Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Defining, Evaluating, And Improving The Process Of Verifying Patient Identifiers, Junghee Jo Nov 2014

Defining, Evaluating, And Improving The Process Of Verifying Patient Identifiers, Junghee Jo

Doctoral Dissertations

Patient identification errors are a major cause of medication errors. During medication administration, failure to identify patients correctly can lead to patients receiving incorrect medications, perhaps resulting in adverse drug events and even death. Most medication error studies to date have focused on reporting patient misidentification statistics from case studies, on classifying types of patient identification errors, or on evaluating the impact of technology on the patient identification process, but few have proposed specific strategies or guidelines to decrease patient identification errors. This thesis aims to improve the verification of patient identifiers (VPI) process by making three key contributions to …


Reliable And Efficient Multithreading, Tongping Liu Aug 2014

Reliable And Efficient Multithreading, Tongping Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

The advent of multicore architecture has increased the demand for multithreaded programs. It is notoriously far more challenging to write parallel programs correctly and efficiently than sequential ones because of the wide range of concurrency errors and performance problems. In this thesis, I developed a series of runtime systems and tools to combat concurrency errors and performance problems of multithreaded programs. The first system, Dthreads, automatically ensures determinism for unmodified C/C++ applications using the pthreads library without requiring programmer intervention and hardware support. Dthreads greatly simplifies the understanding and debugging of multithreaded programs. Dthreads often matches or even exceeds the …


Exploiting Energy Harvesting For Passive Embedded Computing Systems, Jeremy Joel Gummeson Apr 2014

Exploiting Energy Harvesting For Passive Embedded Computing Systems, Jeremy Joel Gummeson

Doctoral Dissertations

The key limitation in mobile computing systems is energy - without a stable power supply, these systems cannot process, store, or communicate data. This problem is of particular interest since the storage density of battery technologies do not follow scaling trends similar to Moore's law. This means that depending on application performance requirements and lifetime objectives, a battery may dominate the overall system weight and form factor; this could result in an overall size that is either inconvenient or unacceptable for a particular application. As device features have scaled down in size, entire embedded systems have been implemented on a …


Free Wake Potential Flow Vortex Wind Turbine Modeling: Advances In Parallel Processing And Integration Of Ground Effects, Nathaniel B. Develder Jan 2014

Free Wake Potential Flow Vortex Wind Turbine Modeling: Advances In Parallel Processing And Integration Of Ground Effects, Nathaniel B. Develder

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Potential flow simulations are a great engineering type, middle-ground approach to modeling complex aerodynamic systems, but quickly become computationally unwieldy for large domains. An N-body problem with N-squared interactions to calculate, this free wake vortex model of a wind turbine is well suited to parallel computation. This thesis discusses general trends in wind turbine modeling, a potential flow model of the rotor of the NREL 5MW reference turbine, various forms of parallel computing, current GPU hardware, and the application of ground effects to the model. In the vicinity of 200,000 points, current GPU hardware was found to be nearly 17 …