An efficient heuristic algorithm for mapping parallel programs onto multicomputers

Mapping, a crucial problem to be solved for optimal utilization of multicomputers, is the problem of allocating the tasks of a parallel program to the processors of a multicomputer in a way that minimizes the total completion time. Unfortunately, this problem is known to be NP-hard and hence we cannot optimally solve it in a reasonable amount of computation time. In this paper, we present a new heuristic algorithm for solving the mapping problem. Our heuristic move-exchange (HME) algorithm works by iterating a sequence of task moves followed by a task exchange in an efficient way and tries to minimize the completion time by minimizing a cost function. This function is a weighted sum of the cost of load imbalance and the cost of all communications. We then present two competing algorithms, viz. the Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm and the Recursive Mincut (RM) bipartitioning algorithm, and compare the performance of the HME algorithm with that of SA and RM algorithms. The results of our study clearly demonstrate that our HME algorithm is better than both SA and RM algorithms for solving the mapping problem.     

Bit-permute multistage interconnection networks

In this paper, we consider a class of log N stage interconnection networks called Bit-Permute Multistage Interconnection Networks (BPMIN's) where the ports of each switch of a stage are different at only one bit position of their labels. We describe the decomposition structure of the BPMIN's and prove that all of the BPMIN's are topologically equivalent and some of them are functionally equivalent. We also identify a class of 2 log N stage rearrangeable networks called symmetric BPMIN's where two log N stage BPMIN's are connected in sequence. The symmetric BPMIN's are either symmetric or asymmetric and regular or irregular in their inter-stage connections and can be reduced into 2 log N-1 stages by combining the two center stages. We show that the symmetric BPMIN's constitute larger class of rearrangeable networks than ever known. We also propose a general routing algorithm for the symmetric BPMIN's by modifying slightly the looping algorithm of the Benes network.     

Cost-optimal dynamic data replication for distributed database systems: DYVO

In this paper, we present a dynamic replication algorithm, DYVO, which could provide an optimal cost for operating replicas according to a read/write pattern of transactions. Unlike previous algorithms for dynamic replication, in which read one and write all available approach is used for preserving consistency of replicas, DYVO basically uses quorum approach for managing replicas. The quorum approach is basically able to encompass a large class of failures. Moreover, the quorum approach simplifies considerably the task maintaining the consistency of replicated data. As a result, DYVO is fault-tolerant to all kinds of failures and gives a way that minimizes overload for managing a replication algorithm.     

Modeling Interactional Influence in Advice Exchanges: Advice Giver Goals and Recipient Evaluations

This study examined how advice givers' self-reported interaction goals influence recipients' evaluations of advice. A typology of giver goals was developed based on message production theories, and the influence of goal pursuit on evaluations of advice was analyzed in interactions between friends (N=189 dyads). In the structural equation model, several giver goals directly affected recipients' evaluations of specific advice features (e.g., greater effort to give efficacious and feasible advice resulted in ratings of advice as more efficacious and feasible). In turn, recipient evaluations of specific message features influenced their ratings of advice message quality. Advice giver goals of efficacy/feasibility, politeness, and novelty led to positive recipient ratings, whereas effort to change the recipient's mind led to negative evaluations.     

Message fatigue: Conceptual definition,operationalization, and correlates

Despite growing concern over the public’s fatigue toward inundated health messages, communication research has largely neglected such ramifications of prolonged, real-life campaign exposure. This paper offers an initial conceptual and empirical treatment of message fatigue, an important, but understudied, side effect of campaigns. Specifically, it proposes conceptual and operational definitions of the construct and examines psychometric characteristics of a proposed message fatigue scale. The findings from two studies concerning safe sex (N?=?412) and anti-obesity messages (N?=?396) demonstrated solid support for the scale’s unidimensionality. In support of construct validity, the scale exhibited significant associations with message avoidance, annoyance, information seeking, and desensitization. Moreover, in an experimental setting in Study 2, message fatigue negatively predicted attention and message elaboration, while positively predicting counterargument.     

‘No hugging please,we are Muslims’: Akademi Fantasia,Malay television audiences and the negotiation of global popular cultural forms

This paper analyses the audience reception of the Malaysian reality television programme Akademi Fantasia (AF), which first aired in 2003 and completed its ninth season in 2011. AF has been an influential pioneer in the national television industry, inaugurating the trend of local reality shows and weathering intense competition from similar shows to remain at the top of the ratings chart over the last decade. Based on the Mexican talent search show, La Academia, Malaysia's AF is a unique hybrid blend of an Idol-style talent contest and Big Brother observational spectacle. The article draws on primary audience research to investigate the ways in which Malay audiences interpret the potentially incommensurable cultural meanings generated within the context of a localised version of a global television format. Chua's concept of ‘identification and distancing’ is employed as a framework to analyse the complex ways in which perceived Malay ‘cultural norms’ assume primacy as interpretative lenses for audience evaluations of the show and measures of its local difference from similar global cultural products. The research also reveals how these cultural norms are themselves being negotiated by the audience as part of the everyday experience of inhabiting coexisting local and global popular cultural spaces. The analysis focuses on audience understandings and pleasure in the programme in relation to fashion and taste; the behaviour of the official judges; voyeurism and conflict in ‘backstage’ coverage; and emotional intimacy onstage in the public performance component of the programme.     

Heeding the Signals: Applying Web best Practices when Google recommends

Google is the single largest driver of traffic to library Web sites and digital repositories, and librarians would do well to listen when the search giant reveals information about its practices or makes recommendations. Recently, Google announced that it would begin to favor Web sites that use the secure hypertext transfer protocol (HTTPS) in its search results rankings. HTTPS encrypts data transmission and one of Google's stated reasons for this change is to help make the Web safer and minimize data theft. Similar announcements by Google have sometimes been ignored by librarians, to the peril of the visibility and use of library products and services on the Web.     

Distribution algorithms for document allocation in multiprocessor information retrieval systems

Distributed memory information retrieval systems have been used as a means of managing the vast volume of documents in an information retrieval system, and to improve query response time. However, proper allocation of documents plays an important role in improving the performance of such systems. Maximising the amount of parallelism can be achieved by distributing the documents, while the inter-node communication cost is minimised by avoiding documents distribution. Unfortunately, these two factors contradict each other. Finding an optimal allocation satisfying the above objectives is referred to as distributed memory document allocation problem (DDAP), and it is an NP-Complete problem. Heuristic algorithms are usually employed to find an optimal solution to this problem. Genetic algorithm is one such algorithms. In this paper, a genetic algorithm is developed to find an optimal document allocation for DDAP. Several well-known network topologies are investigated to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. The approach relies on the fact that documents of an information retrieval system are clustered by some arbitrary method. The advantages of a clustered document approach specially in a distributed memory information retrieval system are well-known.Since genetic algorithms work with a set of candidate solutions, parallelisation based on a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) paradigm seems to be the natural way to obtain a speedup. Using this approach, the population of strings is distributed among the processing elements. Each string is processed independently. The performance gain comes from the parallel execution of the strings, and hence, it is heavily dependent on the population size. The approach is favoured for genetic algorithms' applications where the parameter set for a particular run is well-known in advance, and where such applications require a big population size to solve the problem. DDAP fits nicely into the above requirements. The aim of the parallelisation is two-fold: the first one is to speedup the allocation process in DDAP which usually consists of thousands of documents and has to use a big population size, and second, it can be seen as an attempt to port the genetic algorithm's processes into SIMD machines.     

Efficient distributed selective search

Simulation and analysis have shown that selective search can reduce the cost of large-scale distributed information retrieval. By partitioning the collection into small topical shards, and then using a resource ranking algorithm to choose a subset of shards to search for each query, fewer postings are evaluated. In this paper we extend the study of selective search into new areas using a fine-grained simulation, examining the difference in efficiency when term-based and sample-based resource selection algorithms are used; measuring the effect of two policies for assigning index shards to machines; and exploring the benefits of index-spreading and mirroring as the number of deployed machines is varied. Results obtained for two large datasets and four large query logs confirm that selective search is significantly more efficient than conventional distributed search architectures and can handle higher query rates. Furthermore, we demonstrate that selective search can be tuned to avoid bottlenecks, and thus maximize usage of the underlying computer hardware.     

Text Messaging the Reference Desk: Using Upside Wireless' SMS-to-Email to Extend Reference Service

The author discusses “Text a Librarian,” a short message service-to-email service provided via Upside Wireless, Inc., a Canadian telecommunications provider. Any user of the University of Virginia Library who has a cell phone and text messaging capability can send a text message to a local phone number provided by Upside Wireless. Upside's “virtual SMS channel,” which forwards the message to the Library's reference e-mail account. Librarians then respond to the query with an e-mail message that the user receives as a text message on his or her cell phone. This article describes the process by which a library developed the idea for the service and decided to contract with Upside, as well as staffing for the service and the challenges, successes, and possible new directions. A brief survey of the SMS reference landscape is included.     

Internal Party Bulletin or Paper of the Working Class Movement?

On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, the Daily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, the Daily Worker was very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement.     

Efficiency,unused capacity and transmission power as indicators of the Triple Helix of university–industry–government relationships

In this paper, we show that an information source composed with n random variables may be split into 2ⁿ or 2ⁿ − 1 “states”; therefore, one could compute the maximum entropy of the source. We derive the efficiency and the unused capacity of an information source. We demonstrate that in more than two dimensions, the transmission's variability depends on the system configuration; thus, we determine the upper and the lower bounds to the mutual information and propose the transmission power as an indicator of the Triple Helix of university–industry–government relationships. The transmission power is defined as the fraction of the total ‘configurational information’ produced in a system; it appears like the efficiency of the transmission and may be interpreted as the strength of the variables dependency, the strength of the synergy between the system's variable or the strength of information flow within the system.     

Jimmy Carter and the rhetoric of charisma

Jimmy Carter's unusual success in the Presidential Primaries of 1976 has been the subject of much discussion. One rhetorical explanation posits that Carter's message may be described in terms of Weber's concept of charisma, and Bormann's theory of rhetorical vision. The charismatic message was caught up in a unique rhetorical situation, the social fantasies attending the Bicentennial Celebration. Carter's rhetoric and the people's fantasies transcended along similar lines. This confluence helped to carry Carter to the White House.     

A new deadlock prevention scheme for nonminimal adaptive wormhole routing

In multicomputer networks, the adaptive routing has been expected as a promising way to improve network performance by utilizing available network bandwidth. Previous adaptive routing algorithms in wormhole-routed multicomputer networks restrict the routing of messages to prevent deadlocks, and the routing restriction results in low degree of adaptiveness and low utilization of communication channels. In this paper, we examine the possibility of performing restriction-free, nonminimal adaptive routing in wormhole-routed networks as an approach to further improving the performance of these networks. A new flow control policy, called message cutting, is proposed, and two adaptive routing strategies are presented. Freedom of communication deadlock is achieved by the proposed flow control policy. The proposed adaptive routing strategies do not restrict routing and maximally utilize the physical and virtual channels. Simulation results show that the restriction-free adaptive routing approach is promising from the fact that it has the lowest latency and highest throughput depending on the number of virtual channels per physical channel and patterns of message traffic.     

Assessing web services of emerging economies in an Eastern country — Taiwan's e-government

Accessibility of much country-level information and many web services, originating from governments are a global standard. The governments of emerging economies in the eastern countries especially need to adopt, without undue delay, the advanced technologies for providing better web services to their citizens. However, consideration and evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of governments' web services is currently lacking in previous literature. Thus, this study first adopts a computational approach suggested in the literature to measure the effectiveness of Taiwan's established, city- and county-level (25 cities and counties, and 1411 governmental units) governments' websites. Then, by considering the IT-related input and output resources as suggested by the experts of e-government during several in-depth interviews, data envelopment analysis (DEA) evaluates the efficiency of Taiwan's governmental web services. This study reveals that the well-developed web services provided by Taiwan's government are apparent in two geographically dispersed cities (north and south) and one county in the northern region of Taiwan. In addition, six cities and counties appear to be ineffective and inefficient in providing web services to Taiwan's citizens due to their geographical remoteness from the capital and small regional populations. An additional finding confirms the significant effect of population size on Taiwanese services for e-government in each city and county. Finally, this study suggests applying more attention to website designs for different levels or regions of governments and building alternative communication channels for citizens with different backgrounds. Consequently, providing citizens' most-requested services becomes easier, and the resources' distribution becomes effective and efficient for those in different geographical locations. This study's findings represent a reference for providing better electronic publically accessible services, and a benchmark for scholars conducting further research in this area.     

Monotonicity and the Hirsch index

The Hirsch index is a number that synthesizes a researcher's output. It is the maximum number h such that the researcher has h papers with at least h citations each. Woeginger [Woeginger, G. J. (2008a). An axiomatic characterization of the Hirsch-index. Mathematical Social Sciences, 56(2), 224–232; Woeginger, G. J. (2008b). A symmetry axiom for scientific impact indices. Journal of Informetrics, 2(3), 298–303] characterizes the Hirsch index when indices are assumed to be integer-valued. In this note, the Hirsch index is characterized, when indices are allowed to be real-valued, by adding to Woeginger's monotonicity two axioms in a way related to the concept of monotonicity.     

A new bmj.com: now with added Drupal

This case study describes a two year co‐development project involving BMJ Group and HighWire Press to redesign and migrate the company's flagship website, bmj.com , to Drupal. The new site went live in November 2011. The project achieved its five main objectives: (i) to boost discoverability of new content; (ii) increase user engagement; (iii) increase traffic; (iv) promote the site's channels (research, education, comment, news, multimedia, specialties); and (v) drive referrals to other BMJ Group product sites.     

Mapping real-time motion estimation type algorithms to memory efficient,programmable multi-processor architectures

In this paper, an architectural template is presented, which is able to execute the full search motion estimation algorithm or other similar video or image processing algorithms in real time. The architecture is based on a set of programmable video signal processors (VSP's). It is also possible to integrate the processor cores and their local memories on a (set of) chip(s). Due to the programmability, the system is very flexible and can be used for emulation of other similar block-oriented local-neighborhood algorithms. The architecture can be easily divided into several partitions, without data-exchange between partitions. Special attention is paid to memory size and transfer optimization, which are dominant factors for both area and power cost. The trade-offs and techniques used to arrive at these solutions are explained in detail. It is shown that careful optimizations can lead to large savings in memory size (up to 66%) and bandwidth requirements (up to a factor of 4) compared to a straightforward solution.     

Mutual implications and granularity

This paper illustrates a technique for discovering mutual implications among hierarchically structured data. Such a technique may be applied to both knowledge and data bases. If the hierarchical structure makes it possible to define granularity levels, mutual implications can be evaluated at any level. Results can be quantitative (i.e. a degree in the range [0, 1]) or qualitative (i.e. a label taken from a user-defined set). If the ground data do not represent a mapping among individuals, i.e. the level of information granularity is not the highest, a local approximation based on T-Norms can be used. The process of implication discovery allows one to derive inference rules for expert systems and to detect default values. In addition, it might be successfully used by sophisticated machine learning algorithms.