Computer Virtual Environments Research Articles

3D OBJECTS CREATION APPROACH FOR AR PROJECTS

In this paper are discussed the application of 3D technologies, which are reflected in various areas of life, such as education, science, engineering and entertainment industry. The use of 3D technology in the educational process can significantly increase its efficiency by bringing the virtual computer environment closer to the real three-dimensional world. But for now the use of augmented reality in teaching is only gaining momentum. Many applications are still quite primitive, but developers are actively working on their refinement, increasing the amount of educational content, improving quality. The task of fast and high-quality algorithm for creating 3D content for further import in AR training projects has been urgent. The aim of this work is to increase the level of use of 3D technologies in the educational process for an effective and external interactive way of providing information. In the course of the work the methods of creating 3D content for different areas of application such as game industry, 3D visualization, 3D printing, AR projects, holographic fans, preliminary assessment of technical properties of the product and etc were considered. Data analysis has been shown that for each area of ​​application 3d content has its own requirements and features. This information was identified and presented in the form of a comparative table. Based on the analysis of modern methods of developing 3D content for various applications, a general method of creating 3D objects for further import into AR projects was proposed. Based on the proposed approach, a 3D model of the character for the children audio-encyclopedic stories educational application was designed. The obtained models were also integrated in the augmented reality environment. The use of this approach has increased the download speed of the model in an augmented reality application.

A Workflow Execution System for Analyzing Large-scale Astronomy Data on Virtualized Computing Environments

A Workflow Execution System for Analyzing Large-scale Astronomy Data on Virtualized Computing Environments

Existential, Instrumental and Cyber Spaces as Ontological Modi of Human Being

Context and relevance of the research: the task of developing a general theoretical basis and methodology of ontological problems of interaction and interrelation of the Internet space and the physical world comes forward with the formation of the virtual computer environment determined both by the presence of a human being in computer network and presence of computer network in the life world of the human being. Virtual reality, even in its current state, is already widely recognized and described in academic sources. There are prospects of its application in medicine, education, professional training, space, military, art, automotive industry, shipbuilding, trade, leisure, consulting assistance to population, administration, and other spheres of management. According to academic forecasts, intensive, large-scale, multidirectional development of virtual computer environment will continue in the 21st century. The purpose of the study is to carry out a systematic analysis of the concepts: existential space, instrumental space and cyberspace in their interrelationship and interaction; to propose the author’s definition of existential space as a methodological construction for the study of its ontological modi: instrumental space and cyberspace; to define the ontological characteristics of instrumental space and cyberspace, their common features (connection) and distinction; to reveal features of existential immersion of a person into virtual computer reality – the process of emotional perception of existence in the information field – an artificially created world of ‘people and things,’ as well as subjective-personal effects accompanying this process. The methodology used: M. Heidegger’s Dasein analytics, D. Ihde’s instrumental realism, systems-based approach, comparative analysis. Key findings: the creation of cyberspace and computer virtual reality has unveiled a new stage in the formation of existential experience and project as a system of information technology and socio-psychological competencies. There is a necessity in the system-based elaboration of conceptual and categorical apparatus. The researcher will use it to describe the ontological modi of both existing and a new (computer virtual) reality and their interconnection.

A Path-Integral-Based Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Path Following of an Autoassembly Mobile Robot.

Reinforcement learning (RL) combined with deep neural networks has led to a number of great achievements for robot control in virtual computer environments, where sufficient data can be obtained without any difficulty to train various models. However, thus far, only few and relatively simple tasks have been accomplished for practical robots, which is mainly caused by the following two reasons. First, training with real robots, especially with dynamic systems, is too complicated to be fully and accurately represented in simulations. Second, it is very costly to obtain training data from real systems. To address these two problems effectively, in this article, a path-integral-based RL algorithm is proposed for the task of path following of an autoassembly mobile robot, wherein three kernel techniques are introduced. First, a generalized path-integral-control approach is proposed to obtain the numerical solution of a stochastic dynamical system, wherein the calculation of the gradient and kinematics inverse is avoided to ensure fast and reliable training convergence. Second, a novel parameterization method using Lyapunov techniques is introduced into the RL algorithm to ensure good performance of the system when directly transferring simulation results into practical systems. Third, the optimal parameters for all discrete initial states are first learned offline and then tuned online to improve the generalization and real-time performance. In addition to the optimization control for the mobile robot, the proposed method also possesses general applicability for a class of nonlinear systems such as crane systems. Simulation and experimental results are included and analyzed to illustrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.

Lightweight Power Monitoring Framework for Virtualized Computing Environments

The pervasive use of virtualization techniques in today's datacenters poses challenges in power monitoring since it is not possible to directly measure the power consumption of a virtual entity such as a virtual machine (VM) and a container. In this paper, we present cWatts++, a lightweight virtual power meter that enables accurate power usage measurement in virtualized computing environments such as VMs and containers of Cloud data centers. At the core of cWatts++ is its application-agnostic power model. To this end, we devise two power models (eventModel and raplModel) that are driven by CPU event counters and the Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) feature of modern Intel CPUs, respectively. While eventModel is more generic and, thus, applicable to a wide range of workloads, raplModel is particularly good for CPU-bound workloads. We have evaluated cWatts++ with its two power models in a real system using the PARSEC benchmark suite and our in-house benchmarks. Our evaluation study demonstrates that these power models have an average error of 4.55 and 1.25 percent, respectively, compared with actual power usage measurements of a real power meter, Cabac Power-Mate.

Philosophy in the digital epoch: potential development and challenges

The world of digital technologies is reformatting socio-humanitarian knowledge, in which digital humanities are actively developing, bringing together the hard sciences and humanities. It began to take shape form in the middle of the XXth century, and due to digital humanities, traditional philosophical questions received new perspectives also. The huge amount of digitized information does not simplify, but often complicates the search for true knowledge, pushing to epistemological pessimism. Blurring the boundaries between the physical world and the computer virtual environment in a new way raises the ontological question of reality itself and its boundaries. The ability to create a new person (s) in a virtual environment often causes not only psychological, but also axiological problems, contributes to the crime of ethical norms, and leads to alienation between people. In the field of philosophical anthropology, the gradual cyborgization of society modifies the question of the essence of man (Transhumanism, etc.). A new branch of philosophical knowledge, digital philosophy, is developing actively. It can be interpreted in two directions: simple digitization of philosophical texts and visualization of philosophy or an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of metaphysics and cosmology. All the above allows us to speak about the formation of new vectors of philosophical knowledge: media philosophy, digital philosophy, etc.

Proposed Framework for Combining Gamification Elements with Open Learner Model in a Collaborative e-Learning System for Programming Course

The main objective of the proposed framework that combines gamification and open learner model is to increase students’ engagement in learning programming via virtual computer environ ment, thus enabling them to learn cooperatively and helps them to increase awareness of their own performance. The framework proposed the development of an e - Learning system that includes gamification elements such as the users’ level and leaderboard to di splay users’ achievements and rewards. Meanwhile, in order to increase students’ awareness of their own milestone in the programming course, the framework also included the Open Learnel Model, which shows the students’ milestones via the skills meters. T his project also proposed the use of Web 2.0 elements such as chat rooms to allow collaboration and group discussions over the Internet.

Optimized Speculative Execution to Improve Performance of MapReduce Jobs on Virtualized Computing Environment

Recently, virtualization has become more and more important in the cloud computing to support efficient flexible resource provisioning. However, the performance interference among virtual machines may affect the efficiency of the resource provisioning. In a virtualized environment, where multiple MapReduce applications are deployed, the performance interference can also affect the performance of the Map and Reduce tasks resulting in the performance degradation of the MapReduce jobs. Then, in order to ensure the performance of the MapReduce jobs, a framework for scheduling the MapReduce jobs with the consideration of the performance interference among the virtual machines is proposed. The core of the framework is to identify the straggler tasks in a job and back up these tasks to make the backed up one overtake the original tasks in order to reduce the overall response time of the job. Then, to identify the straggler task, this paper uses a method for predicting the performance interference degree. A method for scheduling the backing-up tasks is presented. To verify the effectiveness of our framework, a set of experiments are done. The experiments show that the proposed framework has better performance in the virtual cluster compared with the current speculative execution framework.

Framework for Deploying a Virtualized Computing Environment for Collaborative and Secure Data Analytics.

Introduction:Large amounts of health data generated by a wide range of health care applications across a variety of systems have the potential to offer valuable insight into populations and health care systems, but robust and secure computing and analytic systems are required to leverage this information.Framework:We discuss our experiences deploying a Secure Data Analysis Platform (SeDAP), and provide a framework to plan, build and deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to enable innovation, collaboration and operate within academic funding structures. It outlines 6 core components: Security, Ease of Access, Performance, Cost, Tools, and Training.Conclusion:A platform like SeDAP is not simply successful through technical excellence and performance. It’s adoption is dependent on a collaborative environment where researchers and users plan and evaluate the requirements of all aspects.

QoS Evaluation of End-to-End Services in Virtualized Computing Environments

Quality of service (QoS) optimization for end-to-end (e2e) services always depends on performance analysis in cloud-based service delivery industry. However, performance analysis of e2e services becomes difficult as the scale and complexity of virtualized computing environments increase. In this paper, the authors present a novel hierarchical stochastic approach to evaluate the QoS of e2e virtualized cloud services using Quasi-Birth Death structures, where jobs arrive according to a stochastic process and request virtual machines (VMs), which are specified in terms of resources, i.e., VM-configuration. To reduce the complexity of performance evaluation, the overall virtualized cloud services are partitioned into three sub-hierarchies. The authors analyze each individual sub-hierarchy using stochastic queueing approach. Thus, the key performance metrics of e2e cloud service QoS, such as acceptance probability and e2e response delay incurred on user requests, are obtained.

DSRTrust: A Dynamic Trust Model of Distinguishing Service and Recommendation for Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment

Internet-based virtual computing environments (iVCE) are open, anonymous and dynamic in nature. Such characteristics bring about threats and vulnerabilities in providing trusted services and improving resource utilization. Therefore, a dynamic trust model for distinguishing service and recommendation is proposed. In this paper, we analyze multidimensional decision factors related to the evaluation of autonomous node, such as user satisfaction, reward function, punishment function and time decay function. According to the network connection degree of node, our model assigns a new trust weight that specifically describes the relationship between network and trust in iVCE. We then propose a dynamic quantitative model for measuring different kinds of trust. Simulation results indicate that our model can effectively cope with malicious behavior and exhibits evident advantages in resource utilization compared with existing models.

Development and Application of Virtual Manufacturing Technology

As an advanced machining technology, virtual manufacturing has been regarded as an useful tool to carry out analysis and research work with digital model instead of practical manufacture. For the virtual manufacturing process, it is a mapping of the practical machining in computer virtual environment, no real production is created and without material or power wasting. Several typical definition of virtual manufacturing dominate in this fields were listed out, based on which expressed an explicit interpretation. Main features and three type of virtual manufacturing, such as design-centered, machine-centered and control centered virtual manufacturing were analysed respectively. The virtual manufacturing system, supported by cutter tool magazine, pallet storage, production database, material storage and NC storage, have been demonstrated in an architecture figure. Finally, the author concluded the important role of virtual manufacturing and illustrated an example of applying virtual manufacturing in five-axis machining process.

Security Vulnerability Analysis in Virtualized Computing Environments

Virtualization brings compelling features to individual computer systems and organizations allowing for the concurrent execution of multiple operating systems and applications on the same physical server. However, for all the performance improvements offered by adopting virtualization technologies, one of the major obstacles to widespread adoption of virtualization is the concern about security in the technology. Therefore, the security implications in virtualization environments must be addressed and understood because of the exploitation to compromise the operation of missioncritical systems. In this paper, we first discuss common exploits of security properties in virtualized computing environments and analyze their security vulnerabilities from the perspective of attackers. Consequently, we identify the main areas of virtualized information system design and operation in which security concerns must be addressed. Finally, we present our recommendations and future trends for trusted virtualized computing environments.

A Redundant Scheduling Algorithm based on Trust Model for Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment

A Redundant Scheduling Algorithm based on Trust Model for Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment

Virtualization of Teaching at the Department of KVD UWB in Pilsen, New Features and Benefits

The existence and functionality of virtual environment at the Department of Computer Science and Educational Technology (KVD) of the University West Bohemia (UWB) in Pilsen are the current reality. The VMware ESX server has been in operation sinece 2007 at the KVD department. The software ESX 3.5.0 SP2 has been installed on the server Dell PE2900. Current status is as follows: about 10 virtual machines (VM) are used by department members, 6 virtual machines are used as a variety of servers and services for education and teaching, about 30 VM are designed as virtual labs to teach students. Earlier model to manage the VM bases solely on access via the ESX server using VMware Infrastructure client which is not effective and safe. In particular, the system of permissions and roles is not effective enough. It is not possible to set access rights (ACL) to each single VM separately. The new solution has been installed since September 2009, ESX host server and vCenter server as one entity. The new ELMS licensing model for VMware vSphere 4 provides unprecedented efficiency, control and choice. Virtual Center Server 4.0 (recently called vCenter Server 4.0) has been implemented on the operating system MS Srv2008 and as one of the virtual machines. Information systems educators must balance the need to protect the stability, availability, and security of computer laboratories with the learning objectives of various courses. The same requirements and needs have to be considered on our side. This paper presents this basic environment, configuration, licensing model and sample teaching laboratories at the KVD. The manuscript demonstrates the advantages, strengths but also the weaknesses in the creation of virtual laboratories for teaching purposes. The final chapter deals with considerations on the coexistence of virtual computer environments to traditional classrooms. We then review the main body of research in this area and identify the key patents that have emerged in this field.

Combined Power and Performance Management of Virtualized Computing Environments Serving Session-Based Workloads

This paper develops an online resource provisioning framework for combined power and performance management in a virtualized computing environment serving session-based workloads. We pose this management problem as one of sequential optimization under uncertainty and solve it using limited lookahead control (LLC), a form of model-predictive control. The approach accounts for the switching costs incurred when provisioning virtual machines and explicitly encodes the risk of provisioning resources in an uncertain and dynamic operating environment. We experimentally validate the control framework on a server cluster supporting three online services. When managed using LLC, our cluster setup saves, on average, 41% in power-consumption costs over a twenty-four hour period when compared to a system operating without dynamic control. Finally, we use trace-based simulations to analyze LLC performance on server clusters larger than our testbed and show how concepts from approximation theory can be used to further reduce the computational burden of controlling large systems.

Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment: Beyond the data center as a computer

The two dominating characteristics of new and emerging Internet applications are ultra-large scales and utility. Centralized data centers alone are often inadequate for running such applications. In this paper we introduce the concept of an Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment (iVCE), which aims to provide Cloud services by a dynamic combination of data centers and other multi-scale computing resources on the Internet. We present a model that addresses two critical challenges in iVCE: multi-scale resource aggregation and elastic binding. We then describe the design and implementation of our iVCE software platform that embodies the model. Comprehensive experiments show that iVCE provides a novel, promising way to deal with scalability and utility, thereby enabling economical and elastic Cloud Computing.

A Programming Language Approach to Internet-Based Virtual Computing Environment

There is an increasing need to build scalable distributed systems over the Internet infrastructure. However, the development of distributed scalable applications suffers from lack of a wide accepted virtual computing environment. Users have to take great efforts on the management and sharing of the involved resources over Internet, whose characteristics are intrinsic growth, autonomy and diversity. To deal with this challenge, Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment (iVCE) is proposed and developed to serve as a platform for distributed scalable applications over the open infrastructure, whose kernel mechanisms are on-demand aggregation and autonomic collaboration of resources. In this paper, we present a programming language for iVCE named Owlet. Owlet conforms with the conceptual model of iVCE, and exposes the iVCE to application developers. As an interaction language based on peer-to-peer content-based publish/subscribe scheme, Owlet abstracts the Internet as an environment for the roles to interact, and uses roles to build a relatively stable view of resources for the on-demand resource aggregation. It provides language constructs to use 1) distributed event driven rules to describe interaction protocols among different roles, 2) conversations to correlate events and rules into a common context, and 3) resource pooling to do fault tolerance and load balancing among networked nodes. We have implemented an Owlet compiler and its runtime environment according to the architecture of iVCE, and built several Owlet applications, including a peer-to-peer file sharing application. Experimental results show that, with iVCE, the separation of resource aggregation logic and business logic significantly eases the process of building scalable distributed applications.

Repeated Game Theory Based Penalty-Incentive Mechanism in Internet-Based Virtual Computing Environment

如何促进网络中自主元素自觉规范行为、积极有序协作从而形成“可信的计算平台”是下一代互联网亟需解决的重点问题.提出一种基于重复博弈的惩罚激励机制PETrust,旨在有效促进自主元素采取系统期望的诚实协作策略进行规范行为.PETrust根据自主元素信誉特征的变化动态调整惩罚力度.理论分析和实验结果表明,PETrust能够有效区分自主元素的不同行为特征,遏制和惩罚恶意行为,提高自主元素诚实交易的积极性和系统的整体效率,并具有更好的抵御共谋欺骗的能力.PETrust还同时具备计算复杂度低、报文通信量小的特点,利于部署实施.;In order to construct a trustworthy computing platform for the next Internet, there needs to be normalizing and promoting of autonomic elements in order to have them collaborate actively with on another. A novel penalty-incentive mechanism, named PETrust, based on a repeated game theory, is given in this paper. This paper aims at providing a set of mechanisms, which the behavior of autonomic elements is normalized and is promoted to take the expected strategy. PETrust adjusts the degree of penalty by changing the reputation status. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that PETrust can distinguish the different features of behavior, effectively, can punish and stifle malicious behavior, can improve the system’s entire efficiency, can stimulate autonomic elements’ honest trade enthusiasm, and can provide a better capacity of resisting collusive deception. Furthermore, PETrust presents both low time complexity and few incurred packets, which is favourable for engineering deployment and implementation.

The Development of Virtual Manufacturing Technology

As an advanced machining technology, virtual manufacturing has been regarded as an useful tool to carry out analysis and research work with digital model instead of practical manufacture. For the virtual manufacturing process, it is a mapping of the practical machining in computer virtual environment, no real production is created and without material or power wasting. Several typical definition of virtual manufacturing dominate in this fields were listed out, based on which expressed an explicit interpretation. Main features and three type of virtual manufacturing, such as design-centered, machine-centered and control centered virtual manufacturing were analysed respectively. The virtual manufacturing system, supported by cutter tool magazine, pallet storage, production database, material storage and NC storage, have been demonstrated in an architecture figure. Finally, the author concluded the important role of virtual manufacturing and illustrated an example of applying virtual manufacturing in five-axis machining process.