18362603
Apply cluster and grid computing on parallel 3D rendering
A cluster is a collection of independent and cheap machines, used together as a supercomputer to provide a solution. In this paper, a PC cluster consisting of one master node and nine disk-less slave nodes (10 processors), is proposed and built for parallel rendering purposes. The system architecture and benchmark performances of this cluster are also presented. Internet computing and grid technologies promise to change the way we tackle complex problems. They will enable large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources across institutional boundaries. Harnessing these new technologies effectively will transform scientific disciplines ranging from high-energy physics to the life sciences. Also, in this paper, we construct two heterogeneous PC clusters for parallel rendering purpose and install Linux Red Hat 9 on each PC cluster. Then, these clusters are set to the different subnet. Therefore, we use the grid middleware lambdaobus ToolKit, to connect these two clusters to form a grid computing environment on multiple Linux PC clusters. We also install the SUN Grid Engine, to manage and monitor incoming or outgoing computing jobs and schedule the job to achieve high performance computing and high CPU utilization. The system architecture and benchmark performances of this cluster are also presented
32464432
An Enhanced Parallel Loop Self-Scheduling Scheme for Cluster Environments
In this paper, a parallel loop self-scheduling scheme for heterogeneous PC cluster systems is proposed. Though the proposed scheme does allow users to choose parameters before the execution initialization phase, there are still weaknesses that motivate us to go further with new improvements in that scheme. For instance, a decision on a fixed and monotonous parameter can easily lead to invalid schedule by using previous input information. Thus, it is proposed in this paper a new scheme, where the scheduling parameter can be adjusted dynamically and fit into most widely available computer systems, in order to provide higher overall performance.
12951016
A shareable e-learning platform using data grid technology
Over the past decade, speed in the transmission of knowledge is no longer the way it used to be. Due to this influence, conventional educational methodology has also followed this trend and has gone through a momentous transformation. An excellent example is e-learning which has achieved and broken through the restrictions of time and space. In recent years it has become one of the most popular teaching methods. SCORM (Sharable Course Object Reference Model) the most popular e-learning standard has been adapted from many differing e-learning platforms. Normally, courseware meeting SCORM standards is sharable with other e-learning platforms. Most e-learning platforms however are unable to share courseware directly on the Internet. With this in mind, we have employed one type of grid computing technology called "data grid" in order to achieve this. This technology allows the integration of different SCORM platforms into a huge e-learning environment.
7749374
A Performance-Based Approach to Dynamic Workload Distribution for Master-Slave Applications on Grid Environments
Effective workload distribution techniques can significantly reduce the total completion time of a program on grid computing environments. In this paper, we propose a dynamic performance-based workload partition approach for master-slave types of applications on grids. Furthermore, we implement two types of applications and conduct the experimentations on our grid testbed. Experimental results showed that our method could execute more efficiently than traditional schemes.
5672930
An e-Learning Platform Based on Grid Architecture
The overall popularity of the Internet has helped e-learning become a hot method for learning in recent years. Over the Internet, learners can freely absorb new knowledge without restrictions on time or place. Many companies have adopted e-learning to train their employees. An e-learning system can make an enterprise more competitive by increasing the knowledge of its employees. E-learning has been shown to have impressive potential in e-commerce. At present, most e-learning environment architectures use single computers or servers as their structural foundations. As soon as their work loads increase, their software and hardware must be updated or renewed. This is a big burden on organizations that lack sufficient funds. Thus, in this study we employ a kind of Grid Computing technology, called the ”Data Grid” to integrate idle computer resources in enterprises into e-learning platforms, thus eliminating the need to purchase costly high-level servers and other equipment.
7849532
A Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing System with Data Grid Technology for Mobile Devices
Increases in mobile device processing power, storage capacity, and connectivity in recent years have led to a rapid rise in mobile device use. But mobile users face challenges in making connections with other users in order to share resources. To address this issue, we propose an architecture that uses peer-to-peer protocol to establish a resource sharing platform for mobile devices, combined with a data grid to help analyze and classify resources.
5388492
On-the-Fly rendering of losslessly compressed irregular volume data
Very large irregular-grid data sets are represented as tetrahedral mesh and may incur significant disk I/O access overhead in the rendering process. An effective way to alleviate the disk I/O overhead associated with rendering large tetrahedral mesh is to reduce the I/O bandwidth requirement through compression. Existing tetrahedral mesh compression algorithms focus only on compression efficiency and cannot be readily integrated into the mesh rendering process, and thus demand that a compressed tetrahedral mesh be decompressed before it can be rendered into a 2D image. This paper presents an integrated tetrahedral mesh compression and rendering algorithm calledGatun, which allows compressed tetrahedral meshes to be rendered incrementally as they are being decompressed, thus forming an efficient irregular grid rendering pipeline. Both compression and rendering algorithms in Gatun exploit the same local connectivity information among adjacent tetrahedra, and thus can be tightly integrated into a unified implementation framework. Our tetrahedral compression algorithm is specifically designed to facilitate the integration with irregular grid renderer without any compromise in compression efficiency. A unique performance advantage of Gatunis its ability to reduce the run-time memory footprint requirement by releasing memory allocated to tetrahedra as early as possible. As a result, Gatunis able to decrease rendering time by a factor of 2 for very large tetrahedral mesh whose size exceeds the amount of physical memory. At the same time, the smaller working set and better access locality of Gatunimprove the rendering performance by up to 30%, even when the input tetrahedral mesh is entirely memory-resident. CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation—Display Algorithms; E.4 [Coding and Information Theory]: Data Compaction and Compression.
40640034
Applying Collision Avoidance Expert System to Navigation Training Systems as an Intelligent Tutor
To enhance the skills of captains and improve the existing training technologies, it is very important and urgent to research and develop an intelligent navigation training system. Therefore we propose to incorporate a collision avoidance expert system into real-time ship handling simulator to provide intelligent decision-making support for navigation training. The intelligent tutor aims to assist the trainee to master necessary skills for handling ship in complex navigating environments such as open sea, restricted waterway, and rough sea conditions by sharing multiple captains' experience. In this paper, the developed collision avoidance expert system will be outlined, then the proposed intelligent decision-making support for navigation training will be presented in details.
16831415
Automatic construction of English/Chinese parallel corpora
As the demand for global information increases significantly, multilingual corpora has become a valuable linguistic resource for applications to cross-lingual information retrieval and natural language processing. In order to cross the boundaries that exist between different languages, dictionaries are the most typical tools. However, the general-purpose dictionary is less sensitive in both genre and domain. It is also impractical to manually construct tailored bilingual dictionaries or sophisticated multilingual thesauri for large applications. Corpus-based approaches, which do not have the limitation of dictionaries, provide a statistical translation model with which to cross the language boundary. There are many domain-specific parallel or comparable corpora that are employed in machine translation and cross-lingual information retrieval. Most of these are corpora between Indo-European languages, such as English/French and English/Spanish. The Asian/Indo-European corpus, especially English/Chinese corpus, is relatively sparse. The objective of the present research is to construct English/ Chinese parallel corpus automatically from the World Wide Web. In this paper, an alignment method is presented which is based on dynamic programming to identify the one-to-one Chinese and English title pairs. The method includes alignment at title level, word level and character level. The longest common subsequence (LCS) is applied to find the most reliable Chinese translation of an English word. As one word for a language may translate into two or more words repetitively in another language, the edit operation, deletion, is used to resolve redundancy. A score function is then proposed to determine the optimal title pairs. Experiments have been conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed method using the daily press release articles by the Hong Kong SAR government as the test bed. The precision of the result is 0.998 while the recall is 0.806. The release articles and speech articles, published by Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited, are also used to test our method, the precision is 1.00, and the recall is 0.948.
11840547
Numerical Analysis Of The Edl Effect On Liquid Flow In Microchannels
A mathematical model is developed to study the electrokinetic effect on developing liquid flow in a parallel slit. A finite-volume method is used to solve the proposed model. The characteristics of the pressure-driven flow in the presence of the electrokinetic effect are examined. The computation results show the electrical double layer has the effect on both developing and fully-developed flows.
8997074
Applying Multi Agent Technology to Supply Chain Management
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is extremely important to the manufacturing and retailing industries. Profitability of enterprises in these two industries depends on the efficiency and effectiveness on they manage their supply chains. Information technology has been a key element in supporting supply chain management. As the access to the Internet becomes easier, managers are able to access real-time data and use decision support tools to support their decision making. In this paper, we investigate how multi-agent technology and constraint network can be integrated together to improve the efficiency and transparency of supply chain management. A multi-agent based supply chain management system has been developed to support communication, coordination, collaboration, and operation of different entities in supply chains. Which enabled the warehouses and plants to query and share information. A constraint network model has been applied to model the objectives and constraints of each entity in supply chains. Two experiments have been conducted to evaluate the usefulness and performance of the system with participation of a retailing firm. The results indicated that the proposed system has several benefits. For example, improve efficiency by saving time and efforts for decision makers as well as improve the quality and responsiveness of decision making by value-added services, such as, bullwhip detection agent.