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The use of asymmetric multi-core processors with on-chip computational accelerators is becoming common in a variety of environments ranging from scientific computing to enterprise applications. The focus of current research has been on making efficient use of individual systems, and porting applications to asymmetric processors. The use of these asymmetric processors, like the Cell processor, in a cluster setting is the inspiration for the Cell Connector framework presented in this thesis. Cell Connector adopts a streaming approach for providing data to compute nodes with high computing potential but limited memory resources. Instead of dividing very large data sets once among computation resources, Cell Connector slices, distributes, and collects work units off of a master data held by a single large memory machine. Using this methodology, Cell Connector is able to maximize the use of limited resources and produces results that are up to 63.3\% better compared to standard non-streaming approaches. / Master of Science

<p>A major challenge facing the South African wine industry has been the economic repositioning of the sector, which since 1994 has moved away from a highly regulated domestic environment. The increasing integration of the local industry into international markets and global value chains has been accompanied by the industry&rsquo / s deregulation and restructuring. From the production focus&nbsp / on a limited range of low value-added varieties produced for domestic tastes and to meet monopoly quotas, producers have shifted to planting noble cultivars suited to various international&nbsp / tastes. Despite the lack of growth in traditional Western European markets, new world producers like South Africa have successfully competed and secured new market share. The Western Cape&nbsp / ine industry is ranked as the second-largest contributor to the Western Cape economy. The thesis explores the effect of cluster governance and the coordination of strategic collective&nbsp / actions on the Western Cape wine cluster&rsquo / s competitiveness. The data has been gathered through a combination of documentary analysis and interviews conducted with the leadership and/or&nbsp / management of various industry organisations. A qualitative approach has been adopted in the data analysis and interpretation of the findings, with information gathered via a combination of&nbsp / documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with key representatives of established industry bodies and key role-players in the Western Cape wine cluster. </p>

<p>A major challenge facing the South African wine industry has been the economic repositioning of the sector, which since 1994 has moved away from a highly regulated domestic environment. The increasing integration of the local industry into international markets and global value chains has been accompanied by the industry&rsquo / s deregulation and restructuring. From the production focus&nbsp / on a limited range of low value-added varieties produced for domestic tastes and to meet monopoly quotas, producers have shifted to planting noble cultivars suited to various international&nbsp / tastes. Despite the lack of growth in traditional Western European markets, new world producers like South Africa have successfully competed and secured new market share. The Western Cape&nbsp / ine industry is ranked as the second-largest contributor to the Western Cape economy. The thesis explores the effect of cluster governance and the coordination of strategic collective&nbsp / actions on the Western Cape wine cluster&rsquo / s competitiveness. The data has been gathered through a combination of documentary analysis and interviews conducted with the leadership and/or&nbsp / management of various industry organisations. A qualitative approach has been adopted in the data analysis and interpretation of the findings, with information gathered via a combination of&nbsp / documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with key representatives of established industry bodies and key role-players in the Western Cape wine cluster. </p>

Magister Commercii - MCom / A major challenge facing the South African wine industry has been the economic repositioning of the sector, which since 1994 has moved away from a highly regulated domestic environment. The increasing integration of the local industry into international markets and global value chains has been accompanied by the industry’s deregulation and restructuring. From the production focus on a limited range of low value-added varieties produced for domestic tastes and to meet monopoly quotas, producers have shifted to planting noble cultivars suited to various international tastes. Despite the lack of growth in traditional Western European markets, new world producers like South Africa have successfully competed and secured new market share. The Western Cape ine industry is ranked as the second-largest contributor to the Western Cape economy. The thesis explores the effect of cluster governance and the coordination of strategic collective actions on the Western Cape wine cluster’s competitiveness. The data has been gathered through a combination of documentary analysis and interviews conducted with the leadership and/or management of various industry organisations. A qualitative approach has been adopted in the data analysis and interpretation of the findings, with information gathered via a combination of documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with key representatives of established industry bodies and key role-players in the Western Cape wine cluster. / South Africa

Expressed sequence tag database is a rich and fast growing source of data for gene expression analysis and drug discovery. Clustering of raw EST data is a necessary step for further analysis and one of the most challenging problems of modem computational biology.

Aspergillus flavus is the most common causal agent of aflatoxin contamination of food and feed. However, aflatoxin-producing potential varies widely among A. flavus genotypes with many producing no aflatoxins. Some non-aflatoxigenic genotypes are used as biocontrol agents to prevent contamination. Aflatoxin biosynthesis genes are tightly clustered in a highly conserved order. Gene deletions and presence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in aflatoxin biosynthesis genes are often associated with A. flavus inability to produce aflatoxins. In order to identify mechanisms of non-aflatoxigenicity in non-aflatoxigenic genotypes of value in aflatoxin biocontrol, complete cluster sequences of 35 A. flavus genotypes from Africa and North America were analyzed. Inability of some genotypes to produce aflatoxin resulted from deletion of biosynthesis genes. In other genotypes, non-aflatoxigenicity originated from SNP formation. The process of degeneration differed across the gene cluster; genes involved in early biosynthesis stages were more likely to be deleted while genes involved in later stages displayed high frequencies of SNPs. Comparative analyses of aflatoxin gene clusters provides insight into the diversity of mechanisms of non-aflatoxigenicity in A. flavus genotypes used as biological control agents. The sequences provide resources for both diagnosis of non-aflatoxigenicity and monitoring of biocontrol genotypes during biopesticide manufacture and in the environment.

Notre recherche porte sur un réseau territorialisé d’organisations (RTO) pour développer l’attractivité d’une destination touristique de réunions et de congrès. Le concept de cluster, en tant que forme spécifique de RTO, a retenu notre attention, car il partage un certain nombre de caractéristiques avec une destination touristique.Pour cette dernière, les relations inter organisationnelles sont essentielles au développement de son attractivité. Afin de questionner les mécanismes sous-jacents à la structuration d’un réseau, notre méthodologie se compose d’une analyse structurale et d’une étude qualitative. La première nous permet de représenter graphiquement la structure du réseau et d’appréhender ses propriétés. La seconde, qui repose sur l’approche par la proximité, nous permet de comprendre la stratégie des acteurs à partir des relations inter organisationnelles.Les résultats de cette étude de cas menée dans la région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur soulignent l’importance de la proximité de ressources matérielles et immatérielles, et de la proximité de médiation pour activer les coopérations autour de la promotion de la destination. / Destination planners and managers put all their efforts and resources to elaborate adequate plans to reach destination attractiveness in a very competitive market. Our research highlights the importance of cooperation in order to promote the brand and the image of the destination. In this frame, the concept of cluster is relevant as it shares common features with tourism destination.This study aims at identifying the most salient factors activating the inter-organizational relationships. Using structural analysis and proximities approach, we attempt to consider all the factors influencing the cooperation between organizations to reach destination attractiveness.We analyze tourism from the perspective of travel motives. Meetings and congresses tourism experts in the region Provence-Alps-French Riviera have answered a questionnaire and have been interviewed. Our results show that the most important categories for an attractive destination are the proximities of immaterial and material resources, and proximities of mediation. Findings indicate that the region Provence-Alps-French Riviera might not be the most relevant area to implement a cluster.

Sistemas de Recomendação ajudam na personalização de sites na Internet oferecendo conteúdo ou produtos específicos aos usuários. Com dispositivos móveis, aumentou o interesse do usuário em ter recomendações personalizadas de locais para ir de acordo com o seu histórico de navegação e avaliações como restaurantes e pontos turísticos. Para que as recomendações personalizadas por locais sejam mais precisas é necessário contextualizá-las de acordo com o interesse do usuário que caracterizado por locais que ele visitou e por regiões de interesse como moradia, onde trabalha ou mesmo onde passará férias. Várias técnicas de contextualização utilizaram todos os locais que o usuário visitou para geração da recomendação contextual do local, outras técnicas trabalham na arquitetura híbrida. Muitas assumem que é necessário a posição exata do usuário para que as recomendações sejam online, o que muitas vezes não é possível por limitações técnicas ou mesmo indisponibilização do usuário por questões de privacidade. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é geração de recomendações usando multicontextos de forma offline, gerando vários contextos de cada usuário. Os locais são recomendados utilizando apenas dados históricos, sem a localização exata no usuário do momento da recomendação. Para atingir este objetivo foram utilizadas técnicas de clustering para mapeamento e divisão dos contextos em regiões indicando o interesse do usuário gerando a recomendação final dos locais a partir de um método híbrido de recomendação que usa filtragem colaborativa e a recomendação contextual proposta. Os resultados mostraram que a técnica proposta apresenta recomendações melhores do que apenas a recomendação colaborativa pura e, para usuários assíduos, as recomendações são melhores do que as técnicas base usadas para comparação. / Recommender Systems help in web sites personalization, offering specific content or products to users. With mobile devices, user interest in Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has increased to receive recommendations about places to go according to your navigation and evaluation history in the web site. POI recommendation are improved by contextualizing according to users interest, based on places to where user has been and on regions of interest such as the region where the user lives, works or the region intends go on vacation. Many contextualization techniques use all places that user visited for generation of POI contextual recommendation. Other techniques use hybrid architectures and many of them assume that is necessary the exact point where the user is for online recommendation and this in not possible always due technical limitations or user privacy. The main objective of this work is the offline generation of recommendations using multicontexts. Places to be recommended use only user historical data, without the user current localization at the moment of recommendation. Several techniques have been used for clustering for mapping and division of contexts in regions, indicating the user interests and, finally, generating the final recommendation using a hybrid method with collaborative filtering and contextual recommendation proposed. The results indicate that the proposed technique builds better recommendations than the pure collaborative filtering technique and for heavy users the proposed technique has better results the baseline technique used for comparison.

A demanda por alto desempenho é um desafio enfrentado por diversas aplicações científicas. Nesse sentido, ambientes para processamento distribuído, tais como, clusters e grades computacionais, têm sido desenvolvidos para prover suporte ao uso de diversos recursos simultaneamente para uma mesma aplicação. Aplicações computacionalmente intensivas são organizadas em workflows e executadas com suporte de middlewares para abstrair a complexidade de uso de tais ambientes. Em ambientes de grade computacional, a execução de workflows contendo tarefas sequenciais e tarefas com paralelismo interno, obtendo bom desempenho, é um desafio, devido à heterogeneidade e comportamento dinâmico do ambiente. Nesse sentido, o escalonamento de workflows em ambientes de grade computacional é essencial. O problema de escalonamento de tarefas, em sua forma geral, é NPCompleto, dessa forma, o estudo do escalonamento de workflows em ambientes de grade computacional é fundamental para aprimorar a execução de aplicações computacionalmente intensivas. O objetivo dessa tese é propor estratégias de escalonamento de workflows, que exploram os seguintes aspectos: Avaliação da possibilidade de executar cada tarefa com paralelismo interno usando recursos de múltiplos clusters; Adaptação de planos de escalonamento no momento da submissão de novos workflows. Foram desenvolvidas duas estratégias: a primeira é uma estratégia para escalonamento estático de workflows, que considera o ambiente dedicado a execução de um workflow. A segunda foi desenvolvida para ser utilizada em conjunto com a primeira, para melhorar o tempo de resposta de múltiplos workflows que podem ser submetidos em diferentes momentos. As estratégias propostas foram avaliadas em um ambiente de simulação. / The demand for high performance is a common problem in many scientific applications. In this sense, distributed processing environments such as cluster, grid computing and multi-cluster environments have been developed to provide support for the use of several resources simultaneously for the same application. Computationally intensive applications are structured as workflows and executed with the support of middleware to abstract the complexity of using such environments. In grid computing environments the execution of workflows containing sequential and parallel tasks, with good performance is a challenge due to the heterogeneity and dynamic behavior of the environment. In this sense, the scheduling of workflows on grid computing environments is essential. The task scheduling problem in its general form is NP-Complete, in this sense, the study concerning workflow scheduling in grid computing environments is fundamental to improve the performance of computationally intensive applications. The aim of this thesis is to propose strategies for scheduling workflows that exploit the following aspects: Explore the possibility of performing single parallel tasks using multiple clusters; Adaptation plans escalation in accordance with the submission of new workflows. Two strategies were developed: the first one is a strategy for static scheduling of workflows, which considers a dedicated environment to the execution of a workflow. The second one was developed to use in conjunction with the first one, in order to improve the response time of multiple workflows that can be submitted at different times. The proposed strategies were evaluated in a simulation environment.