ppxscal/embedding_network huggingface dataset:
Introducing a New Cache Design into Vector Computers
Authors: Qing Yang
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Computers (1993)

Introduces an innovative cache design for vector computers, called prime-mapped cache. By utilizing the special properties of a Mersenne prime, the new design does not increase the critical path length of a processor, nor does it increase the cache access time as compared to existing cache organizations. The prime-mapped cache minimizes cache miss ratio caused by line interferences that have been shown to be critical for numerical applications by previous investigators. With negligibly additional hardware cost, significant performance gains are obtained by adding the proposed cache memory to an existing vector computer. The performance of the design is studied analytically, using a generic vector computation model. The analytical model is validated through extensive simulation experiments. A performance analysis for various vector access patterns shows that the prime-mapped cache performs significantly better than conventional cache organizations in the vector processing environment. The performance gain will increase with the increase of the speed gap between processors and memories.
The expected lifetime of &ldquo;single-address-space&rdquo; operating systems
Authors: David Kotz, Preston Crow
Venue: Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems (1994)

Trends toward shared-memory programming paradigms, large (64-bit) address spaces, and memory-mapped files have led some to propose the use of a single virtual-address space, shared by all processes and processors. Typical proposals require the single address space to contain all process-private data, shared data, and stored files. To simplify management of an address space where stable pointers make it difficult to re-use addresses, some have claimed that a 64-bit address space is sufficiently large that there is no need to ever re-use addresses. Unfortunately, there has been no data to either support or refute these claims, or to aid in the design of appropriate address-space management policies. In this paper, we present the results of extensive kernel-level tracing of the workstations in our department, and discuss the implications for single-address-space operating systems. We found that single-address-space systems will not outgrow the available address space, but only if reasonable space-allocation policies are used, and only if the system can adapt as larger address space becomes available.
Queueing performance analysis of co-scheduling in a pool of processors environment
Authors: Margaret A. Schaar, Kemal Efe, Weijia Shang
Venue: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Supercomputing (1994)

We consider a connected set of workstations as a &ldquo;pool of processors&rdquo; and develop a queueing model to analyze the performance of optimal co-scheduling algorithms. The pool of processors model was originally developed for the Amoeba operating system. It was also used in the design of the recent IBM supercomputer model 9076 SP1. Recently, co-scheduling has been suggested as an approach for scheduling computationally intensive tasks in the pool of processors model. Co-scheduling algorithms select the best possible subset of workstations for a task to minimize its completion time. We develop a queueing model which allows us to investigate the dynamic performance of co-scheduling algorithms from the system point of view under several queueing strategies. We use six different queueing strategies in combination with co-scheduling and compare the results to the M/M/m system where arriving tasks would be assigned to workstations as whole computations, and no co-scheduling would take place. The results show that the co-scheduling approach is viable under a wide range of system parameters. Moreover, performance differences of queueing strategies tend to diminish as the number of workstations grows. This suggests that co-scheduling is universally applicable across the queueing disciplines considered here when there are a large number of workstations.
Agreeing to begin: status of the SIGCHI Identity Project
Authors: Suzanne Watzman
Venue: ACM SIGCHI Bulletin (1993)

Over my career I have created and worked on many identity programs for a wide variety of organizations and companies. Of these, the SIGCHI Identity Project has truly been the most unique and challenging.
Infant mortality and generational garbage collection
Authors: Henry G. Baker
Venue: ACM SIGPLAN Notices (1993)

Generation-based garbage collection has been advocated by appealing to the intuitive but vague notion that "young objects are more likely to die than old objects". The intuition is, that if a generation-based garbage collection scheme focuses its effort on scanning recently created objects, then its scanning efforts will pay off more in the form of more recovered garbage, than if it scanned older objects. In this note, we show a counterexample of a system in which "infant mortality" is as high as you please, but for which generational garbage collection is ineffective for improving the average mark/cons ratio. Other benefits, such as better locality and a smaller number of large delays, may still make generational garbage collection attractive for such a system, however.
A reusability-based software development environment
Authors: Jingwen Cheng
Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (1994)

Software reuse has great potential to improve software development productivity. However, it has had only limited success in practice. This is because that there are non technical factors as well technical ones affecting software reusability. This paper discusses some problems related to software reuse, analyzes some technical supports for software reuse, and introduces a reusability-based software development system which has been prototyped and is under further improvement. The prominent features of the system include: allowing programmers dynamically to put tested working program components (including data objects created at run-times) into the reusable software library, helping programmers produce software specifications, automatically searching for the required components according to users' queries, assisting users to make a query, and allowing users to select the retrieved components and browse their specifications.
Photographic rendering of environmental graphics in context: a collaboration between art and science made simple
Authors: Jenny Morlan
Venue: ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics (1993)

Environmental graphics is an interdisciplinary course in which art and computer science students produce professional quality presentations of original signage in an image that visualizes its appearance in an outdoor setting. This area of graphic design has been identified as one of the few where the application of computer graphics has not been fully developed. Previously, this task has been accomplished through expensive, tedious photographic retouching, or by less realistic felt-tipped marker renderings.The structure of this course is easily adaptable to other areas of applied and design art, including package design, industrial design and installation art, and requires only modest computing resources. The course is taught by an artist and a computer scientist, and satisfies degree requirements for the major in both departments.
End-user computing abilities and the use of information systems
Authors: Kunsoo Suh, Sanghoon Kim, Jinjoo Lee
Venue: ACM SIGCPR Computer Personnel (1994)

This paper investigates the relationship between end-user computing (EUC) ability and the use of information systems (IS). Using user's two belief constructs -- perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness -- as intervening variables, this paper proposes a causal model of how computing ability influences IS use. This study found that end-users' computing abilities exert significant and direct effects on their beliefs on the ease of use/usefulness of IS, and these beliefs, in turn, influence their usage behavior. This empirical result supports the assumption that perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness intervene the impact of computing ability on subsequent IS use.
Open commit protocols tolerating commission failures
Authors: Kurt Rothermel, Stefan Pappe
Venue: ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) (1993)

To ensure atomicity of transactions in distributed systems so-called 2-phase commit (2PC) protocols have been proposed. The basic assumption of these protocols is that the processing nodes involved in transactions are &ldquo;sane,&rdquo; i.e., they only fail with omission failures, and nodes eventually recover from failures. Unfortunately, this assumption is not realistic for so-called Open Distributed Systems (ODSs), in which nodes may have totally different reliability characteristics. In ODSs, nodes can be classified into trusted nodes (e.g., a banking server) and nontrusted nodes (e.g., a home PC requesting a remote banking service). While trusted nodes are assumed to be sane, nontrusted nodes may fail permanently and even cause commission failures to occur. In this paper, we propose a family of 2PC protocols that tolerate any number of omission failures at trusted nodes and any number of commission and omission failures at nontrusted nodes. The proposed protocols ensure that (at least) the trusted nodes participating in a transaction eventually terminate the transaction in a consistent manner. Unlike Byzantine commit protocols, our protocols do not incorporate mechanisms for achieving Byzantine agreement, which has advantages in terms of complexity: Our protocols have the same or only a slightly higher message complexity than traditional 2PC protocols.
The role of object-oriented technology in the undergraduate computer science curriculum
Authors: Martin Osborne
Venue: ACM SIGPLAN OOPS Messenger (1993)

Currently object-oriented technology (OOT) plays only a minor role in the computer science curriculum at most universities. This is because the curriculum is already crowded and OOT is just one of many new topics competing for a place. This paper describes reasons for including OOT in the curriculum and strategies for doing so. The experiences of two universities which teach OOT are described. The first university emphasizes OOT, while the second offers only a single course on the subject.
A foreign vocabulary learning aid for the networked world of tomorrow: the LEARN project
Authors: Daniel Berleant, Steven Lovelady, Karthikeyan Viswanathan
Venue: ACM SIGICE Bulletin (1994)

Further increases in society's reliance on computing appear inevitable. An important role of computing will be in customizing textual information from the flood of available text to meet the unique needs of individuals. Information customization services will likely run on relatively powerful computers dedicated to individual users, as exemplified by work-stations.The LEARN project is a Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) system that serves (1) as a demonstration of an information customization service likely to run on the personal workstations of tomorrow's electronically networked world, and (2) as a pragmatically oriented foundation for research on semantically based word sense disambiguation.
Separations of concerns in the Chiron-1 user interface development and management system
Authors: Richard N. Taylor, Gregory F. Johnson
Venue: Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems (1993)

The development of user interfaces for large applications is subject to a series of well-known problems including cost, maintainability, and sensitivity to changes in the operating environment. The Chiron user interface development system has been built to address these software engineering concerns. Chiron introduces a series of layers that insulate components of an application from other components that may experience change. To separate application code from user interface code, user interface agents called artists are attached to application abstract data types. Operations on abstract data types within the application implicitly trigger user interface activities. Chiron also provides insulation between the user interface layer and the underlying system; artist code is written in terms of abstract depiction libraries that insulate the code from the specifics of particular windowing systems and toolkits. Concurrency is pervasive in the Chiron architecture. Inside an application there can be multiple execution threads; there is no requirement for a user interface listening/dispatching routine to have exclusive control. Multiple artists can be attached to a single application abstract data type, providing alternative forms of access by a single user or coordinated access and manipulation by multiple users.
A polynomial time algorithm for generating neural networks for pattern classification: its stability properties and some test results
Authors: Somnath Mukhopadhyay, Asim Roy, Lark Sang Kim, Sandeep Govil
Venue: Neural Computation (1993)

Polynomial time training and network design are two major issues for the neural network community. A new algorithm has been developed that can learn in polynomial time and also design an appropriate network. The algorithm is for classification problems and uses linear programing models to design and train the network. This paper summarizes the new algorithm, proves its stability properties, and provides some computational results to demonstrate its potential.
End-to-end packet delay and loss behavior in the internet
Authors: Jean-Chrysotome Bolot
Venue: Conference proceedings on Communications architectures, protocols and applications (1993)

We use the measured round trip delays of small UDP probe packets sent at regular time intervals to analyze the end-to-end packet delay and loss behavior in the Internet. By varying the interval between probe packets, it is possible to study the structure of the Internet load over different time scales. In this paper, the time scales of interest range from a few milliseconds to a few minutes. Our observations agree with results obtained by others using simulation and experimental approaches. For example, our estimates of Internet workload are consistent with the hypothesis of a mix of bulk traffic with larger packet size, and interactive traffic with smaller packet size. We observe compression (or clustering) of the probe packets, rapid fluctuations of queueing delays over small intervals, etc. Our results also show interesting and less expected behavior. For example, we find that the losses of probe packets are essentially random unless the probe traffic uses a large fraction of the available bandwidth. We discuss the implications of these results on the design of control mechanisms for the Internet.
Algorithm 719: Multiprecision translation and execution of FORTRAN programs
Authors: David H. Bailey
Venue: ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software (TOMS) (1993)

This paper describes two Fortran utilities for multiprecision computation. The first is a package of Fortran subroutines that perform a variety of arithmetic operations and transcendental functions on floating point numbers of arbitrarily high precision. This package is in some cases over 200 times faster than that of certain other packages that have been developed for this purpose. The second utility is a translator program, which facilitates the conversion of ordinary Fortran programs to use this package. By means of source directives (special comments) in the original Fortran program, the user declares the precision level and specifies which variables in each subprogram are to be treated as multiprecision. The translator program reads this source program and outputs a program with the appropriate multiprecision subroutine calls. This translator supports multiprecision integer, real, and complex datatypes. The required array space for multiprecision data types is automatically allocated. In the evaluation of computational expressions, all of the usual conventions for operator precedence and mixed mode operations are upheld. Furthermore, most of the Fortran-77 intrinsics, such as ABS, MOD, NINT, COS, EXP are supported and produce true multiprecision values.
Synthesis aspects in the design of efficient processor arrays from affine recurrence equations
Authors: Philippe Clauss, Catherine Mongenet
Venue: Journal of Symbolic Computation (1993)

Efficient implementation of problems on processor arrays requires dedicated compiling techniques. This paper proposes synthesis techniques in the design of processor array architectures from system of affine recurrence equations. They implement the spacetime mapping which determine the scheduling of the calculations and the allocation of these calculations to a surface of processors. The paper emphazises the two-steps space mapping which is composed of a classical linear allocation followed by the application of two specific partitioning techniques. These techniques reduce the number of processors and therefore result in more efficient parallel solutions. The paper is illustrated with the Cholesky factorization.
Instruction execution sequence confirmation
Authors: Kay P. Litchfield
Venue: ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News (1994)

Acquiring extremely dependable results from computers requires attention to all of the stages from program and machine design through execution of the program. One of the smaller, but still important, stages is that of verifying that the sequence of instructions executed by the processor was exactly the sequence specified by the compiler. A surprisingly small addition to the logic of the processor (and code produced by the compiler) is sufficient to achieve this.
Software for the usability lab: a sampling of current tools
Authors: Paul Weiler
Venue: Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems (1993)

This panel brings together usability professionals throughout the computer industry to demonstrate and discuss their usability lab software tools. These tools are specifically designed to improve the data collection and analysis process for usability labs. Their capabilities range from simple to complex and the panel will not only discuss the benefits of using the tools but also share the lessons learned during the design and development process.
A comparison of sender-initiated and receiver-initiated reliable multicast protocols
Authors: Sridhar Pingali, Don Towsley, James F. Kurose
Venue: Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems (1994)

Sender-initiated reliable multicast protocols, based on the use of positive acknowledgments (ACKs), lead to an ACK implosion problem at the sender as the number of receivers increases. Briefly, the ACK implosion problem refers to the significant overhead incurred by the sending host due to the processing of ACKs from each receiver. A potential solution to this problem is to shift the burden of providing reliable data transfer to the receivers&mdash;thus resulting in a receiver-initiated multicast error control protocol based on the use of negative acknowledgments (NAKs). In this paper we determine the maximum throughputs of the sending and receiving hosts for generic sender-initiated and receiver-initiated protocols. We show that the receiver-initiated error control protocols provide substantially higher throughputs than their sender-initiated counterparts. We further demonstrate that the introduction of random delays prior to generating NAKs coupled with the multicasting of NAKs to all receivers has the potential for an additional substantial increase in the throughput of receiver-initiated error control protocols over sender-initiated protocols.
Corolla partitioning for distributed logic simulation of VLSI-circuits
Authors: Christian Sporrer, Herbert Bauer
Venue: Proceedings of the seventh workshop on Parallel and distributed simulation (1993)

Time Warp has evolved to a common technique for distributed simulation. Speedup in Time Warp simulation systems mainly depends on two overhead factors: first, the load on the simulators has to be well balanced and second, communication and rollbacks have to be kept to a minimum. Both of these factors are influenced by the partitioning of the simulated system. In this paper, we focus on various static partitioning schemes used to partition digital circuits for distributed simulation. A new hierarchical partitioning approach is presented, compared and rated with other partitioning schemes by evaluating benchmark circuits. Partitioning is done in two steps: a fine grained clustering step based on corollas and a coarse grained step forming partitions using the connectivity matrix. The corolla approach yields very good partitioning results even for a large number of partitions. The achieved speedups are almost linear (up to 12 partitions for larger circuits), as long as the partition sizes are large enough so that communication between the simulators is not a bottleneck. The results reveal the great impact of partitioning on the acceleration of distributed logic simulation and show the effectiveness of the presented corolla partitioning scheme.
Schema transformation without database reorganization
Authors: Markus Tresch, Marc H. Scholl
Venue: ACM SIGMOD Record (1993)

We argue for avoiding database reorganizations due to schema modification in object-oriented systems, since these are expensive operations and they conflict with reusing existing software components. We show that data independence, which is a neglected concept in object databases, helps to avoid reorganizations in case of capacity preserving and reducing schema transformations. We informally present a couple of examples to illustrate the idea of a schema transformation methodology that avoids database reorganization.
Building group decision support rooms using "off-the-shelf" computing resources: prospects and issue
Authors: Roberta M. Roth, William C. Wood,  II, Ronald Hahm, Daniel J. Power
Venue: ACM SIGMIS Database (1993)

The concept of a decision support system (GDSS) is appealing to many organizations as ways are sought to improve the productivity of group meetings. Unfortunately, the purchase or development of group decision support systems may be prohibitively expensive. This paper explores an alternative way of acquiring GDSS capabilities. First, the fundamental features of a GDSS are identified based upon a review of literature. These features provide a framework in which to identify GDSS requirements and capabilities. Then, an implemented GDSS composed of off-the-shelf software and readily available hardware is described. A general model is presented for GDSS developers that clarifies choices and options that must be made when assembling a GDSS using off-the-shelf components. The article closes with a discussion of important issues for developers of "off-the-shelf" GDSSs.