Digital Commons Network^™

An Efficient Task-Parallel Platform For Interactive Applications, Kyle Singer

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The performance growth of individual processor cores has been slowed by physical limitations that are difficult to overcome; as such, the trend has been for processor manufacturers to instead increase the number of processing cores in a single chip. As a result, programmers must write parallel code to gain performance. While prior work on task-parallel platforms has simplified the process of writing throughput-oriented scientific applications, they have paid little attention to the types of workloads seen in modern interactive applications such as web services.

Interactive applications are programs which interact with users or other programs using input/output (I/O) operations and …

Scheduling Multiple Parallel Jobs Online, Kefu Lu

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The prevalence of parallel processing has only increased in recent years. Today, most computing machines available on the market shifted from using single processors to possessing a multicore architecture. Naturally, there has been considerable work in developing parallel programming languages and frameworks which programmers can use to leverage the computing power of these machines. These languages allow users to create programs with internal parallelism. The next, and crucial, step is to ensure that the computing system can efficiently execute these parallel jobs. Executing a single parallel job efficiently is a very well-studied problem in parallel computing. In the area of …

The Hidden Costs Of Scheduling: Temporal Structure Reduces Task Enjoyment And Contracts Time, Gabriela Nicole Tonietto

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Time is an important but limited resource, and consumers are constantly looking for ways to get more from their time. This has led to the popularity of scheduling as a strategy to help consumers manage and organize their time. Although scheduling is both highly recommended and widely adopted, surprisingly little is known about the psychological effects of scheduling. In this dissertation, I explore the potential effects of scheduling for task enjoyment, perceived time, and time consumption, finding that scheduling may have some important hidden costs. In the first chapter, I examine the effect of scheduling leisure activities. While prior research …

Real-Time Virtualization And Cloud Computing, Sisu Xi

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

In recent years, we have observed three major trends in the development of complex real-time embedded systems. First, to reduce cost and enhance flexibility, multiple systems are sharing common computing platforms via virtualization technology, instead of being deployed separately on physically isolated hosts. Second, multi-core processors are increasingly being used in real-time systems. Third, developers are exploring the possibilities of deploying real-time applications as virtual machines in a public cloud. The integration of real-time systems as virtual machines (VMs) atop common multi-core platforms in a public cloud raises significant new research challenges in meeting the real-time latency requirements of applications. …

Modeling Aerial Refueling Operations, Allen Mccoy

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Aerial Refueling: AR) is the act of offloading fuel from one aircraft: the tanker) to another aircraft: the receiver) in mid flight. Meetings between tanker and receiver aircraft are referred to as AR events and are scheduled to: escort one or more receivers across a large body of water; refuel one or more receivers; or train receiver pilots, tanker pilots, and boom operators. In order to efficiently execute the Aerial Refueling Mission, the Air Mobility Command: AMC) of the United States Air Force: USAF) depends on computer models to help it make tanker basing decisions, plan tanker sorties, schedule aircraft, …

Scheduling Policy Design Using Stochastic Dynamic Programming, Robert Glaubius

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Scheduling policies for open soft real-time systems must be able to balance the competing concerns of meeting their objectives under exceptional conditions while achieving good performance in the average case. Balancing these concerns requires modeling strategies that represent the range of possible task behaviors, and solution techniques that are capable of effectively managing uncertainty in order to discover scheduling policies that are effective across the range of system modes. We develop methods for solving a particular class of task scheduling problems in an open soft real-time setting involving repeating, non-preemptable tasks that contend for a single shared resource. We enforce …

Priority Scheduling In Tinyos : A Case Study, Venkita Subramonian, Huang-Ming Huang, Seema Datar, Chenyang Lu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

In recent years, networked sensors are finding use in a variety of different applications ranging from temperature monitoring to battlefield strategy planning. Advances in fabrication techniques have led to the development of sensor-actuator devices called MEMS. It has now become possible to move software closer to where the “action” is, i.e. the sensors themselves. These sensor devices typically have a micro-controller, instruction and data memory, a radio module for wireless communication and an operating system. These devices are severely resource constrained in terms of memory, processing power and energy, since most of these devices are battery driven. A sensor network …