16093001
Textiles and computing: background and opportunities for convergence
John Kay's invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 sparked the first Industrial Revolution, which led to the transformation of industry and subsequently of civilization itself. Yet another invention in the field of textiles - the Jacquard head by Joseph Marie Jacquard (circa 1801) - was the first binary information processor. At any given point, the thread in a woven fabric can be in one of two states or positions: on the face of the fabric or on the back. Pattern cards were punched or cut according to the required fabric design. A hole in the card signified that the thread would appear on the face of the fabric, while a blank meant that the end would be left down and appear on the back of the fabric. The Jacquard head was used on the weaving loom or machine for raising and lowering the warp threads to form desired patterns based on the lifting plan or program embedded in the cards. Thus the Jacquard mechanism set the stage for modern day binary information processing. Ada Lovelace, the benefactor for Charles Babbage who worked on the Analytical Engine (the predecessor to the modern day computer), is said to have remarked, "The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." The Jacquard mechanism that inspired Babbage and spawned the Hollerith punched card has been instrumental in bringing about one of the most profound technological advancements known to humans, viz., the second Industrial Revolution also known as the Information Processing Revolution [1]. In fact, when Intel introduced its Pentium class of microprocessors, one of the advertisements had a "fabric of chips" emerging from a weaving machine; this picture eloquently captured the essence of chip making - a true blending of art and science - much like the design and production of textiles.
17672600
A prototype network embedded in textile fabric
A digital network between active components or "buttons" atop an e-textile fabric must handle the inexact placement of wires in the fabric both for signal distribution and for power distribution. We approach the problem of signal distribution by making the pin logic of the buttons reconfigurable and by providing enough local state to allow an external agent to discover and to reconfigure the buttons into a working network. We describe a prototype system of a 2x2 array of FPGA-and-microcontroller buttons atop a fabric with 0.100"-pitch wiring including architecture decisions, circuits and software algorithms.
195862521
The wearable motherboard: a framework for personalized mobile information processing (PMIP)
Textiles and computing share a synergistic relationship, which is being harnessed to create a new paradigm in personalized mobile information processing (PMIP). In this paper, we provide an overview of this "interconnection" between the two fields and present the vision for "E-Textiles," which represents the convergence of the two fields. We discuss the role of the Georgia Tech Wearable Motherboard in pioneering this paradigm of "fabric is the computer" and serving as a framework for PMIP. Finally, recent research in this area resulting in the realization of a "computational fabric network" is discussed.
36047409
A Comparison of Scalable Labeling Schemes for Detecting Races in OpenMP Programs
Detecting races is important for debugging shared-memory parallel programs, because the races result in unintended nondeterministic executions of the program. On-the-fly technique to detect races uses a scalable labeling scheme which generates concurrency information of parallel threads without any globally-shared data structure. Two efficient schemes of scalable labeling, BD Labeling and NR Labeling, show the similar complexities in space and time, but their actual efficiencies have been compared empirically in no literature to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we empirically compare these two labeling schemes by monitoring a set of OpenMP kernel programs with nested parallelism. The empirical results show that NR Labeling is more efficient than BD Labeling by at least 1.5 times in generating the thread labels, and by at least 3.5 times in using the labels to detect races in the kernel programs.
46184949
Adaptive Deadlock-Free Wormhole Routing in Faulty Hypercubes
1442053
User preferences when searching individual and integrated full-text databases
This paper addresses a crucial issue in the digital library environment: how to support effective interaction of users with heterogeneous and distributed information resources. We compared users' preference for systems which implement interaction with multiple databases through a common interface and with multiple databases as if they were one (integrated interaction) in an experiment in the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) environment. Twenty-eight volunteers were recruited from the graduate students of School of Communication, Information, & Library Studies at Rutgers University. Significantly more subjects preferred the common interface (HERMES) to the integrated interface (HERA). For most of the subjects in this study, the greater control in HERMES outweighed the advantages of HERA such as convenience, efficiency, and ease of use. These results suggest that: (1) the general assumption of the information retrieval (IR) literature that an integrated interaction is best needs to be revisited; (2) it is important to allow for more user control in various ways in the distributed environment; and (3) for digital library purposes, it is important to characterize different databases to support user choice for integration.
439941
Iterative exploration, design and evaluation of support for query reformulation in interactive information retrieval
We report on the progressive investigation of techniques for supporting interactive query reformulation in the TREC Interactive Track. Two major issues were explored over four successive years: methods of term suggestion; and, interface design to support different system functionalities. Each year's results led to the following year's investigation, with respect to both of these issues. This paper presents first the general motivation for the entire series of studies; then an overview of each year's investigation, its results, and how they influenced the next year's investigation. We discuss what has been learned through this series of investigations about effective term suggestion, usable and useful interface design, and the relationships between these two in support of the TREC Interactive Track task. We conclude with comments about the general methodology employed over this series of studies, and its relevance to the development and evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems.
310444
Managing energy-performance tradeoffs for multithreaded applications on multiprocessor architectures
In modern computers, non-performance metrics such as energy consumption have become increasingly important, requiring tradeoff with performance. A recent work has proposed performance-guaranteed energy management, but it is designed specifically for sequential applications and cannot be used to a large class of multithreaded applications running on high end computers and data servers.
 To address the above problem, this paper makes the first attempt to provide performance-guaranteed energy management for multithreaded applications on multiprocessor architectures. We first conduct a comprehensive study on the effects of energy adaptation on thread synchronizations and show that a multithreaded application suffers from not only local slowdowns due to energy adaptation, but also significant slowdowns propagated from other threads because of synchronization. Based on these findings, we design three Synchronization-Aware (SA) algorithms, LWT (Lock Waiting Time-based), CSL (Critical Section Length-based) and ODP (Operation Delay Propagation-based) algorithms, to estimate the energy adaptation-induced slowdowns on each thread. The local slowdowns are then combined across multiple threads via three aggregation methods (MAX, AVG and SUM) to estimate the overall application slowdown.
 We evaluate our methods using a large multithreaded commercial application, IBM DB2 with industrial-strength online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, and six SPLASH parallel scientific applications. Our experimental results show that LWT combined with the MAX aggregation method not only controls the performance slow down within the specified limits but also conserves the most energy.