Computer Engineering Commons^™

Shelfaware: Accelerating Collaborative Awareness With Shelf Crdt, John C. Waidhofer

Master's Theses

Collaboration has become a key feature of modern software, allowing teams to work together effectively in real-time while in different locations. In order for a user to communicate their intention to several distributed peers, computing devices must exchange high-frequency updates with transient metadata like mouse position, text range highlights, and temporary comments. Current peer-to-peer awareness solutions have high time and space complexity due to the ever-expanding logs that each client must maintain in order to ensure robust collaboration in eventually consistent environments. This paper proposes an awareness Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) library that provides the tooling to support an …

A Method For Monitoring Operating Equipment Effectiveness With The Internet Of Things And Big Data, Carl D. Hays Iii

Master's Theses

The purpose of this paper was to use the Overall Equipment Effectiveness productivity formula in plant manufacturing and convert it to measuring productivity for forklifts. Productivity for a forklift was defined as being available and picking up and moving containers at port locations in Seattle and Alaska. This research uses performance measures in plant manufacturing and applies them to mobile equipment in order to establish the most effective means of analyzing reliability and productivity. Using the Internet of Things to collect data on fifteen forklift trucks in three different locations, this data was then analyzed over a six-month period to …

Relevance Analysis For Document Retrieval, Eric Labouve

Master's Theses

Document retrieval systems recover documents from a dataset and order them according to their perceived relevance to a user’s search query. This is a difficult task for machines to accomplish because there exists a semantic gap between the meaning of the terms in a user’s literal query and a user’s true intentions. Even with this ambiguity that arises with a lack of context, users still expect that the set of documents returned by a search engine is both highly relevant to their query and properly ordered. The focus of this thesis is on document retrieval systems that explore methods of …

Quantifying Parkinson's Disease Symptoms Using Mobile Devices, Charles R. Aylward

Master's Theses

Current assessments for evaluating the progression of Parkinson’s Disease are largely qualitative and based on small sets of data obtained from occasional doctor-patient interactions. There is a clinical need to improve the techniques used for mitigating common Parkinson’s Disease symptoms. Available data sets for researching the disease are minimal, hindering advancement toward understanding the underlying causes and effectiveness of treatment and therapies. Mobile devices present an opportunity to continuously monitor Parkinson’s Disease patients and collect important information regarding the severity of symptoms. The evolution of digital technology has opened doors for clinical research to extend beyond the clinic by incorporating …

Polyfs Visualizer, Paul Martin Fallon

Master's Theses

One of the most important operating system topics, file systems, control how we store and access data and form a key point in a computer scientists understanding of the underlying mechanisms of a computer. However, file systems, with their abstract concepts and lack of concrete learning aids, is a confusing subjects for students. Historically at Cal Poly, the CPE 453 Introduction to Operating Systems has been on of the most failed classes in the computing majors, leading to the need for better teaching and learning tools. Tools allowing students to gain concrete examples of abstract concepts could be used to …

Rest Api To Access And Manage Geospatial Pipeline Integrity Data, Alexandra Michelle Francis

Master's Theses

Today’s economy and infrastructure is dependent on raw natural resources, like crude oil and natural gases, that are optimally transported through a net- work of hundreds of thousands of miles of pipelines throughout America[28]. A damaged pipe can negatively a↵ect thousands of homes and businesses so it is vital that they are monitored and quickly repaired[1]. Ideally, pipeline operators are able to detect damages before they occur, but ensuring the in- tegrity of the vast amount of pipes is unrealistic and would take an impractical amount of time and manpower[1].

Natural disasters, like earthquakes, as well as construction are just …

Decafs: A Modular Distributed File System To Facilitate Distributed Systems Education, Halli Elaine Meth

Master's Theses

Data quantity, speed requirements, reliability constraints, and other factors encourage industry developers to build distributed systems and use distributed services. Software engineers are therefore exposed to distributed systems and services daily in the workplace. However, distributed computing is hard to teach in Computer Science courses due to the complexity distribution brings to all problem spaces. This presents a gap in education where students may not fully understand the challenges introduced with distributed systems. Teaching students distributed concepts would help better prepare them for industry development work.

DecaFS, Distributed Educational Component Adaptable File System, is a modular distributed file system designed …

Accurate Hardware Raid Simulator, Darrin Kalung Weng

Master's Theses

Computer data storage is growing at an astonishing rate. With cloud computing and the growth of the Internet enterprise storage has been predicted to grow at rates as high as 300\% per year. To fulfill this need technologies such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks or RAID are being used in industry today. Not only does RAID increase I/O performance but also provides redundancy measures to protect against hardware failure. Even though RAID has existed for some time now and is well understood, proprietary optimizations such as command scheduling and cache strategies that are employed by current RAID controllers are …

Amaethon – A Web Application For Farm Management And An Assessment Of Its Utility, Tyler Yero

Master's Theses

Amaethon is a web application that is designed for enterprise farm management. It takes a job typically performed with spreadsheets, paper, or custom software and puts it on the web. Farm administration personnel may use it to schedule farm operations and manage their resources and equipment. A survey was con- ducted to assess Amaethon’s user interface design. Participants in the survey were two groups of students and a small group of agriculture professionals. Among other results, the survey indicated that a calendar interface inside Amaethon was preferred, and statistically no less effective, than a map interface. This is despite the …

Active Storage And Ssd Caching In An Object Storage Environment, Michael T. Runde

Master's Theses

The advancing performance and lowering costs required to implement additional processing power on system peripherals such as disk drives are increasingly allowing additional computing ability to be located directly on individual drives. Active Storage attempts to take advantage of this excess by moving some computationally intensive applications directly to the disk drives. This can remove the bottlenecks seen through interconnects between the drives and the CPU of an initiating system as well as remove the need for systems to handle these applications.

The contributions of this thesis are in two areas. The first is the development of a framework designed …

Improvement Of Statistical Process Control At St. Jude Medical's Cardiac Manufacturing Facility, Christopher Lance Edwards

Master's Theses

Sig sigma is a methodology where companies strive to reproduce results ending up having a 99.9996% chance their product will be void of defects. In order for companies to reach six sigma, statistical process control (SPC) needs to be introduced. SPC has many different tools associated with it, control charts being one of them. Control charts play a vital role in managing how a process is behaving. Control charts allow users to identify special causes, or shifts, and can therefore change the process to keep producing good products, free of defects.

There are many factories and manufacturing facilities having implemented …

An Interactive Visualization Model For Analyzing Data Storage System Workloads, Steven Charubhat Pungdumri

Master's Theses

The performance of hard disks has become increasingly important as the volume of data storage increases. At the bottom level of large-scale storage networks is the hard disk. Despite the importance of hard drives in a storage network, it is often difficult to analyze the performance of hard disks due to the sheer size of the datasets seen by hard disks. Additionally, hard drive workloads can have several multi-dimensional characteristics, such as access time, queue depth and block-address space. The result is that hard drive workloads are extremely diverse and large, making extracting meaningful information from hard drive workloads very …

Digital Signaling Processor Resource Management For Small Office Phone Systems, John T. Gilkeson

Master's Theses

Contemporary small office phone systems are specialized computers that connect a variety of phones within the office and to the local phone company. These systems use digital signaling processors (DSPs) to convert signals from analog to digital and vice-versa. Many different types of applications run on the DSPs and different businesses have varying application needs. Given the systems have limited amounts of DSP resources and growing numbers of applications for a phone system, an administrator needs a way to configure the uses of resources based on their individual business needs.

This thesis provides an overview of a system for configuring …

Jdiet: Footprint Reduction For Memory-Constrained Systems, Michael John Huffman

Master's Theses

Main memory remains a scarce computing resource. Even though main memory is becoming more abundant, software applications are inexorably engineered to consume as much memory as is available. For example, expert systems, scientific computing, data mining, and embedded systems commonly suffer from the lack of main memory availability.

This thesis introduces JDiet, an innovative memory management system for Java applications. The goal of JDiet is to provide the developer with a highly configurable framework to reduce the memory footprint of a memory-constrained system, enabling it to operate on much larger working sets. Inspired by buffer management techniques common in modern …