Energy aware software for many-core systems

Many-core systems provide a great potential in application performance with the massively parallel structure. Such systems are currently being integrated into most parts of daily life from high-end server farms to desktop systems, laptops and mobile devices. Yet, these systems are facing increasing challenges such as high temperature causing physical damage, high electrical bills both for servers and individual users, unpleasant noise levels due to active cooling and unrealistic battery drainage in mobile devices; factors caused directly by poor energy efficiency. Power management has traditionally been an area of research providing hardware solutions or runtime power management in the operating system in form of frequency governors. Energy awareness in application software is currently non-existent. This means that applications are not involved in the power management decisions, nor does any interface between the applications and the runtime system to provide such facilities exist. Power management in the operating system is therefore performed purely based on indirect implications of software execution, usually referred to as the workload. It often results in over-allocation of resources, hence power waste. This thesis discusses power management strategies in many-core systems in the form of increasing application software awareness of energy efficiency. The presented approach allows meta-data descriptions in the applications and is manifested in two design recommendations: 1) Energy-aware mapping 2) Energy-aware execution which allow the applications to directly influence the power management decisions. The recommendations eliminate over-allocation of resources and increase the energy efficiency of the computing system. Both recommendations are fully supported in a provided interface in combination with a novel power management runtime system called Bricktop. The work presented in this thesis allows both new- and legacy software to execute with the most energy efficient mapping on a many-core CPU and with the most energy efficient performance level. A set of case study examples demonstrate realworld energy savings in a wide range of applications without performance degradation.

Marketing performance measurement in the marketing-finance interface

Marketing and finance are both facing challenges in the constantly changing business environment. Finance is challenged to change its role from cost control to value-adding business partner while marketing needs to be able to demonstrate its accountability so how it contributes to firm performance. Finance is the key partner for marketing to prove its impact by helping marketing to measure its actions. By doing so, finance can also emphasize its business partner role. There is not a lot of research conducted of the relationship between marketing and finance departments. The aim of this study is to investigate how the professional differences of marketing and finance and their forms of cooperation affect marketing performance measurement. Literature of marketing and finance disciplines, their cooperation, performance implications of their interface as well as the roles of marketing performance measurement, performance measurement system and measures were reviewed. This research was conducted as a qualitative case study among senior management of marketing and finance in the sporting goods company. The data collected through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and secondary data was described and classified and connections were made. The results of the study show that the nature of marketing and finance disciplines has many effects on their cooperation and performance measurement. Due to the ambiguous nature of marketing, measuring its performance is still seen as a challenge but digitalization is helping the measurement. It was indicated that marketing and finance professionals need to have different skillsets in order to perform their roles effectively and thus cooperation is needed. Marketing performance needs to be measured with both financial and nonfinancial measures. Both marketing and finance interviewees highlighted the importance of marketing measures over financial measures. Measuring marketing performance comprehensively is seen as a challenge since marketing and finance cooperation is still shaped by the cost control and budget management roles, rather than performance measurement. We recognized three constraints affecting this cooperation and performance measurement: people, time and software. If marketing and finance would develop deeper cooperation, they could create comprehensive performance measurement system that improves organizational performance.

Software for Transport Accessibility Analysis: The Case of Moscow

In this thesis the process of building a software for transport accessibility analysis is described. The goal was to create a software which is easy to distribute and simple to use for the user without particular background in the field of the geographical data analysis. It was shown that existing tools do not suit for this particular task due to complex interface or significant rendering time. The goal was accomplished by applying modern approaches in the process of building web applications such as maps based on vector tiles, FLUX architecture design pattern and module bundling. It was discovered that vector tiles have considerable advantages over image-based tiles such as faster rendering and real-time styling.

TactoColor : conception et évaluation d’une interface d’exploration spatiale du web pour malvoyants.

Nous nous intéressons, dans le cadre de cette recherche, à l’accès à l’internet des personnes malvoyantes. Plusieurs types d’outils destinés à ce public sont disponibles sur le marché, comme les lecteurs et les agrandisseurs d’écran, en fonction de l’acuité visuelle de la personne. Bien que ces outils soient utiles et régulièrement utilisés, les malvoyants (ainsi que les aveugles) évoquent souvent leur aspect frustrant. Plusieurs raisons sont citées, comme le manque d’organisation spatiale du contenu lu avec les lecteurs d’écran ou le fait de ne solliciter qu’un seul sens. La présente recherche consiste à adapter pour les malvoyants un système en développement le TactoWeb (Petit, 2013) qui permet une exploration audio-tactile du Web. TactoWeb a été conçu pour les handicapés ayant une cécité complète et n’offre donc aucune propriété visuelle. Nous proposons ici une adaptation du système pour les handicapés n’ayant qu’une déficience visuelle partielle. Nous espérons fournir à cette population des outils performants qui leur permettront de naviguer sur l’internet de façon efficace et agréable. En effet, grâce à une exploration non-linéaire (qui devrait améliorer l’orientation spatiale) et une interface multimodale (qui sollicite la vue, l’ouïe et le toucher), nous pensons réduire fortement le sentiment de frustration qu’évoquent les malvoyants. Nous avons posé l’hypothèse qu’une exploration non-linéaire et trimodale d’un site internet avec TactoColor est plus satisfaisante et efficace qu’une exploration non-linéaire bimodale avec TactoWeb (sans retour visuel). TactoColor a été adapté pour les malvoyants en ajoutant des indices visuels traduisant les composantes de la page (liens, menus, boutons) qui devraient rendre l’exploration plus aisée. Pour vérifier notre hypothèse, les deux versions du logiciel ont été évaluées par des malvoyants. Ainsi, les participants ont commencé soit avec TactoWeb, soit avec TactoColor afin de ne pas favoriser une des versions. La qualité de la navigation, son efficacité et son efficience ont été analysées en se basant sur le temps nécessaire à l’accomplissement d’une tâche, ainsi que la facilité ou la difficulté évoquée par le participant. Aussi, à la fin de chaque session, nous avons demandé leur avis aux participants, grâce à un questionnaire d’évaluation, ce qui nous a permis d’avoir leur retour sur notre logiciel après leur brève expérience. Tous ces relevés nous ont permis de déterminer que l’ajout des couleurs entraine une exploration plus rapide des pages web et une meilleure orientation spatiale. Par contre les performances très différentes des participants ne permettent pas de dire si la présence des couleurs facilite la complétion des tâches.

The DIADEM Software Development Methodology extended to Multimedia Interfaces

DIADEM, created by THOMSON-CSF, is a methodology for specifying and developing user interfaces. It improves productivity of the interface development process as well as quality of the interface. The method provides support to user interface development in three aspects. (1) DIADEM defines roles of people involved and their tasks and organises the sequence of activities. (2) It provides graphical formalisms supporting information exchange between people. (3) It offers a basic set of rules for optimum human-machine interfaces. The use of DIADEM in three areas (process control, sales support, and multimedia presentation) was observed and evaluated by our laboratory in the European project DIAMANTA (ESPRIT P20507). The method provides an open procedure that leaves room for adaptation to a specific application and environment. This paper gives an overview of DIADEM and shows how to extend formalisms for developing multimedia interfaces.

Interface issues in the ESCHER visual database editor

Presentation at the 1997 Dagstuhl Seminar "Evaluation of Multimedia Information Retrieval", Norbert Fuhr, Keith van Rijsbergen, Alan F. Smeaton (eds.), Dagstuhl Seminar Report 175, 14.04. - 18.04.97 (9716). - Abstract: This presentation will introduce ESCHER, a database editor which supports visualization in non-standard applications in engineering, science, tourism and the entertainment industry. It was originally based on the extended nested relational data model and is currently extended to include object-relational properties like inheritance, object types, integrity constraints and methods. It serves as a research platform into areas such as multimedia and visual information systems, QBE-like queries, computer-supported concurrent work (CSCW) and novel storage techniques. In its role as a Visual Information System, a database editor must support browsing and navigation. ESCHER provides this access to data by means of so called fingers. They generalize the cursor paradigm in graphical and text editors. On the graphical display, a finger is reflected by a colored area which corresponds to the object a finger is currently pointing at. In a table more than one finger may point to objects, one of which is the active finger and is used for navigating through the table. The talk will mostly concentrate on giving examples for this type of navigation and will discuss some of the architectural needs for fast object traversal and display. ESCHER is available as public domain software from our ftp site in Kassel. The portable C source can be easily compiled for any machine running UNIX and OSF/Motif, in particular our working environments IBM RS/6000 and Intel-based LINUX systems. A porting to Tcl/Tk is under way.

La elaboración de materiales curriculares en la etapa de la ESO con programas de ordenador de licencia abierta (sistema operativo Guadalinex) : interdisciplinariedad para la creación de unidades didácticas.

El trabajo de este proyecto de innovación ha consistido en la elaboración de un cuadro de interacción entre diversas áreas en el primer ciclo de la ESO. En el mismo se incluyen las programaciones de cada una de las áreas, así como la unidad correspondiente a una de las cinco áreas temáticas que se han escogido para el proyecto de innovación, y que aúnan los objetivos, procedimientos, actitudes y contenidos conceptuales recogidos en los decretos correspondientes. Todo el material se ha elaborado utilizando el software Open Office, y se ofrecen a manera de presentación para una consulta más fácil. Han participado profesores y profesoras del instituto, así como otros y otras de Educación Primaria.

Programas de Innovación Educativa.

Los CD contienen los trabajos de la III Edición de los premios TIC en las modalidades de: software, recursos didácticos para las aulas de informática y recursos educativos interactivos en formato web

Software educativo gratuito.

Numerosos programas de los que se presentan en este CD han sido probados y experimentados, entre otros, por el profesorado del C.P. Vicente Aleixandre, de Fortuna (Murcia) durante el curso escolar 2002/2003

Software para la manipulación de Bases de Datos Espaciales PostGIS

In this work is presented a developed software, which primary objective is to allow the manipulation of PostGIS spatial databases from a graphic interface programmed in Java language

Implantación de un SIG basado en software libre para el estudio de recursos hídricos y procesos hidrológicos

En este trabajo se describe la solución ideada para la implantación de un Sistema de Información Geográfica que debe dar servicio al Instituto Universitario del Agua y del Medio Ambiente de la Universidad de Murcia y al Instituto Euromediterráneo del Agua. Dada la naturaleza de ambas instituciones, se trata de una herramienta orientada fundamentalmente al estudio de recursos hídricos y procesos hidrológicos. El proceso se inició con una identificación de las necesidades de los usuarios (con perfiles y requerimiento diferentes) y el posterior desarrollo del diseño conceptual que pudiera asegurar la satisfacción de estas necesidades. Debido a que los requerimientos de los usuarios así lo demandaban, se ha tenido en cuenta tanto a usuarios que trabajan en entorno linux como a otros que lo hacen en entorno windows. Se ha optado por un sistema basado en software libre utilizando GRASS para el manejo de información raster y modelización; postgis (sobre postgreSQL) y GRASS para la gestión de información vectorial; y QGIS, gvSIG y Kosmo como interfaces gráficas de usuario. Otros programas utilizados para propósitos específicos han sido R, Mapserver o GMT

Capaware: plataforma de desarrollo de software libre para aplicacines geográficas 3D multicapa

En este trabajo se presenta Capaware, una plataforma de software libre para el desarrollo de aplicaciones geográficas 3D multicapa, que surge a partir de la iniciativa del Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias en colaboración con la Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Este entorno simplifica la creación de aplicaciones 3D sobre territorios geográficos extensos, disponiendo de una herramienta muy visual que aporta un nuevo punto de vista muy importante para una toma de decisiones eficaz. Capaware proporciona una interfaz fácil de usar y muy flexible que simplifica el desarrollo de nuevas aplicaciones, permitiéndonos crear rápidamente entornos virtuales con múltiples capas de información sobre el terreno. Con las capacidades clásicas de un Sistema de Información Geográfica (SIG), Capaware permite actualmente la carga de capas WMS sobre entornos 3D, añadir objetos 3D sobre el terreno, y visualizar elementos dinámicos, ofreciendo una nueva perspectiva de la información analizada. Así mismo, podemos administrar las capas de recursos y elementos que se pueden representar sobre la zona geográfica en cuestión. (...)

Los desaf??os de la cultura participativa. Software libre y universidad

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

Aplicaciones educativas multimedia : el problema de la evolución del software.

Resumen tomado de la publicación

Herramientas software para el diseño y simulación en aplicaciones de control e instrumentación electrónica.

Resumen tomado de la publicación