Local Operating System Research Articles

Economic Diagnostics of Territorial Development: National Dimension and Experience of EU Countries

The study is devoted to the theoretical and applied organizational bases for substantiation of indicators and indicators for assessing the competitiveness of transformation processes in the regions. The main purpose of the article is the process of conducting a competitive analysis of the effectiveness of transformation processes in the regions of Ukraine. The article tests the authors' hypothesis on certain indicators for assessing the competitiveness of transformation processes in the region, as well as using them to study the main trends in the regional operating system in dynamics, which is an important step for strategic decisions in the context of competitiveness. The dependence of the calculations on the multicriteria analysis of the competitiveness of the regions on the principle of the process approach showed that each region of Ukraine has its competitive advantages and disadvantages, which must be taken into account when formulating regional development strategies. The results of the study can be used as an information basis for further prospective research to develop recommendations for optimizing business processes in the regions to increase their competitiveness, and the proposed methodological approaches can be used to assess the competitiveness of local operating systems, including at the local level to determine their investment attractiveness and optimize individual business processes or their components.

ShakeMap系统在福建地区的研究及应用

ShakeMap系统是Wald et al.等人开发的一套开源、免费、准实时的烈度速报系统，能够在震后自动生成地震动峰值(PGA/PGV)等值图、仪器烈度分布图等产品，可以为震后各项应急救援的制定提供科学的参考依据。本文以该系统为基础，重新编译并应用于国内系统架构，并使用国内前人对地震动衰减和仪器烈度计算等方面的研究成果替换系统原有模块对其进行“改造”，期望获得真实反映出地震情况的产品。由于ShakeMap系统的产品内容为英文表述，使得国内大众对地震信息的获取和理解存在一定的困难，因而本文对ShakeMap系统的图形、网页和电子邮件通知等产品进行相应的本地化工作，以便于公众对信息的理解和地震信息的传播，提升系统的应用价值。最后，本文将“改造后”的ShakeMap系统应用于福建地区，并以2013年9月4日福建省莆田市仙游县M4.8级地震为例，说明改造后的系统在福建地区应用的可行性及局限性，期望为国内烈度速报系统的研究及应用提供一定的参考和借鉴。 ShakeMap developed by Wald et al. is an open source, free and real-time Rapid Seismic Intensity Reporting System can automatically generate products such as peak ground motion maps(peak ground acceleration map and peak ground velocity map), Intensity Instrumental distribution map and so on, which can give scientific basis for emergency rescue work after an earthquake. Based on the ShakeMap, we recompiled and installed it on the local operating system, and used the former research results on ground motion attenuation and instrumental intensity calculation founded by domestic scientists to replace the internal equations, to obtain the real ground motion products. Furthermore, the content of ShakeMap products are showed in English, which makes the products very difficult to receive and understand for the domestic public and very hard for information spreading, so we localized the content of maps, web pages and E-mail notifications to make those easy understanding and elevated the value of the system. In the end, we used the reformed ShakeMap in Fujian region and took the Xianyou earthquake that is M4.8 occurred in 4th, Sep-tember, 2013 in Fujian Province as an example to show the feasibility and limitation of the re-formed ShakeMap used in Fujian region. From the application we hope to give some hints and sup-ports for the development of the research on domestic Rapid Seismic Intensity Reporting System

Examining effective factors in initial acceptance of high-tech localized technologies: Xamin, Iranian localized operating system

An operating system (OS) is the most important software platform for secure electronic data transfer. Having an OS that is compatible with Iranian security applications and requirements is imperative. The first attempt to create local operating system in Iran was made some 10years ago, when pertinent technological research led to the development of Xamin as Iran's localized operating system. When the first version of the Xamin localized operating system was introduced in the market, some 250 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as 5 large organizations adopted the national operating system. This study analyzes the process of acceptance of Xamin localized open source server operating system technology in Iran. A technology acceptance model (TAM) has been used as the base model, and external variables have been determined based on surveying method. Moreover, two moderator variables have been introduced as new contributors in this study. The results are extracted using path analysis based on structural equation modeling. The statistical population is 250 Xamin users. Data collection tools consist of 200 questionnaires filled out by these users. The results show that subjective norm component and absorptive capacity moderator are two factors affecting the acceptance of this technology. Eventually, given Iran's special conditions, recommendations have been provided for strategic planning or policymaking for acceptance of Xamin operating system. The research also improves knowledge of conceptualization and policymaking for acceptance of high-tech software products.

The Role of OSS in Development of Software Industry in Developing Countries with Weak Intellectual Property Rights

One of the areas of significant importance in the growth of Information Technology (IT) in the world is the issue of open source software. The movement of open source software has led to considerable advancement and transformation in the world's IT industry. It is considered as one of the hotly-debated issues today. In Iran, open source software has recently received remarkable attention due to its many advantages. In this study, the problems of software industry in Iran, the opportunities created by using open source software, and the impacts and advantages of producing local open source operating system have been addressed through semi-structured interviews with the producers of local operating system and experts of open source software. Solving security problems, attending international markets, creating the spirit of cooperation and team work and flourishing the software business are some of the main impacts of producing open source software in Iran.

A flexible time-triggered service for real-time CORBA

This paper presents a new service for CORBA applications that orchestrates the timely execution of the tasks of a distributed real-time system in a flexible way. It follows the CORBA philosophy of complementing the CORBA standard with additional services that solve specific problems and facilitate using CORBA in complex applications. The service has been designed for highly coupled applications that execute over LANs. It provides a synchronous framework to synchronize distributed applications that is open to accepting and removing components on-line, with reduced impact on the application timing. It also provides the flexibility to use different distributed scheduling policies that can override the local operating systems schedulers. This paper describes the service architecture and implementation as well as its best-case performance on low computing power hardware with the QNX OS and connected to a switched Ethernet network. Finally the usage and of the service is illustrated with one case study: the synchronization of several robots in a welding process.

RodosVisor - an object-oriented and customizable hypervisor: The CPU virtualization

RodosVisor is an object-oriented and bare-metal virtual machine monitor (VMM) or hypervisor designed for the aerospace industry, mainly to provide time and spatial separation to the NetworkCentric core avionics machine, Montenegro and Dittrich (2009). The NetworkCentric core avionics machine consists of several harmonized components working together to implement dependable computing in a simple way, with computing units managed by the local real-time operating system RODOS. To support partitioned software architectures such as AIR, Rufino et al. (2009), and MILS, DeLong, R. (2007), RodosVisor adapted the Popek and Goldberg's fidelity, efficiency and resource control virtualization requirements, Popek and Goldberg (1974), to the space application domain by extending them with extra ones, like timing determinism, reactivity and improved dependability. Another distinctive RodosVisor feature is the customized design based on generative programming techniques, such as aspect oriented programming and template meta-programming.

Where the Cloud Meets the Commons

Changes presented by cloud computing—shared computing services, applications, and storage available to end users via the Internet—have the potential to seriously alter how libraries provide services, not only remotely, but also within the physical library, specifically concerning challenges facing the typical desktop computing experience. Libraries have invested time and money in establishing an infrastructure to support a particular kind of computing experience, and advances in cloud computing may make this type of experience obsolete. One of the ways libraries have added value to their services has been by implementing library commons. A key component to these commons has been desktop computing. Cloud computing offers applications via a Web browser, meaning that the applications can run independently of the local hardware and operating system, calling into question the necessity of traditional desktop computing. As libraries have shown in the past, they have the capability to assess challenging situations and adapt to provide users a beneficial experience.

SCELib2: the new revision of SCELib, the parallel computational library of molecular properties in the single center approach

SCELib2: the new revision of SCELib, the parallel computational library of molecular properties in the single center approach

Process Management inside ATLAS DAQ

The Process Management component of the online software of the future ATLAS experiment data acquisition system is presented. The purpose of the Process Manager is to perform basic job control of the software components of the data acquisition system. It is capable of starting, stopping and monitoring the status of those components on the data acquisition processors independent of the underlying operating system. Its architecture is designed on the basis of a server client model using CORBA based communication. The server part relies on C++ software agent objects acting as an interface between the local operating system and client applications. Some of the major design challenges of the software agents were to achieve the maximum degree of autonomy possible, to create processes aware of dynamic conditions in their environment and with the ability to determine corresponding actions. Issues such as the performance of the agents in terms of time needed for process creation and destruction, the scalability of the system taking into consideration the final ATLAS configuration and minimizing the use of hardware resources were also of critical importance. Besides the details given on the architecture and the implementation, we also present scalability and performance tests results of the Process Manager system.

Software-based rerouting for fault-tolerant pipelined communication

This paper presents a software-based approach to fault-tolerant routing in networks using wormhole or virtual cut-through switching. When a message encounters a faulty output link, it is removed from the network by the local router and delivered to the messaging layer of the local node's operating system. The message passing software can reroute this message, possibly along nonminimal paths. Alternatively, the message may be addressed to an intermediate node, which will forward the message to the destination. A message may encounter multiple faults and pass through multiple intermediate nodes. The proposed techniques are applicable to both obliviously and adaptively routed networks. The techniques are specifically targeted toward commercial multiprocessors where the mean time to repair (MTTR) is much smaller than the mean time between router failures (MTBF), i.e., it is sufficient to tolerate a maximum of three failures. This paper presents requirements for buffer management, deadlock freedom, and livelock freedom. Simulation results are presented to evaluate the degradation in latency and throughput as a function of the number and distribution of faults. There are several advantages of such an approach. Router designs are minimally impacted, and thus remain compact and fast. Only messages that encounter faulty components are affected, while the machine is ensured of continued operation until the faulty components can be replaced. The technique leverages existing network technology, and the concepts are portable across evolving switch and router designs. Therefore, we feel that the technique is a good candidate for incorporation into the next generation of multiprocessor networks.

Transparent remote execution in LAHNOS by means of a neural network device

LAHNOS is a Local Area Heterogeneous Operating System [1] being currently developed at the Universidad Nacional de San Luis over which distributed services are to be built. This paper shows some enhancements to be introduced into the original design in order to achieve automatic allocation of remote execution requests to the best fitted node under some chosen performance criteria.Following current trends in Distributed Systems we propose the insertion of a neural network device into the kernel of LAHNOS to reflect a selected allocation policy to provide improved system performance as long as to release the user of some cumbersome decisions.

The Chimera II real-time operating system for advanced sensor-based control applications

The Chimera II has been designed as a local operating system, to be used in conjunction with a global operating system. It executes on one or more single board computers in a VMEbus-based system. Advanced sensor-based control systems are both statistically and dynamically reconfigurable. As a result, they require many special features, which are currently not found in commercial real-time operating systems. Several design issues for such systems are presented as well as the features the authors have developed and implemented as part of Chimera II. These features include: a real-time kernel with dynamic scheduling, global error handling, user signals, and two levels of device drivers; an enhanced collection of interprocessor communication mechanisms, including global shared memory, spin-locks, remote semaphores, priority message passing, global state variable tables, multiprocessor servo task control, and host workstation integration; and several support utilities, including a UNIX C and math libraries, a matrix library, a command interpreter library, and a configuration file library.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Retrospective on DACNOS

Heterogeneity of hardware and software is a fact in most distributed computing environments. The DACNOS prototype is a network operating system that enables resource sharing in such environments. It extends the local operating systems without interfering with existing programs. It provides comprehensive system level support for distributed applications.

SUPRENUM: A trendsetter in modern supercomputer development

The designer of a numerical supercomputer is confronted with fundamental design decisions stemming from some basic dichotomies in supercomputer technology and architecture. On the side of the hardware technology there exists the dichotomy between the use of very high-speed circuitry or very large-scale integrated circuitry. On the side of the architecture there exists the dichotomy between the SIMD vector machine and the MIMD multiprocessor architecture. In the latter case, the ‘nodes’ of the system may communicate through shared memory, or each node has only private memory, and communication takes place through the exchange of messages. All these design decisions have implications with respect to performance, cost-effectiveness, software complexity, and fault-tolerance. In the paper the various dichotomies are discussed and a rationale is provided for the decision to realize the SUPRENUM supercomputer, a large ‘number cruncher’ with 5 Gflops peak performance, in the form of a massively parallel MIMD/SIMD multicomputer architecture. In its present incorporation, SUPRENUM is configurable to up to 256 nodes, where each node is a pipeline vector machine with 20 Mflops peak performance, IEEE double precision. The crucial issues of such an architecture, which we consider the trendsetter for future numerical supercomputer architecture in general, are on the hardware side the need for a bottleneck-free interconnection structure as well as the highest possible node performance obtained with the highest possible packaging density, in order to accommodate a node on a single circuit board. On the side of the system software the design goal is to obtain an adequately high degree of operational safety and data security with minimum software overhead. On the side of the user an appropriate program development environment must be provided. Last but not least, the system must exhibit a high degree of fault tolerance, if for nothing else but for the sake of obtaining a sufficiently high MTBF. In the paper a detailed discussion of the hardware and software architecture of the SUPRENUM supercomputer, whose design is based upon the considerations discussed, is presented. A largely bottleneck-free interconnection structure is accomplished in a hierarchical manner: the machine consists of up to 16 ‘clusters’, and each cluster consists of 16 working ‘nodes’ plus some organisational nodes. The node is accommodated on a single circuit board; its architecture is based on the principle of data structure architecture explained in the paper. SUPRENUM is strictly a message-based system; consequently, the local node operating system has been designed to handle a secured message exchange with a considerable degree of hardware support and with the lowest possible software overhead. SUPRENUM is organized as a distributed system—a prerequisite for the high degree of fault tolerance required; therefore, there exists no centralized global operating system. The paper concludes with an outlook on the performance limits of a future supercomputer architecture of the SUPRENUM type.

Meditation on man-machine interfaces or our personal role in graphics dialogue programming

This paper discusses and meditates about problems and solutions on man-machine interfaces. The incorporation of the user and the designer, local operating models and system theory, standarization efforts and a special example on design are presented and annotated. A way to connect low-level partial solutions and integrated systems is exhibited.

Operating Systems for the Micronet Network Computer

The Micros operating system executes on a modular multimicroprocessor system. It provides system-wide high-level control as well as local operating systems for individual nodes.

A microprocessor file server

Many microprocessor teaching and development laboratories make use of a multiuser computer system for program development, and the object code is down-line loaded into the microprocessor for testing. The program development cycle of edit-compile-load can be fairly lengthy on a heavily loaded central system and it would be more desirable to use a commercially available operating system running on the microprocessor to perform program development. The operating systems will require a disc, and it may be undesirable or just too expensive to add a disc system to each microprocessor, or it may be that the central multiuser system provides other services such as printer spooling, electronic mailing and file back-up. The paper discusses an alternative method to using discs on every microprocessor, whereby the multiuser system acts as a file server to the microprocessors, thus requiring no extra cost to enhance the microprocessors to run a local operating system

Designing SENSE (a software environment for social science rEsearch)

In most general purpose computer systems there is a wide variety of software available to users. Such software is usually provided in one of three organisational forms - routines in a library; collections of related functions grouped in a package with a common interface; independent programs called through operating system commands. This interdependent tripartite structure creates problems for non-sophisticated users as it involves different levels of user interface complexity.At the routine level a user must write programs in an appropriate host programming language to use the software. If he wishes to use a selection of routines written in incompatible languages then he may have to familiarise himself with more than one host language. In each language he must be aware of the calling conventions for routines, the possible representations of various types of data, the methods of passing parameters and the ways of inputting and outputting data to and from the external environment. This type of interface occurs with libraries like NAG and IMSL. In the case of packages the imperative user interface is usually somewhat simpler, consisting essentially of a name identifying the function required and some associated parameters which identify variables, labels, files, options, control and code values, etc as appropriate. However, function calls of this form must normally be preceded by a non-trivial amount of declarative and other "red tape" information expressed in the package interface language. Also, package environments can be restrictive in that the user is constrained to the types of data structure and analysis supported by the chosen package unless he is prepared to write programs to transform his data for other packages or to analyse it independently. SPSS is typical of this kind of package. When software facilities are provided at the program level, the user interface often consists simply of one-line program invocation commands written in the local operating system's command language, with program options and data files identified by command parameters. Common examples of such facilities are sort and archiving programs. A program level interface becomes even simpler, and at the same time more powerful, if command sequences can be formed into parameterised command procedures and if programs are enabled to conmlunicate directly with one another without the need for explicit intermediate files. In the latter type of environment the application software user generally finds that there are analytic program tools available to meet only some of his requirements. Consequently he has to embrace either or both of the other levels in addition in order to increase the analytic power available to him. Transfer between levels is not easily accomplished in most systems as facilities do not normally exist to help the user move data between levels. This difficulty comes on top of the obvious problem of having to master more than one interface and more than one level of complexity. In the SENSE project (11), which is funded by the U.K. Social Science Research Council, we are creating a prototype computing environment for social science researchers which can accommodate non-sophisticated users. The aim is to provide an integrated environment where such users will have a complete range of application software available (packages, routines and programs) through a single, simple user interface. We believe that this can be achieved by exploiting and extending the concept of software tools propounded by Kernighan and Plauger (19), so that as far as possible all software can be used through a program level interface, with its attendant advantages. Following Kernighan and Plauger we believe that software tools "can be used to create a comfortable and effective interface to existing programs", as well as providing an ideal model for the structuring of brand new application software. This paper will consider various aspects of the initial design of the SENSE software environment with particular reference to the importance of software tools in that design.

A rule-based approach to knowledge acquisition for man-machine interface programs

The development of computer programs, called agents, that act as man-machine interfaces for computer users are described. These programs are written in RITA: the Rule-directed Interactive Transaction Agent system, and are organized as sets of IF-THEN rules or “production systems.” The programs, or “personal computer agents,” are divided into two main categories: those that interface the user to computer systems he wishes to use and those that interact with the user to acquire the knowledge needed to create these interface programs. The relationship between the interface program and the knowledge acquisition program is that of parent-offspring. Three types of parent-offspring RITA agent pairs are described: (1) an exemplary programming agent that watches a user perform an arbitrary series of operations on the computer and then writes a program (a task agent) to perform the same task; (2) a tutoring agent that watches an expert demonstrate the use of an interactive computer language or local operating system and then creates a teaching agent that can, help naive users become familiar with the language or system demonstrated by the expert; and (3) a reactivemessage creating agent which elicits text from a user (the sender) and from it creates a new RITA agent which is a reactive message. The reactive message is sent to some other user (the recipient) who interacts with it. During the course of the interaction a record of the recipient's responses is sent back to the sender.