Engineering Commons^™

Gridfields: Model-Driven Data Transformation In The Physical Sciences, Bill Howe

Dissertations and Theses

Scientists' ability to generate and store simulation results is outpacing their ability to analyze them via ad hoc programs. We observe that these programs exhibit an algebraic structure that can be used to facilitate reasoning and improve performance. In this dissertation, we present a formal data model that exposes this algebraic structure, then implement the model, evaluate it, and use it to express, optimize, and reason about data transformations in a variety of scientific domains.

Simulation results are defined over a logical grid structure that allows a continuous domain to be represented discretely in the computer. Existing approaches for manipulating …

Efficient Support For Application-Specific Video Adaptation, Jie Huang

Dissertations and Theses

As video applications become more diverse, video must be adapted in different ways to meet the requirements of different applications when there are insufficient resources. In this dissertation, we address two sorts of requirements that cannot be addressed by existing video adaptation technologies: (i) accommodating large variations in resolution and (ii) collecting video effectively in a multi-hop sensor network. In addition, we also address requirements for implementing video adaptation in a sensor network.

Accommodating large variation in resolution is required by the existence of display devices with widely disparate screen sizes. Existing resolution adaptation technologies usually aim at adapting video …

Addressing Cheating And Workload Characterization In Online Games, Christopher Chambers

Dissertations and Theses

The Internet has enabled the popular pastime of playing video games to grow rapidly by connecting game players in disparate locations. However, with popularity have come the two challenges of hosting a large number of users and detecting cheating among users. For reasons of control, security, and ease of development, the most popular system for hosting on-line games is the client server architecture. This is also the most expensive and least scalable architecture for the game publisher, which drives hosting costs upwards with the success of the game. In addition to the expense of hosting, as a particular game grows …

Teabag: A Debugger For Curry, Stephen Lee Johnson

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis describes TeaBag, which is a debugger for functional logic computations. TeaBag is an accessory of a virtual machine currently under development. A distinctive feature of this machine is its operational completeness of computations, which places novel demands on a debugger. This thesis describes the features of TeaBag, in particular the handling of non-determinism, the ability to control nondeterministic steps, to remove context information, to toggle eager evaluation, and to set breakpoints on both functions and terms. This thesis also describes TeaBag's architecture and its interaction with the associated virtual machine. Finally, some debugging sessions of defective programs are …

Infrastructure For Performance Tuning Mpi Applications, Kathryn Marie Mohror

Dissertations and Theses

Clusters of workstations are becoming increasingly popular as a low-budget alternative for supercomputing power. In these systems,message-passing is often used to allow the separate nodes to act as a single computing machine. Programmers of such systems face a daunting challenge in understanding the performance bottlenecks of their applications. This is largely due to the vast amount of performance data that is collected, and the time and expertise necessary to use traditional parallel performance tools to analyze that data.

The goal of this project is to increase the level of performance tool support for message-passing application programmers on clusters of workstations. …

Pperfgrid: A Grid Services-Based Tool For The Exchange Of Heterogeneous Parallel Performance Data, John Jared Hoffman

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis details the approach taken in developing PPerfGrid. Section 2 discusses other research related to this project. Section 3 provides general background on the technologies utilized in PPerfGrid, focusing on the components that make up the Grid services architecture. Section 4 provides a description of the architecture of PPerfGrid. Section 5 details the implementation of PPerfGrid. Section 6 presents tests designed to measure the overhead and scalability of the PPerfGrid application. Section 7 suggests future work, and Section 8 concludes the thesis.

A Performance Study Of Lam And Mpich On An Smp Cluster, Brian Patrick Kearns

Dissertations and Theses

Many universities and research laboratories have developed low cost clusters, built from Commodity-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components and running mostly free software. Research has shown that these types of systems are well-equipped to handle many problems requiring parallel processing. The primary components of clusters are hardware, networking, and system software. An important system software consideration for clusters is the choice of the message passing library.

MPI (Message Passing Interface) has arguably become the most widely used message passing library on clusters and other parallel architectures, due in part to its existence as a standard. As a standard, MPI is open for anyone …

Content Aware Request Distribution For High Performance Web Service: A Performance Study, Robert M. Jones

Dissertations and Theses

The World Wide Web is becoming a basic infrastructure for a variety of services, and the increases in audience size and client network bandwidth create service demands that are outpacing server capacity. Web clusters are one solution to this need for high performance, highly available web server systems. We are interested in load distribution techniques, specifically Layer-7 algorithms that are content-aware. Layer-7 algorithms allow distribution control based on the specific content requested, which is advantageous for a system that offers highly heterogenous services. We examine the performance of the Client Aware Policy (CAP) on a Linux/Apache web cluster consisting of …

Querying Geographically Dispersed, Heterogeneous Data Stores: The Pperfxchange Approach, Matthew Edward Colgrove

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis details PPerfXchange’s approach for querying geographically dispersed heterogeneous data stores. While elements of PPerfXchange’s method have been implemented for other application areas, PPerfXchange shows how these elements can be applied to parallel performance analysis. The accomplishments of this thesis are:

• The design of an architecture for PPerfXchange, giving a uniform method to query heterogeneous data stores;
• A proof of concept prototype implementation of PPerfXchange including a partial implementation of an XQuery processor and a relational database virtual XML document; and
• Evaluation of PPerfXchange using example parallel performance analysis data.

Towards Comparative Profiling Of Parallel Applications With Pperfdb, Christian Leland Hansen

Dissertations and Theses

Due to the complex nature of parallel programming, it is difficult to diagnose and solve performance related problems. Knowledge of program behavior is obtained experimentally, with repeated runs of a slightly modified version of the application or the same code in different environments. In these circumstances, comparative performance analysis can provide meaningful insights into the subtle effects of system and code changes on parallel program behavior by highlighting the difference in performance results across executions.

I have designed and implemented modules which extend the PPerfDB performance tool to allow access to existing performance data generated by several commonly used tracing …

An Experimental Investigation Of The Finite Time Efficiency Of A Peltier Refrigeration Device, Thomas Schneider

Dissertations and Theses

Since the need of energy conservation has become more and more urgent in the past decades, there has been an increased interest in the study and development of more efficient energy conversion systems. One of the fields that have arisen from that endeavor is a branch of physics called Finite Time Thermodynamics (FIT). It may be said that FIT was initiated through the famous paper by Curzon and Ahlborn (1975) that established new bounds on the efficiency of a finite time Carnot heat engine. Before, the traditional treatments gave a fundamental upper limit on the efficiency of any heat engine. …

A Lagrangian For A System Of Two Dyons, Rainer Georg Thierauf

Dissertations and Theses

Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field are symmetrized by introducing magnetic charges into the formalism of electrodynamics. The symmetrized equations are solved for the fields and potentials of point particles. Those potentials, some of which are found to be singular along a line, are used to formulate the Lagrangian for a system of two dyons (particles with both electric and magnetic charge). The equations of motion are derived from the Lagrangian. It is shown that the dimensionality constants k and k * , which we r e introduced to define the units of the electromagnetic fields, have to be equal …

Effects On Electrolytic Cells Of Magnetic Fields Applied To Single Electrodes, Craig Allen Cousins

Dissertations and Theses

The primary goal of this research was to investigate the effects associated with the application of magnetic fields to single electrodes.

The Influence Of Halloysite Content On The Shear Strength Of Kaolinite, Reka Katalin Gabor

Dissertations and Theses

The objective of this thesis is to determine the relative shear strengths of halloysite, kaolinite, synthetic mixtures, and local soils, to investigate the influence of halloysite content on the shear strength of kaolinite, and to explore the possibility that the strength properties of soil clays might be controlled by the relative content of their component minerals.

Digital Computer Solution Of Electromagnetic Transients In Large Power Systems, Bijan Navidbakhsh

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis is an introduction to the solution of electromagnetic transients by a combination of the Bergeran method of characteristics and the application of trapezoidal rule of integration.

Three test examples solved by digital computer illustrate the step by step solution and computer programming.

To compare this method with the Laplace transformation technique, a test problem solved by both methods and also digital computer is illustrated. In conclusion, the advantages and disadvantages of both methods are compared.

Moment-Curvature-Thrust Relationships In Hybrid Members, Douglas Wrenn Fiala

Dissertations and Theses

In order to overcome the difficulties encountered in closed form solutions, moment-curvature-thrust relationships are developed for hybrid and nonhybrid cross sections utilizing an open form method. The use of horizontal sectors permits the inclusion of residual stresses and/or nonbilinear stress-strain relationships, if desired. Theoretical and experimental data are compared. Applications to circular tubes and other cross sections are discussed. Results indicate that open form solutions are feasible for calculating moment-curvature-thrust data. Hybrid cross sections are easily treated by open form solutions.

Studies Of Bistable Fluid Devices For Particle Flow Control, Gerald H. Hogland

Dissertations and Theses

This study was directed toward the development of a bistable wall attachment Flip-Flop device which was capable of directionally controlling particle flow. The particles were transported by a fluid stream which under the influence of wall attachment. The dominant criteria in the development of the device was the achievement of the highest recovery of particles at the active output, without destroying the wall attachment of the fluid stream The experiment was conducted in several distinct stages; each of which was concerned with at least one aspect of wa1l attachment or particle flow. Results derived from one test were used to …