Digital Commons Network^™

Grounding Via Scanning: Cooking Up Roles From Scratch, Doug Blank, Michael Gasser

Computer Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Case For The Use Of Application Generators In The Creation Of Software For The Hotel Industry, Peter O'Connor, Ciaran Mcdonnell

Conference papers

The article makes the case for the use of Program Generators in producing software for the Hotel and Catering Industry

Instructional Use Of Computers For Entry-Level Physical Therapy Education In The United States, Edmund M. Kosmahl

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Little was known about the value of computer assisted instruction (CAl) for entry-level physical therapy (PT) education. Factors that affect implementation and use of CAl in entry-level PT education had not been identified. Because of this paucity of information, decision-making about the implementation and use of CAl in entry-level PT education had been hampered.

This study used mail questionnaire survey methods to find:

1. The extent of use of computer-assisted instruction (CAl) in entry-level physical therapy (PT) education.
2. The perceived value of CAl compared to more traditional instructional methods for entry-level PT education.
3. What factors affect implementation and use of CAl …

Flattening C++ Classes, Umesh Bellur, Al Villarica, Kevin Shank, Imram Bashir, Doug Lea

Center for Advanced Systems and Engineering

Inheritance with derived classes and virtual functions are key design concepts in C++. Despite this, their use can result in significant degradation of run time performance. We present a class flattening tool, which we believe will help eliminate the overhead associated with virtual functions in C++ programs. A flattener may also prove useful in the reuse, debugging, and understanding of C++ components. This report deals with the issues associated with flattening, and then presents a detailed design of such a tool.

Software Support For Irregular And Loosely Synchronous Problems, Alok Choudhary, Geoffrey C. Fox, Sanja Ranka, Seema Hiranandani

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

A large class of scientific and engineering applications may be classified as irregular and loosely synchronous from the perspective of parallel processing. We present a partial classification of such problems. This classification has motivated us to enhance Fortran D to provide language support for irregular, loosely synchronous problems. We present techniques for parallelization of such problems in the context of Fortran D.

Scheduling Regular And Irregular Communication Patterns On The Cm-5, Ravi Ponnusamy, Rajeev Thakur, Alok Choudhary, Geoffrey C. Fox

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

In this paper, we study the communication characteristics of the CM-5 and the performance effects of scheduling regular and irregular communication patterns on the CM-5. We consider the scheduling of regular communication patterns such as complete exchange and broadcast. We have implemented four algorithms for complete exchange and studied their performances on a 2D FFT algorithm. We have also implemented four algorithms for scheduling irregular communication patterns and studied their performance on the communication patterns of several synthetic as well as real problems such as the conjugate gradient solver and the Euler solver.

Which Applications Can Use High Performance Fortran And Fortran-D: Industry Standard Data Parallel Languages?, Alok Choudhary, Geoffrey C. Fox, Tomasz Haupt, S. Ranka

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

In this paper, we present the first, preliminary results of HPF/Fortran-D language analysis based on compiling and running benchmark applications using a prototype implementation of HPF/Fortran-D compiler. The analysis indicate that the HPF is a very convenient tool for programming many applications on massively parallel and/or distributed systems. In addition, we cumulate experience on how to parallelize irregular problems to extend the scope of Fortran-D beyond HPF and suggest future extensions to the Fortran standard.

Compiling Distribution Directives In A Fortran 90d Compiler, Zeki Bozkus, Alok Choudhary, Geoffrey C. Fox, Sanjay Ranka

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

Data Partitioning and mapping is one of the most important steps of in writing a parallel program; especially data parallel one. Recently, Fortran D, and subsequently, High Performance Fortran (HPF) have been proposed to allow users to specify data distributions and alignments for arrays in programs. This paper presents the design of a Fortran 90D compiler that takes a Fortran 90D program as input and produces a node program + message passing calls for distributed memory machines. Specifically, we present the design of the Data Partitioning Module that processes the alignment and distribution directives and illustrate what are the important …

Global Domination Of Factors Of A Graph, Julie R. Carrington

Retrospective Theses and Dissertations

A factoring of a graph G = (V, E) is a collection of spanning subgraphs F₁, F₂, ... , F_k, known as factors into which the edge set E has been partitioned. A dominating set of a graph is a set of nodes such that every node in the graph is either contained in the set or has an edge to some node in the set. Each factor F_i is itself a graph and so has a dominating set. This set is called a local dominating set or LDS. An LDS of minimum …

Program Maintenance And Code Reuse: Object Oriented Versus Procedure Oriented Programming, Beiramali Moradi

Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to address the problem of the increasing cost of program maintenance in the data processing world. On average, programmers today spend 60% of their time in program maintenance and that figure is increasing at an estimated rate of 1 % each year. The cost is staggering and almost every business would like to find ways of reducing maintenance costs. One way to help reduce maintenance and development costs is to improve code reusability. Both maintenance programming and code reusability are the focus of this thesis.

Today's most commonly used programming language style is procedure …

The Power Of The Middle Bit, Frederic Green, Johannes Kobler, Jacobo Toran

Computer Science

The class of languages that can be recognized in polynomial time with the additional information of one bit from a #P function is studied. In particular, it is shown that every ModkP class and every class contained in PH are low for this class. These results are translated to the area of circuit complexity using MidBit (middle bit) gates. It is shown that every language in ACC can be computed by a family of depth-2 deterministic circuits of size 2 to the (log n)c power with a MidBit gate at the root and AND-gates of fan-in (log n)c at the …

Concurrent Local Search For Fast Proximity Algorithms On Parallel And Vector Architectures, Peter Su

Computer Science Technical Reports

This paper presents a fast algorithm for solving the all-nearest-neighbors problem. The algorithm uses a data parallel style of programming which can be efficiently utilized on a variety of parallel and vector architectures [4,21,26]. I have implemented the algorithm in C on one such architecture, the Cray Y-MP. On one Cray CPU, the implementation is about 19 times faster than a fast sequential algorithm running on a Sparc workstation. The main idea in the algorithm is to divide the plane up into a fixed grid of cells, or buckets. When the points are well distributed, the algorithm processes each query …

How To Encrypt /Usr/Dict/Words In About A Second, Peter Su, Matt Bishop

Computer Science Technical Reports

We present an implementation of the Data Encryption Standard on the Connection Machine architecture. The DES encryption algorithm is ideally suited to the Connection Machine because it consists of bit serial operations, and thousands of encryptions can be done in parallel, independently of one another. Thus, our code encrypts passwords about ten times faster than the fastest competition that we know about. In addition, the nature of the Connection Machine's architecture is such that some of the optimizations that make DES run much faster on conventional architectures have no effect on the performance of the Connection Machine. Our comparison of …

Distributed Ray Casting For High-Speed Volume Rendering, Patricia L. Brightbill

Theses and Dissertations

The volume rendering technique known as ray casting or ray tracing is notoriously slow for large volume sizes, yet provides superior images. A technique is needed to accelerate ray tracing volumes without depending on special purpose or parallel computers. The realization and improvements in distributed computing over the past two decades has motivated its use in this work. This thesis explores a technique to speedup ray casting by distributed programming. The work investigates the possibility of dividing the volume among general purpose workstations and casting rays (using Levoy's front-to-back algorithm) through each subvolume independently. The final step being the composition …

Query Optimization In Oodb, Hwee Hwa Pang, Hongjun Lu, Beng Chin Ooi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In object-oriented databases, relationships are generally maintained explicitly. The partial result of a retrieved object can be used to efficiently retrieve related objects. Instead of optimizing joins as in relational database systems, pointer chasing is optimized in object-oriented database systems. Further, semantics inherent in the object-oriented database, like superclass-subclass relationships and composite-component relationships between object classes, must be realised. In this paper, we describe our initial result in query optimization in an object-oriented database system. Semantic query transformation is used to preprocess the query. semantically optimized query is then translated into a query evaluation plan which comprises method invocations that …

Measurement Of Τ Decays Involving Η Mesons, M. Artuso, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

A Study Of The Methodologies Currently Available For The Maintenance Of The Knowledge-Base In An Expert System, Kai Teh

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This research studies currently available maintenance methodologies for expert system knowledge bases and taxonomically classifies them according to the functions they perform. The classification falls into two broad categories. These are: (1) Methodologies for building a more maintainable expert system knowledge base. This section covers techniques applicable to the development phases. Software engineering approaches as well as other approaches are discussed. (2) Methodologies for maintaining an existing knowledge base. This section is concerned with the continued maintenance of an existing knowledge base. It is divided into three subsections. The first subsection discusses tools and techniques which aid the understanding of …

System Design Quality And Efficiency Of System Analysts: An Automated Case Tool Versus A Manual Method, Satomi H. Sugishita

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the current research study is to find out if CASE tools help to increase the software design quality and efficiency of system analysts and designers when they modify a system design document. Results of the experimental data analysis show that only the experience level of subjects had an effect on quality of their work. Results indicated that the design methods, either CASE tools or manual, do not have a significant effect on quality of the modification task nor the efficiency of system analysts and designers.

The Group Spreadsheet, George Francis Morrissey Jr.

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Groupware is fast becoming an important part of the computing world. This thesis reviews past history and research in which a group oriented spreadsheet is shown to have a real purpose in today's business world. A group oriented spreadsheet was implemented using a public domain package called The Spreadsheet Calculator. Spreadsheet users and programmers tested the implementation. The results and conclusions of this implementation are also presented.

Constrained Completion: Theory, Implementation, And Results, Daniel Patrick Murphy

Doctoral Dissertations

"The Knuth-Bendix completion procedure produces complete sets of reductions but can not handle certain rewrite rules such as commutativity. In order to handle such theories, completion procedure were created to find complete sets of reductions modulo an equational theory. The major problem with this method is that it requires a specialized unification algorithm for the equational theory. Although this method works well when such an algorithm exists, these algorithms are not always available and thus alternative methods are needed to attack problems. A way of doing this is to use a completion procedure which finds complete sets of constrained reductions. …

High Performance Issues In Image Processing And Computer Vision, Jingyuan Zhang

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Typical image processing and computer vision tasks found in industrial, medical, and military applications require real-time solutions. These requirements have motivated the design of many parallel architectures and algorithms. Recently, a new architecture called the reconfigurable mesh has been proposed. This thesis addresses a number of problems in image processing and computer vision on reconfigurable meshes.

We first show that a number of low-level descriptors of a digitized image such as the perimeter, area, histogram and median row can be reduced to computing the sum of all the integers in a matrix, which in turn can be reduced to computing …

Smimd - A Synchronous Multiple Instruction Multiple Data Computer Architecture, Cathy C. Roberts

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

This thesis assesses the feasibility of utilizing a hypercube interconnect topology to link a heterogeneous processor array in a very long instruction word (VLIW) computer architecture. The research focused upon the selection of a suitable arrangement of processors for the computer and the subsequent demonstration of the architecture's capability to handle simple loop iterations. Previous attempts at VLIW computer design are summarized, the new SMIMD architecture is presented, and suggestions for future research are given. The thesis concludes with results of the initial performance evaluations of the architecture design.

The Complexity Of Software Testing, J. Paul Myers Jr.

Computer Science Faculty Research

The futility of using a general-purpose metric to characterise 'the' complexity of a program has been argued to support the design of specific metrics for the different stages of the software life-cycle. An analysis of the module testing activity is performed, providing evidence of the absurdity of all-purpose metrics, as well as a methodical means with which to measure testing complexity. Several standard metrics are seen to serve as component measures for the intricacies of testing. The methodology is applied to compare traditional and adaptive means of testing. It is shown that previous informal arguments asserting the superiority of adaptive …

On Sources In Comparability Graphs, With Applications, Stephan Olariu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We characterize sources in comparability graphs and show that our result provides a unifying look at two recent results about interval graphs.

Semi-Supervised Adaptive Resonance Theory (Smart2), Christopher J. Merz, William E. Bond, Daniel C. St. Clair

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Adaptive resonance theory (ART) algorithms represent a class of neural network architectures which self-organize stable recognition categories in response to arbitrary sequences of input patterns. The authors discuss incorporation of supervision into one of these architectures, ART2. Results of numerical experiments indicate that this new semi-supervised version of ART2 (SMART2) outperformed ART for classification problems. The results and analysis of runs on several data sets by SMART2, ART2, and backpropagation are analyzed. The test accuracy of SMART2 was similar to that of backpropagation. However, SMART2 network structures are easier to interpret than the corresponding structures produced by backpropagation.

Proving Functionally Difficult Problems Through Model Generation, Richard Rankin, Ralph W. Wilkerson

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Satchmo [MA88] is a Theorem Prover Implemented in Prolog Which Attempts to Provide Satisfiability Checking through Model Generation. This Paper Gives a Brief Introduction to SATCHMO and Reports Extensions to the Original Work Which Allow SATCHMO to Solve Problems Previously Considered to Be Finitely Unprovable within the SATCHMO System. the Specific Problems Are from [PE86, MO85, LU85] and Were Designed to Convert Simple Propositional Logic Problems into Functionally Difficult First Order Problems. Although the Benefits of using the SATCHMO System Are Many, the Fact that It Could Not Offer Proofs for a Set of Problems Provable in Other Systems is …

Formation Of Clusters And Resolution Of Ordinal Attributes In Id3 Classification Trees, Chaman Sabharwal, Keith R. Hacke, Daniel C. St. Clair

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Many learning systems have been designed to construct classification trees from a set of training examples. One of the most widely used approaches for constructing decision trees is the ID3 algorithm [Quinlan 1986]. Decision trees are ill-suited to handle attributes with ordinal values. Problems arise when a node representing an ordinal attribute has a branch for each value of the ordinal attribute in the training set. This is generally infeasible when the set of ordinal values is very large. Past approaches have sought to cluster large sets of ordinal values before the classification tree is constructed [Quinlan 1986; Lebowitz 1985; …

Some Developments In Information Technology In The Irish Hotel And Catering Industry, Sean Connell, Elaine Sunderland, Ciaran Mcdonnell

Conference papers

This paper describes the current and potential future use of computers in the Hospitality Industry in Ireland. It briefly outlines two research projects which are being carried out in the Dublin College of Catering in the application of computers to the Industry.

Applying Metrics To Rule-Based Systems, Paul Doyle, Renaat Verbruggen

Other

Since the introduction of software measurement theory in the early seventies it has been accepted that in order to control software it must first be measured. Unambiguous and reproducible measurements are considered to be the most useful in controlling software productivity, costs and quality, and diverse sets of measurements are required to cover all aspects of software. This paper focuses on measures for rule-based language systems and also describes a process for developing measures for other non-standard 3GL development tools. This paper uses KEL as an example and the method allows the re-use of existing measures and indicates if and …

Parallel Error Tolerance Scheme Based On The Hill Climbing Nature Of Simulated Annealing, Bruce M. Mcmillin, Chul-Eui Hong

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In parallelizing simulated annealing in a multicomputer, maintaining the global state S involves explicit message traffic and is a critical performance bottleneck. One way to mitigate this bottleneck is to amortize the overhead of these state updates over as many parallel state changes as possible. Using this technique introduces errors in the calculated cost C(S) of a particular state S used by the annealing process. Analytically derived bounds are placed on this error in order to assure convergence to the correct result. The resulting parallel simulated annealing algorithm dynamically changes the frequency of global updates as a function of the …