Portability, predictability and performance for parallel computing: BSP in practice

We report on practical experience using the Oxford BSP Library to parallelize a large electromagnetic code, the British Aerospace finite-difference time-domain code EMMA T:FD3D. The Oxford BS Library is one of the first realizations of the Bulk Synchronous Parallel computational model to be targeted at numerically intensive scientific (typically Fortran) computing. The BAe EMMA code is one of the first large-scale applications to be parallelized using this library, and it is an important demonstration of the cost effectiveness of the BSP approach. We illustrate how BSP cost-modelling techniques can be used to predict and optimize performance for single-source programs across different parallel platforms. We provide predicted and observed performance figures for an industrial-strength, single-source parallel code for a variety of real parallel architectures: shared memory multiprocessors, workstation clusters and massively parallel platforms.

Home is where my archive is

The miniaturization and dissemination of audiovisual media into small, mobile assemblages of cameras, screens and microphones has brought "database cinema" (Manovich) into pockets and handbags. In turn, this micro-portability of video production calls for a reconsideration of database cinema, not as an aesthetic but rather as a media ecology that makes certain experiences and forms of interaction possible. In this context the clip and the fragment become a social currency (showing, trading online, etc.), and the enjoyment of a moment or "occasion" becomes an opportunity for recording, extending, preserving and displaying. If we are now the documentarists of our lives (as so many mobile phone adverts imply), it follows that we are also our own archivists as well. From the folksonomies of Flickr and YouTube to the slick "media centres" of Sony, Apple and Microsoft, the audiovisual home archive is a prized territory of struggle among platforms and brands. The database is emerging as the dominant (screen) medium of popular creativity and distribution – but it also brings the categories of "home" and "person" closer to that of the archive.

I wanna be a protocol: online media and electronic structures of kinship

Heidegger famously identified Modernity with a technological leveling of being to a single order of a “standing reserve.” In a radically different tone, Gilles Deleuze articulated a single “plane of immanence” within which ontological distinctions between mind and body, God and world, interiority and exteriority become indiscernible. Taking such philosophical declarations as points of departure, this panel will consider how a collapse of ontological distinction emerged as a thematic and structural trope in literary and cinematic modernisms. We hope to consider how writers and film-makers of the 20th c. utilize the resources of their media to ask “the question of being” that troubled their philosophical contemporaries and heirs. In this vein, we will examine how these modernist ontologies of immanence describe the crisis of a subject saturated and eclipsed by a world which comprises her while also remaining strange or opaque. Papers will ask what is lost with the departure of a distinctly human sense of “being” and how the historical arrival of an alternative ontological order may be evident in the lived experience of modernity. In this sense, the relationship to departures and arrivals becomes the modern subject’s suspicion that he is unable to do either vis á vis the world.

An analysis of masculine and feminine writings in postings within a series of health and social care online undergraduate courses

This study aims to extend understanding of pedagogic dialogue by analysing the effect that the gender of the student has on interaction within a selection of ordinary health and social care on line courses.