FAMOUS, faster: using parallel computing techniques to accelerate the FAMOUS/HadCM3 climate model with a focus on the radiative transfer algorithm

We have optimised the atmospheric radiation algorithm of the FAMOUS climate model on several hardware platforms. The optimisation involved translating the Fortran code to C and restructuring the algorithm around the computation of a single air column. Instead of the existing MPI-based domain decomposition, we used a task queue and a thread pool to schedule the computation of individual columns on the available processors. Finally, four air columns are packed together in a single data structure and computed simultaneously using Single Instruction Multiple Data operations. The modified algorithm runs more than 50 times faster on the CELL’s Synergistic Processing Elements than on its main PowerPC processing element. On Intel-compatible processors, the new radiation code runs 4 times faster. On the tested graphics processor, using OpenCL, we find a speed-up of more than 2.5 times as compared to the original code on the main CPU. Because the radiation code takes more than 60% of the total CPU time, FAMOUS executes more than twice as fast. Our version of the algorithm returns bit-wise identical results, which demonstrates the robustness of our approach. We estimate that this project required around two and a half man-years of work.

The Impact of office productivity cloud computing on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions

Cloud computing is usually regarded as being energy efficient and thus emitting less greenhouse gases (GHG) than traditional forms of computing. When the energy consumption of Microsoft’s cloud computing Office 365 (O365) and traditional Office 2010 (O2010) software suites were tested and modeled, some cloud services were found to consume more energy than the traditional form. The developed model in this research took into consideration the energy consumption at the three main stages of data transmission; data center, network, and end user device. Comparable products from each suite were selected and activities were defined for each product to represent a different computing type. Microsoft provided highly confidential data for the data center stage, while the networking and user device stages were measured directly. A new measurement and software apportionment approach was defined and utilized allowing the power consumption of cloud services to be directly measured for the user device stage. Results indicated that cloud computing is more energy efficient for Excel and Outlook which consumed less energy and emitted less GHG than the standalone counterpart. The power consumption of the cloud based Outlook (8%) and Excel (17%) was lower than their traditional counterparts. However, the power consumption of the cloud version of Word was 17% higher than its traditional equivalent. A third mixed access method was also measured for Word which emitted 5% more GHG than the traditional version. It is evident that cloud computing may not provide a unified way forward to reduce energy consumption and GHG. Direct conversion from the standalone package into the cloud provision platform can now consider energy and GHG emissions at the software development and cloud service design stage using the methods described in this research.

The influence of system designer intention over collaborative tagging. an analysis of tagging behaviour in CiteULike and Delicious

Tagging provides support for retrieval and categorization of online content depending on users' tag choice. A number of models of tagging behaviour have been proposed to identify factors that are considered to affect taggers, such as users' tagging history. In this paper, we use Semiotics Analysis and Activity theory, to study the effect the system designer has over tagging behaviour. The framework we use shows the components that comprise the tagging system and how they interact together to direct tagging behaviour. We analysed two collaborative tagging systems: CiteULike and Delicious by studying their components by applying our framework. Using datasets from both systems, we found that 35% of CiteULike users did not provide tags compared to only 0.1% of Delicious users. This was directly linked to the type of tools used by the system designer to support tagging.

Computing Fresnel integrals via modified trapezium rules

In this paper we propose methods for computing Fresnel integrals based on truncated trapezium rule approximations to integrals on the real line, these trapezium rules modified to take into account poles of the integrand near the real axis. Our starting point is a method for computation of the error function of complex argument due to Matta and Reichel (J Math Phys 34:298–307, 1956) and Hunter and Regan (Math Comp 26:539–541, 1972). We construct approximations which we prove are exponentially convergent as a function of N , the number of quadrature points, obtaining explicit error bounds which show that accuracies of 10−15 uniformly on the real line are achieved with N=12 , this confirmed by computations. The approximations we obtain are attractive, additionally, in that they maintain small relative errors for small and large argument, are analytic on the real axis (echoing the analyticity of the Fresnel integrals), and are straightforward to implement.

Collaborative personal profiling for web service ranking and recommendation

Web service is one of the most fundamental technologies in implementing service oriented architecture (SOA) based applications. One essential challenge related to web service is to find suitable candidates with regard to web service consumer’s requests, which is normally called web service discovery. During a web service discovery protocol, it is expected that the consumer will find it hard to distinguish which ones are more suitable in the retrieval set, thereby making selection of web services a critical task. In this paper, inspired by the idea that the service composition pattern is significant hint for service selection, a personal profiling mechanism is proposed to improve ranking and recommendation performance. Since service selection is highly dependent on the composition process, personal knowledge is accumulated from previous service composition process and shared via collaborative filtering where a set of users with similar interest will be firstly identified. Afterwards a web service re-ranking mechanism is employed for personalised recommendation. Experimental studies are conduced and analysed to demonstrate the promising potential of this research.

Computing journey start times with recurrent traffic conditions

n this study, the authors discuss the effective usage of technology to solve the problem of deciding on journey start times for recurrent traffic conditions. The developed algorithm guides the vehicles to travel on more reliable routes that are not easily prone to congestion or travel delays, ensures that the start time is as late as possible to avoid the traveller waiting too long at their destination and attempts to minimise the travel time. Experiments show that in order to be more certain of reaching their destination on time, a traveller has to leave early and correspondingly arrive early, resulting in a large waiting time. The application developed here asks the user to set this certainty factor as per the task in hand, and computes the best start time and route.

Cloud computing in e-science: research challenges and opportunities

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), workflow, the Semantic Web, and Grid computing are key enabling information technologies in the development of increasingly sophisticated e-Science infrastructures and application platforms. While the emergence of Cloud computing as a new computing paradigm has provided new directions and opportunities for e-Science infrastructure development, it also presents some challenges. Scientific research is increasingly finding that it is difficult to handle “big data” using traditional data processing techniques. Such challenges demonstrate the need for a comprehensive analysis on using the above mentioned informatics techniques to develop appropriate e-Science infrastructure and platforms in the context of Cloud computing. This survey paper describes recent research advances in applying informatics techniques to facilitate scientific research particularly from the Cloud computing perspective. Our particular contributions include identifying associated research challenges and opportunities, presenting lessons learned, and describing our future vision for applying Cloud computing to e-Science. We believe our research findings can help indicate the future trend of e-Science, and can inform funding and research directions in how to more appropriately employ computing technologies in scientific research. We point out the open research issues hoping to spark new development and innovation in the e-Science field.

Prescription software for recovery and rehabilitation using Microsoft Kinect

Brain injuries, including stroke, can be debilitating incidents with potential for severe long term effects; many people stop making significant progress once leaving in-patient medical care and are unable to fully restore their quality of life when returning home. The aim of this collaborative project, between the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Reading, is to provide a low cost portable system that supports a patient's condition and their recovery in hospital or at home. This is done by providing engaging applications with targeted gameplay that is individually tailored to the rehabilitation of the patient's symptoms. The applications are capable of real-time data capture and analysis in order to provide information to therapists on patient progress and to further improve the personalized care that an individual can receive.

The MELODIES project: integrating diverse data using Linked Data and cloud computing

We present an overview of the MELODIES project, which is developing new data-intensive environmental services based on data from Earth Observation satellites, government databases, national and European agencies and more. We focus here on the capabilities and benefits of the project’s “technical platform”, which applies cloud computing and Linked Data technologies to enable the development of these services, providing flexibility and scalability.

Major differences of cloud computing adoption in universities: Europe vs. Middle East

The extensive use of cloud computing in educational institutes around the world brings unique challenges for universities. Some of these challenges are due to clear differences between Europe and Middle East universities. These differences stem from the natural variation between people. Cloud computing has created a new concept to deal with software services and hardware infrastructure. Some benefits are immediately gained, for instance, to allow students to share their information easily and to discover new experiences of the education system. However, this introduces more challenges, such as security and configuration of resources in shared environments. Educational institutes cannot escape from these challenges. Yet some differences occur between universities which use cloud computing as an educational tool or a form of social connection. This paper discusses some benefits and limitations of using cloud computing and major differences in using cloud computing at universities in Europe and the Middle East, based on the social perspective, security and economics concepts, and personal responsibility.

Assessing pragmatic interoperability for process alignment in collaborative working environment

This paper is an extension of our previous study on pragmatic interoperability assessment for process alignment. In this study, we conduct four case studies in industrial companies and hospitals in order to gather their viewpoints regarding the concerns when condensing process alignment in a collaborative working environment. Used techniques include interview, observation, and documentation. The collected results firstly are summarised into three layers based on our previous developed pragmatic assessment model, and then are transformed into the elements which constitutes the purposed method, and finally based on the summarised results we purpose a method for assessing pragmatic interoperability for process alignment in collaborative working environment. The method contains two parts: one gives all the elements of pragmatic interoperability that should be concerned when considering process alignment in collaborative working environment, and the other one is a supplementary method for dealing with technical concerns.