arXiv:1408.4423

Converging an Overlay Network to a Gradient Topology

In this paper, we investigate the topology convergence problem for the gossip-based Gradient overlay network. In an overlay network where each node has a local utility value, a Gradient overlay network is characterized by the properties that each node has a set of neighbors with the same utility value (a similar view) and a set of neighbors containing higher utility values (gradient neighbor set), such that paths of increasing utilities emerge in the network topology. The Gradient overlay network is built using gossiping and a preference function that samples from nodes using a uniform random peer sampling service. We analyze it using tools from matrix analysis, and we prove both the necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence to a complete gradient structure, as well as estimating the convergence time and providing bounds on worst-case convergence time. Finally, we show in simulations the potential of the Gradient overlay, by building a more efficient live-streaming peer-to-peer (P2P) system than one built using uniform random peer sampling.Comment: Submitted to 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2011