Parallel Command Research Articles

Has the Operational Control Transfer of the ROK‐US Alliance Come to the Cul‐de‐sac? International and Domestic Factors That Explain Delays in an Alliance Policy

Strategic effects of military alliances notwithstanding, to assume that their policy will proceed without difficulties is problematic. The ROK‐US alliance began transferring the wartime operational control (OPCON) to the ROK in early 2003. However, the transfer did not proceed as planned, experiencing two delays in June 2010 and October 2014 with a significant format change to the Condition‐based OPCON Transition Plan (COT‐P), meaning the addition of prerequisites for the transfer and the death of the original parallel command structure. What have been the causes of these phenomena and resulting stagnation? This article argues that the allies' strategic consensus over the transfer and the policy coordination in the initiating ally are the main causes of the lethargy. Additionally, this study finds that the impact of the strategic consensus is greater than that of the ROK's policy coordination, as the former is demonstrated in all three indicators of the progress: timeliness, post‐transfer command structure, and the certification assessment through exercises.

Journey to Equality: The Establishment of the Relationship Between the United States and Republic of Korea Forces in the Vietnam War

Abstract This article examines the problem of Operational Control (opcon) in the relationship the Republic of Korea Forces in Vietnam (rokfv) built with the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. When the rokfv deployed in Vietnam, they faced the dilemma of pursuing their own interests while maintaining a good relationship with U.S. forces. Therefore, the rokfv refused to fight under the opcon of U.S. forces, even though all rok troops remaining in South Korea were under U.S. opcon. Instead of arguing who would have opcon over the rokfv, the United States and the rok negotiated the establishment of a cooperative relationship. Although their opcon was not perfect at first, the rokfv nevertheless proved their military professionalism and achievements through securing areas and building company bases in their Vietnamese territories, rather than search-and-destroy operations, to achieve pacification. As a result, the rokfv built a parallel command in which the South Vietnamese, Americans, and South Koreans cooperated, which allowed them to carry out a Korean style of war under a more equal relationship with U.S. forces.

A Revisit of Implicit Monolithic Algorithms for Compressible Solids Immersed Inside a Compressible Liquid

With the development of mature Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools for fluids (air and liquid) and Finite Element Methods (FEM) for solids and structures, many approaches have been proposed to tackle the so-called Fluid–Structure Interaction or Fluid–Solid Interaction (FSI) problems. Traditional partitioned iterations are often used to link available FEM codes with CFD codes in the study of FSI systems. Although these procedures are convenient, fluid mesh adjustments according to the motion and finite deformation of immersed solids or structures can be challenging or even prohibitive. Moreover, complex dynamic behaviors of coupled FSI systems are often lost in these iterative processes. In this paper, the author would like to review the so-called monolithic approaches for the solution of coupled FSI systems as a whole in the context of the immersed boundary method. In particular, the focus is on the implicit monolithic algorithm for compressible solids immersed inside a compressible liquid. Notice here the main focus of this paper is on liquid or more precisely liquid phase of water as working fluid. Using the word liquid, the author would like to emphasize the consideration of the compressibility of the fluid and the assumption of constant density and temperature. It is a common practice to assume that the pressure variations are not strong enough to alter the liquid density in any significant fashion for acoustic fluid–solid interactions problems. Although the algorithm presented in this paper is not directly applicable to aerodynamics in which the density change is significant along with its relationship with the pressure and the temperature, the author did revisit his earlier work on merging immersed boundary method concepts with a fully-fledged compressible aerodynamic code based on high-order compact scheme and energy conservative form of governing equations. In the proposed algorithm, on top of a uniform background (ghost) mesh, a fully implicit immersed method is implemented with mixed finite element methods for compressible liquid as well as immersed compressible solids with a matrix-free Newton–Krylov iterative solution scheme. In this monolithic approach, with the simple modulo function, the immersed solid or structure points can be easily located and thus the displacement projections and force distributions stipulated in the immersed boundary method can be effectively and efficiently implemented. This feature coupled with the key concept of the immersed boundary method helps to avoid topologically challenging mesh adjustments and to incorporate parallel processing commands such as Message Passing Interface (MPI) and further vectorization of the numerical operation. Once these high-performance procedures are implemented coupled with the monolithic implicit matrix-free Newton–Krylov iterative scheme with immersed methods, effective and efficient reduced order modeling techniques can then be employed to explore phase and parametric spaces. The in-house developed programs are at the moment two-dimensional. Furthermore, based on the same approach implemented in one-dimensional test example with one continuum immersed in another continuum, such monolithic implicit matrix-free Newton–Krylov iterative approach can be extended for the study of composites with deformable aggregates and matrix.

Google Earth Engine for large-scale land use and land cover mapping: an object-based classification approach using spectral, textural and topographical factors

ABSTRACT Mapping the distribution and type of land use and land cover (LULC) is essential for watershed management. The Tigris-Euphrates basin is a transboundary region in the Middle East shared between six countries, but a recent fine-scale LULC map of the area is lacking. Using Landsat-8 time series, a 30-m resolution LULC map was produced for the Tigris-Euphrates basin. In total, 1184 Landsat scenes were processed within the Google Earth Engine (GEE). For the collection of ground truth data, differential manifestations of green cover were considered by dividing the study area into five climatic regions and the training samples were taken from each sub-region. To account for the temporal variation of LULC types, six two-month interval composite layers, including the spectral and thermal bands of Landsat-8, texture and spectral indices, as well as topographic factors were created for the target year 2019. Image segmentation and classification were performed using the simple non-iterative clustering (SNIC) and Random Forest (RF) algorithms, respectively. A computationally effective parallel processing approach was developed, which created a number of tiles and sub-tiles and a bulk command was converted into smaller parallel commands. The generated LULC map showed a satisfactory overall accuracy of 91.7%, with the highest User’s accuracy in water and wetland, and the lowest in rainfed crop and rangeland and the highest Producer’s accuracy in water and barren areas, and the lowest in garden and rangeland. This study highlights the necessity of using multi-temporal data for LULC mapping, in particular, multi-temporal NDVI, for the separation of different green cover types in arid and semi-arid environment.

Lclogit2: An enhanced command to fit latent class conditional logit models

In this article, I describe the lclogit2 command, an enhanced version of lclogit (Pacifico and Yoo, 2013, Stata Journal 13: 625–639). Like its predecessor, lclogit2 uses the expectation-maximization algorithm to fit latent class conditional logit (LCL) models. But it executes the expectation-maximization algorithm’s core algebraic operations in Mata, so it runs considerably faster as a result. It also allows linear constraints on parameters to be imposed more conveniently and flexibly. It comes with the parallel command lclogitml2, a new stand-alone command that uses gradient-based algorithms to fit LCL models. Both lclogit2 and lclogitml2 are supported by a new postestimation command, lclogitwtp2, that evaluates willingness-to-pay measures implied by fitted LCL models.

Lclogit2: An Enhanced Module to Estimate Latent Class Conditional Logit Models

This paper describes Stata command lclogit2, an enhanced version of lclogit (Pacifico and Yoo, 2013). Like its predecessor, lclogit2 uses the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to estimate latent class conditional logit (LCL) models. But it executes the EM algorithm's core algebraic operations in Mata, and runs considerably faster as a result. It also allows linear constraints on parameters to be imposed in a more convenient and flexible manner. It comes with parallel command lclogitml2, a new standalone program that uses gradient-based algorithms to estimate LCL models. Both lclogit2 and lclogitml2 are supported by a new postestimation tool, lclogitwtp2, that evaluates willingness-to-pay measures implied by estimated LCL models.

Elites in Competition and the Reorganization of Power: The Case of Brazil

This article describes the formation of the traditional elite of Brazil from the colonial period, and the main ruptures affecting the republic during short democratic periods in which changes were observed in the composition of their elite. The most recent change is historically contextualized by the formation of a new elite, in the form of the governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, who were never part of the political-military-hereditary lineage of traditional elites. This was the scenario of the 2014 elections and the impeachment that once again broke away from the democratic system. The historical practices of the traditional elite of Brazil showed themselves to be caught in a vicious circle around the coup d’etat to return to power, confronting the responses of the new progressive elite that had resulted from elections during the short periods of democracy. A qualitative methodology of bibliographic review is applied for the construction of the conceptual and analytical framework, and the collection of information from the media for recent facts has still been little analyzed with content analysis, and is complemented with two interviews with people who occupied high government posts, both before and during the coup. The results indicate that the new government elite undervalued the process of financial globalization and promoted the strengthening of representatives of international networks and their entry into the decision-making process, where they formed parallel command structures and networks contrary to government decisions and facilitated the rupture of democracy.

Enabling large-scale next-generation sequence assembly with Blacklight.

A variety of extremely challenging biological sequence analyses were conducted on the XSEDE large shared memory resource Blacklight, using current bioinformatics tools and encompassing a wide range of scientific applications. These include genomic sequence assembly, very large metagenomic sequence assembly, transcriptome assembly, and sequencing error correction. The data sets used in these analyses included uncategorized fungal species, reference microbial data, very large soil and human gut microbiome sequence data, and primate transcriptomes, composed of both short-read and long-read sequence data. A new parallel command execution program was developed on the Blacklight resource to handle some of these analyses. These results, initially reported previously at XSEDE13 and expanded here, represent significant advances for their respective scientific communities. The breadth and depth of the results achieved demonstrate the ease of use, versatility, and unique capabilities of the Blacklight XSEDE resource for scientific analysis of genomic and transcriptomic sequence data, and the power of these resources, together with XSEDE support, in meeting the most challenging scientific problems.

SPSens: a software package for stochastic parameter sensitivity analysis of biochemical reaction networks

SPSens is a software package for the efficient computation of stochastic parameter sensitivities of biochemical reaction networks. Parameter sensitivity analysis is a valuable tool that can be used to study robustness properties, for drug targeting, and many other purposes. However its application to stochastic models has been limited when Monte Carlo methods are required due to extremely high computational costs. SPSens provides efficient, state of the art sensitivity analysis algorithms in a single software package so that sensitivity analysis can be easily performed on stochastic models of biochemical reaction networks. SPSens implements the algorithms in C and estimates sensitivities with respect to both infinitesimal and finite perturbations to system parameters, in many cases reducing variance by orders of magnitude compared to basic methods. Included among the features of SPSens are serial and parallel command line versions, an interface with Matlab, and several example problems. SPSens is distributed freely under GPL version 3 and can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/spsens/. The software can be run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms.

A Distributed Parallel Command Governor Strategy for the Coordination of Multi-agent Networked Systems

A novel distributed Parallel Feedback Command Governor (FB-CG) supervision strategy is presented for multi-agent interconnected networked systems subject to pointwise-in-time constraints which need to be enforced during the overall system operations for coordination purposes. The paper extends some recent results related to this coordination-by-constraint approach by resorting to and extending Sequential Distributed Command Governor ideas. This novel Parallel distributed strategy is fully described and analyzed and it is compared with earlier Parallel Feed-Forward Command Governor (FF-CG) strategies in the final example.

Coordination between postural and movement controls: effect of changes in body mass distribution on postural and focal component characteristics

Whole-body reaching movements are accomplished through a combination of anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs) and focal movements. Two different modes of central organization is usually proposed for this coordination: first, a single-process control, where the APAs and the focal movements would share a common command; second, where the APAs and the focal movements would be independently controlled through parallel commands (dual-process control). Here, we investigated which one of these modes of control could better explain the coordination between the trunk and the upper limb for standing subjects reaching for a target located beyond arm's length. This was done evaluating the effect of changing the APAs settings on the arm movement. The APAs modification was achieved by shifting the subject's centre of mass prior to the focal movement onset; this was done by adding an asymmetric load on either side of the head (a control condition with the load fixed centrally at the top of the head was also performed). As it changed the body mass distribution, the muscular torques and the orientation of the head inertia tensor, it is assumed that the addition of the asymmetric load led to a change in the APAs. Analyses indeed showed that both the initial head and trunk displacement towards the supporting side (during the unloading of the moving leg) were smaller when the load was fixed on the side of the supporting leg than when it was fixed on the side of the moving leg. However, changing the initial conditions, and therefore the APAs settings, had no significant effect on the path and kinematics of the focal hand movement. Therefore, subjects cancelled out the effect of the trunk motion on the hand-in-space motion through compensatory arm movements. These results support the dual-process control hypothesis for the postural and the focal components.

Visual Responses on Neck Muscles Reveal Selective Gating that Prevents Express Saccades

Express saccades promote the acquisition of visual targets at extremely short reaction times. Because of the head's considerable inertia, it is unknown whether express saccades are accompanied by a parallel command to the head. Here, by recording electromyographic (EMG) activity from monkey neck muscles, we demonstrate that visual target presentation elicits time-locked, lateralized recruitment of neck muscles at extremely short latencies (55–95 ms). Remarkably, such recruitment not only accompanies express saccades, but also precedes nonexpress saccades, occasionally by up to 150 ms. These results demonstrate selective gating of components of descending commands from the superior colliculus to prevent express saccades yet permit recruitment of a head orienting synergy. We conclude that such selective gating aids eye-head coordination by permitting force development at neck muscles while a decision to commit to a gaze shift is being made, optimizing the contribution of the more inertial head to the ensuing gaze shift.

The Essence of Parallel Algol

We consider a parallel Algol-like language, combining procedures with shared-variable parallelism. Procedures permit encapsulation of common parallel programming idioms. Local variables provide a way to restrict interference between parallel commands. The combination of local variables, procedures, and parallelism supports a form of concurrent object-oriented programming. We provide a denotational semantics for this language, simultaneously adapting possible worlds to the parallel setting and generalizing transition traces to the procedural setting. This semantics supports reasoning about safety and liveness properties of parallel programs, and validates a number of natural laws of program equivalence based on noninterference properties of local variables. The semantics also validates familiar laws of functional programming. We also provide a relationally parallel semantics. This semantics supports standard methods of reasoning about representational independence, adapted to shared-variable programs. The clean design of the programming language and its semantics shows that procedures and shared-variable parallelism can be combined smoothly.

Josephus's View of the Amalekites

AbstractJosephus elevates Moses' role and diminishes the miraculous in the Amalek episode. In the Pentateuch Josephus, defensive about the charge that Jews preach genocide, omits the command to eliminate Amalek; rather, Moses predicts it. In 1 Samuel he explains that G-d so hated them as to order it. As to the parallel command to exterminate the seven Canaanite nations, this was necessary, says Josephus, for the national survival of the Israelites.

Vector Averaging Occurs Downstream from Learning in Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements of Monkeys

How are sensory-motor transformations organized in a cortical motor system? In general, sensory information is transformed through a variety of signal processing operations in the context of distinct coordinate frameworks. We studied the interaction of two distinct operations in pursuit eye movements, learning and vector-averaging, to gain insight into their underlying coordinate frameworks and their sequence in sensory-motor processing. Learning was induced in the initiation of pursuit eye movements by targets that moved initially at one speed for 100 msec and then increased or decreased to a sustained final speed. Vector averaging was studied by comparing the initial eye acceleration evoked by the simultaneous motion of two targets with that evoked by each target singly. Learning caused specific effects on the direction of the vector-averaged responses to two-target stimuli that included one target moving in the direction used to induce learning. Learned increases or decreases in eye acceleration caused the direction of the responses to two-targets to rotate toward or away from the learning direction. Learning also caused nonspecific changes in the responses to two-target stimuli. After any learning protocol, two-target responses usually became smaller, and their directions rotated away from the axis of the target motion used for learning. Quantitative analysis showed that the specific effects of learning were predicted most closely by a model in which vector averaging occurs downstream from the site(s) of learning. We suggest that the pursuit system creates parallel commands for potential movements to each of the targets in two-target stimuli, and that learning occurs in the coordinates of the potential movements.

A fully parallel, multi-processor software system using Inmos transputers and the occam programming language

A complete description of a fully parallel command processor, data acquisition, and process control software system given. The system runs on custom hardware built around the Inmos transputer and is written in the first truly parallel real-time programming language, called occam. Occam coding techniques are discussed, and code benchmarks are given. Results for interrupt response time, data transfer rates, and processor performance are presented.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Distributed implementation of nested communicating sequential processes: Communication and termination

A model for the distributed implementation of CSP programs, based on cooperation between communicating virtual processors, is defined. Emphasis is placed on the relations between nested parallel commands, communication, and process termination. We then present a protocol for process termination handling that guarantees the consistency of distributed structures and aims at optimizing the rate of communications among virtual processors. Finally, the adoption of the model in the implementation of the run-time support of a CSP-based language on the MuTEAM distributed multiprocessor is described.

Partial correctness of exits from concurrent structures

A rudimentary exit-mechanism from the parallel command of the language fragment CSP is introduced. A method for embedding invariants in a standard partial correctness system with pre-and postconditions is presented. Proof rules for exits from concurrent systems are introduced, and a simple data flow system is verified.

Implementation of CSP-S for description of distributed algorithms

The implementation of CSP-S (a subset of CSP)—a high level language for distributed programming—is presented in this paper. The language CSP-S features a parallel command, communication by message passing and the use of guarded command. The implementation consists of a compiler translating the CSP-S constructs into intermediate language. The execution is carried out by a scheduler which creates an illusion of concurrency. Using the CSP-S language constructs, distributed algorithms are written, executed and tested with the compiler designed.

A communicating sequential process language and implementation

AbstractThe design of a communicating sequential process language is presented, featuring a parallel command, communication by message passing and the use of the guarded command as a means of introducing and controlling non‐determinism. The language described here incorporates a number of new proposals regarding communications between sequential processes. The principal proposal is that messages are to be selected for reception by a receiving process solely on the basis of their type and arrival order within type; in particular, the identity of the sending process does not influence message reception. This results in a greater degree of parallelism and non‐determinism, which is useful to both the programmer and the language implementor. Also a hierarchichal composition regime is proposed, which gives communications significance to the organization of subprocess hierarchies; this promotes an independence of specification of program components through information hiding properties. The language implementation is described, and several aspects are of particular interest: the design of a process scheduler in a non‐deterministic situation leads to some interesting optimizations, as does the design of a message handler in the case where the communicating processes can access the same memory. Finally, example programs are given to illustrate some of the novel features of the language.