Stand-alone Microcomputer Research Articles

Density scaling approximation for Monte-Carlo simulations of radioactive plumes

The release of radioactive gas into the atmosphere can diffuse into large volumes of air downwind from the point of release. The extent of radioactivity can cover thousands of cubic meters of air. For such large volumes, the weather models used to predict the down-wind distribution of the plume and the radiation transport models used to predict the radiation reaching ground-level from the plume can take tens of hours of computer time on multi-node institutional High-Performance Computing facilities.In this paper we focus on the radiation transport aspect of plume modeling. We describe a phenomenological method for approximating the amounts of radiation that reach ground level from large volumes of a static radioactive plume that can be calculated on a stand-alone personal computer in much shorter computation times than those usually needed for such large volume evaluations. We refer to this method as the Density Scaling Approximation (DSA). Its ability to approximate ground-level count rates of large plumes comes from using a small-plume volume with a scaled-up value of air density to simulate the same number of scatterings that occur during transport in larger plume volumes at normal air density.We demonstrate the DSA by using a 100 m-diameter air-filled hemispherical dome geometry with a uniform volumetric activity of 135Xe gas throughout the air-filled volume. The DSA for a larger dome diameter is obtained by evaluating the 100 m dome with an air density scaled up by the linear ratio of the larger diameter to the 100 m diameter. We find that this approximation works well for dome diameters up to 1200 m – the largest diameter studied and a size more than sufficient for accounting for all the radiation from 135Xe. Moreover, most of our DSA results can be calculated over 500 times faster than corresponding full-sized geometry with normal air density.To help evaluate the accuracy of the DSA and gain insight into how well it can reproduce different regions of the spectra, we use three, easily understood regions of interest to compare the DSA results to the full-sized geometry at normal air density results. These regions are the full-energy peak, the region of single-Compton scattering, and the region of multiple-Compton scattering. We show how the dominance of the Compton scattering mechanism determines this division and thus provides insight into how Compton scattering is manifested in spectra from photon scattering through air in general, and how well the DSA approximation works.

Temporal convolutional neural (TCN) network for an effective weather forecasting using time-series data from the local weather station

Non-predictive or inaccurate weather forecasting can severely impact the community of users such as farmers. Numerical weather prediction models run in major weather forecasting centers with several supercomputers to solve simultaneous complex nonlinear mathematical equations. Such models provide the medium-range weather forecasts, i.e., every 6 h up to 18 h with grid length of 10–20 km. However, farmers often depend on more detailed short-to medium-range forecasts with higher-resolution regional forecasting models. Therefore, this research aims to address this by developing and evaluating a lightweight and novel weather forecasting system, which consists of one or more local weather stations and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for weather forecasting using time-series data from these weather stations. To this end, the system explores the state-of-the-art temporal convolutional network (TCN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Our experimental results show that the proposed model using TCN produces better forecasting compared to the LSTM and other classic machine learning approaches. The proposed model can be used as an efficient localized weather forecasting tool for the community of users, and it could be run on a stand-alone personal computer.

An Approach Towards Establishing Reference Linking in Desktop Reference Manager

The growth in the availability of number of research journal articles in a digital form is explosive. So more and more researchers have turned towards the publications in digital form, download and maintain them in their standalone personal computers. This increase in a number of publications in digital form has made it difficult for researchers, who have to face the burden of managing, linking and searching the research journal articles on their personal computers. Many reference manager softwares like RefWorks, Zotero, EndNote, and Mendeley are available in the market, which provide an easy way for a researcher to organize and manage the research journal articles. These above said reference managers take the help of extracted basic metadata such as Title, Author, Abstract, etc. to organize the journal articles and maintain a link between them. But the essential feature of “reference linking” is not focused. Reference linking is a feature where a cited article can be tracked from the article citing it, from a large volume of journal article collection. This feature is mostly available for online, but not for offline standalone personal computers. This paper addresses this problem in detail, explores the existing reference linking features which exist for online scholarlty literature, presents the algorithms for retrieving the metadata along with references at the end of each journal article and a way for storing and linking them to the full texts present in the reference management software that works on a standalone personal computer, using semantic technology. A reference management software “sodhanaRef” which includes the reference linking feature and semantic search has been built along with an explanation about its architecture.

Разработка микромашинных кибернетических платформ для культивирования эндотелиальных капиллярных сетей in vitro в пространстве организованных микропотоков питательной среды

This work is devoted to the development of technology and special equipment for the cultivation of spontaneously developing functioning endothelial capillary networks in vitro as the basis of artificial cloth-like structures with desired biological properties. It is the scientific and engineering projects RFBR №94-04-13544 «Structural analysis of microvascular bifurcations" and №96-04-50991 «Cell and Tissue Engineering endothelium (formation in endothelial culture in vitro the functioning self-developing capillary networks)." The proposed technology allows the author to form three-dimensional capillary endothelial network around micro-fluidic arrays, immersed in a specially designed dynamic gel. In 2013, the Korean research team under the lea-dership Noo Li Jeon has reproduced, using a similar approach, the phenomenon of self-developing functioning endothelial capillary networks with mass transfer in vitro. It has fully confirmed the validity of the concept pro-posed in the listed projects. Using system of the mathematical modeling Matlab & Simulink and system engi-neering design Cadence Orcad it was developed simulation mathematical model and circuit diagrams experimental reactor modules, it allows to saving considerable financial resources allocated to research and de-velopment of this kind. The resulting model contains 5.4 million basic Simulink blocks and performs more than 7,000 different mathematical functions, reflecting the behavior of devices in stationary and non-stationary conditions. Device control is based on neural network technology. Portable stand-alone microcomputers cyber platform includes microfluidic matrix, generators of microflows liquid phase nutrient medium, life-support systems of endothelial culture system of automatic digital imaging process of angiogenesis, the transmission system of encrypted data over a secure radio, digital control systems. All systems are backed up multiple times, allowing the product to operate in stand-alone mode for a long time (up to a year or more).

TEXT SIGNAGE RECOGNITION IN ANDROID MOBILE DEVICES

This study presents a Text Signage Recognition (TSR) model in Android mobile devices for Visually Impaired People (VIP). Independence navigation is always a challenge to VIP for indoor navigation in unfamiliar surroundings. Assistive Technology such as Android smart devices has great potential to assist VIPs in indoor navigation using built-in speech synthesizer. In contrast to previous TSR research which was deployed in standalone personal computer system using Otsu’s algorithm, we have developed an affordable Text Signage Recognition in Android Mobile Devices using Tesseract OCR engine. The proposed TSR model used the input images from the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2003 dataset for system training and testing. The TSR model was tested by four volunteers who were blind-folded. The system performance of the TSR model was assessed using different metrics (i.e., Precision, Recall, F-Score and Recognition Formulas) to determine its accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed TSR model has achieved recognition rate satisfactorily.

ONE APPROACH TO CAI-EFL PROBLEMS IN JAPAN

Some current topics related to CAI-EFL field in Japan are reviewed with emphasis on the achievements of the TELP (Tokai English Language Program)-CAI project, which developed a stand-alone microcomputer system in 1979 and another CAI-EFL system in 1984, along with abundant courseware. The latest system, called TELP-CAI System III, is described. It is composed of a personal computer keyboard, a color CRT, a cassette tape deck, a floppy disc drive unit, and a tailor-made interface unit to integrate all these devices. Including some of its features, like the menu-format authoring system, the discussion extends to on-going improvements for continued development of this system.

Direct approaches to exploit many-core architecture in bioinformatics

Current trends in computer programming look for solutions in the challenging task of porting and optimizing existing algorithms to many-core architectures with tens of Central Processing Units (CPUs). Yet, the lack of standardized general-purpose parallel programming and porting methodologies represents the main bottleneck on these developments. We have focused on bioinformatics applied to genomics in general and the so-called “Next-Generation” Sequencing (NGS) in particular, in order to study the viability and cost of porting and optimizing well known algorithms to a many-core architecture. Three different methods are tackled in order to implement existing algorithms in Tile64, corresponding to a microprocessor containing 64 CPUs, each of them being capable of executing an independent Linux operating system. Three different approaches have been explored: (i) implementation of the Needleman–Wunsch/Smith–Waterman pairwise aligner from scratch; (ii) direct translation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) C++ ABySS assembly algorithm with changes on the communication layer; and (iii) migration of the ClustalW tool, parallelizing only the most time-consuming stage. The performance-gain/development-cost tradeoffs indicate that the Tile64 microprocessor has the potential to increase the performance of bioinformatics in an unprecedented way for a standalone Personal Computer (PC). Yet, the effective exploitation of these parallel implementations requires a detailed understanding of the peculiar many-core characteristics when migrating previous non-parallel source codes.

Parallelizing and optimizing a bioinformatics pairwise sequence alignment algorithm for many-core architecture

Current computer engineering evolves at an accelerated pace, with hardware advancing towards new chip multiprocessors (CMP) architectures and with supporting software gearing towards new programming and abstraction paradigms, to obtain the maximum efficiency of the hardware at a low cost. In this context, Tilera Corporation has developed a brand new CMP architecture with 64 cores (tiles) called Tile64, and has launched several Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) cards to be used and monitored from a host Personal Computer (PC). These cards may execute parallel applications built in C/C++ and compiled with the Tile-GCC compiler. We have previously demonstrated the usefulness of the Tile64 architecture for bioinformatics [S. Gálvez, D. Díaz, P. Hernández, F.J. Esteban, J.A. Caballero, G. Dorado, Next-generation bioinformatics: using many-core processor architecture to develop a web service for sequence alignment, Bioinformatics, 26 (2010) 683–686]. We have chosen a bioinformatics algorithm to test this many-core Tile64 architecture because of actual bioinformatics challenging needs: data-intensive workloads, space and time-consuming requirements and massive calculation. This algorithm, known as Needleman–Wunsch/Smith–Waterman (NW/SW), obtains an optimal sequence alignment in quadratic time and space cost, yet requires to be optimized to take full advantage of computing parallelization. In this paper we redesign, implement and fine-tune this algorithm, introducing key optimizations and changes that take advantage of specific Tile64 characteristics: RISC architecture, local tile’s cache, length of memory word, shared memory usage, RAM file system, tile’s intercommunication and job selection from a pool. The resulting algorithm – named MC64-NW/SW for Multicore64 Needleman–Wunsch/Smith–Waterman – achieves a gain of ∼1000% when compared with the same algorithm on a ×86 multi-core architecture. As far as we know, our NW/SW implementation is the fastest ever published for a standalone PC when aligning a pair of sequences larger than 20 kb.

Audiometers—A Closer Look

Audiometers—A Closer Look

Next-generation bioinformatics: using many-core processor architecture to develop a web service for sequence alignment

Bioinformatics algorithms and computing power are the main bottlenecks for analyzing huge amount of data generated by the current technologies, such as the 'next-generation' sequencing methodologies. At the same time, most powerful microprocessors are based on many-core chips, yet most applications cannot exploit such power, requiring parallelized algorithms. As an example of next-generation bioinformatics, we have developed from scratch a new parallelization of the Needleman-Wunsch (NW) sequence alignment algorithm for the 64-core Tile64 microprocessor. The unprecedented performance it offers for a standalone personal computer (PC) is discussed, optimally aligning sequences up to 20 times faster than the non-parallelized version, thus saving valuable time. This algorithm is available as a free web service for the scientific community at http://www.sicuma.uma.es/multicore. The open source code is also available on such site.

A mainframe interfacing computer management system for the control of oral anticoagulant therapy.

A unique computerized management system has been used to control the anticoagulation of over 400 patients at a large teaching hospital for the last eighteen months. The system is located on the main pathology computer which can be interfaced with the patient administration system (PAS). This enables files in the anticoagulant program to be linked with files in the PAS and files in the haematology database. This system has many advantages over a stand-alone microcomputer system and will form the basis for the next generation of computerized anticoagulant management systems.

Aplicação de eficientes técnicas computacionais a problemas de tomografia sísmica com ondas superficiais

Com o objetivo de economizar recurso computacional, é proposto um algoritmo não-iterativo baseado nos esquemas de Horowitz-Sahni, para gerenciamento de matriz esparsa, e da Ohio State University, para inversão matricial. O algoritmo explora as características da solução por MMQ, estruturando os dados de forma a gerenciá-los eficientemente. Primeiramente, o esquema é aplicado à matriz dos coeficientes (retangular, não simétrica), cuja compactação pode reduzir a demanda em até 98%, na matriz. Posteriormente, matrizes simétricas são também comprimidas, e o algoritmo OSU é modificado, contribuindo para otimizar recursos em adicionais 50%. Em todos os casos, a remoção de elementos redundantes implica na redução nos tempos de acesso e memória exigida. A rotina foi submetida a testes de desempenho envolvendo 2.000 trajetórias de ondas Rayleigh, para várias dimensões de células da grade, cujos resultados foram comparados com as técnicas, tradicional e SVD, e comprovaram uma economia de recursos que varia entre 65% e 98%. O esquema foi, também, utilizado em dois casos reais, no Sudeste e Nordeste do Brasil, empregando-se, exclusivamente, um computador do tipo PC, cuja demanda foi reduzida em dezesseis vezes, sem perda de exatidão nos cálculos. Embora o algoritmo seja aplicado, neste contexto, a um problema específico na área de Sismologia (tomografia com ondas superficiais), ele pode ser usado em quaisquer ocorrências de sistema esparso, sobretudo quando é exigido o cálculo rigoroso das matrizes resolução e covariância.

Integration of Web-based and PC-based Clinical Research Databases

We have created a Web-based repository or data library of information about measurement instruments used in studies of multi-factorial geriatric health conditions (the Geriatrics Research Instrument Library - GRIL) based upon existing features of two separate clinical study data management systems. GRIL allows browsing, searching, and selecting measurement instruments based upon criteria such as keywords and areas of applicability. Measurement instruments selected can be printed and/or included in an automatically generated standalone microcomputer database application, which can be downloaded by investigators for use in data collection and data management. Integration of database applications requires the creation of a common semantic model, and mapping from each system to this model. Various database schema conflicts at the table and attribute level must be identified and resolved prior to integration. Using a conflict taxonomy and a mapping schema facilitates this process. Critical conflicts at the table level that required resolution included name and relationship differences. A major benefit of integration efforts is the sharing of features and cross-fertilization of applications created for similar purposes in different operating environments. Integration of applications mandates some degree of metadata model unification.

Designing and implementing special-purpose databases: lessons from the pharmacogenetic network.

The Pharmacogenetics Research Network, which has the long-term goal of genotype-phenotype correlation related to pharmacotherapy, mandates timely electronic publication of results by participating research groups through submission to PharmGKB, the consortium's repository database. Because informatics expertise across groups varies, many groups need help in managing their own data and in generating electronic submissions. To assist these operations, we perform a needs assessment to determine an optimum database implementation strategy, which varies from standalone microcomputer database application to Web-based solutions, depending on the group and problem scope. Solution implementation is coupled with transfer of expertise through hands-on training, so as to reduce the groups' long-term dependence on us. Where multiple groups face common problems, such as managing genotyping data or clinical study support, we have devised generic software that can be reused in its entirety by individual groups, or customized with modest effort.

Modelling, simulation, and gain scheduling control of large radiotelescopes

A detailed model of a radiotelescope (yoke on king post parabolic antenna) is developed. It uses modelling concepts that have been successfully applied to industrial robotic systems. In this approach, the interactions between the different dynamically coupled subsystems are viewed as disturbances whose dynamic behaviours are known. The proposed controller for the radiotelescope was developed by using a gain-scheduling strategy, which has the advantage of using known parameters for every region of operation. Thus, the computational complexity is substantially decreased and, in consequence, the parameters for each region of operation can be independently computed by inexpensive stand-alone microcomputers.

Field testing of advanced ventilation controls for variable air volume systems

Results from the experimental phase of a larger research project are presented for three promising ventilation controls capable of meeting the ventilation requirements of ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 62-1989 (ASHRAE 1989) with low energy use. Each control dynamically adjusted the outdoor air (OA) requirement based upon occupancy and measured building zone loads. Credit for unvitiated air from over-ventilated spaces was also taken in each control. Controls 2 and 3 used primary airflow rate as an optimization variable to decrease the required OA flow rate, thus reducing the energy needed to condition OA. The supply air temperature in control 2 was a constant, but was an additional optimization variable in control 3. The three ventilation controls were achieved by the simulation/optimization algorithms resident in a stand-alone personal computer (PC) on site. A total of 24 days of performance data were collected. Typical day data sets for each control are presented in some detail. The objective of the experimental phase was to verify the reliability of the simulation/optimization algorithms resident in the on-site PC. That objective was met for each of the three controls since excellent agreement was found between the measured data and the control algorithm predictions.

An intranet database for pacemaker patients

A database system, incorporating smartcard technologies, was designed to hold the personal and pacing details of pacemaker patients, who attended a clinic at the Royal Sussex County Hospital (RSCH), Brighton, UK. Following an initial period of a 12 month clinical trial, with the database running on a standalone personal computer, the Pacemaker Patient Database has been redesigned and implemented as an intranet-based system. This paper describes the issues relating to the development of the new prototype system and identifies the design principles for intranet-based electronic health care (EHCR) record database systems.

Database requirements for QTL mapping in livestock

Genetic mapping in livestock and the hunt for quantitative trait loci have been concentrated in several small to medium size laboratories. Information systems developed at these laboratories to support research range from full relational database management systems with World Wide Web interfaces to spreadsheets on standalone microcomputers. There has been little coordination of effort on database issues between laboratories. Sharing and combining data between laboratories is at best difficult and time consuming. Obstacles to effective data exchange go beyond networks and software and often result from differences in conceptual schema, nomenclature, and semantics. Data sharing capabilities may be improved by physically consolidating data or by integrating distributed data. This presentation describes and compares specific information system architectures felt to be viable alternatives for a cooperative strategy to improve data sharing capabilities.

A Pressure Measuring Sphere for monitoring handling of fruit and vegetables

Abstract An “artificial fruit” was developed to detect damage sources for perishable fruit and vegetables during practical harvesting and handling. This Pressure Measuring Sphere (PMS) is designed robustly in order to tolerate usual mechanical loads under practical conditions. It consists of a liquid-filled rubber ball with a pressure data acquisition system embedded inside. The system contains a stand-alone microcomputer, a fluid pressure sensing unit and a battery. The PMS is capable to collect all load events touching its skin, if they exceed a preset threshold, and to store them together with time from an internal clock. Calibration tests confirmed that the PMS senses static as well as dynamic mechanical loads. Measured load data were nearly reproducible under static load conditions (variation coefficient about 4%). Under dynamic load conditions a minimum of 15 measuring runs provide for representative results (variation coefficient about 20%).

Development and Submission of a Nonclinical (Pharmacology/Toxicology) CANDA

The experience with the submission of a nonclinical (pharmacology and toxicology) computer-assisted New Drug Application (CANDA) is reviewed. This system consisted of a stand-alone personal computer running several commercial programs in Microsoft Windows to access both text and data. WordPerfect was used as the word processor that contained all the documents and data tables (in read-only format) that were submitted in hard copy, and Andyne GQL was used as a tool to query the data in an Oracle relational database. Microsoft Excel was provided as a spreadsheet for graphics and analysis of data. Documents appeared virtually identical to those in the hard copy NDA submission. Searching the text was facilitated by the use of buttons on the screen, which allowed the NDA to be searched for a particular term. Data could be located either in WordPerfect documents, or in an Oracle database (using Andyne GQL) by querying the data. The data queries could be performed ad hoc, in which the reviewer selected all the parameters for a search, or with predefined query buttons, which retrieved data for principal treatment-related changes. This type of system also could serve as a useful model for both inhouse nonclinical review and the submission of INDs and IND amendments.