Most systems in HPC make use of hierarchical designs that allow multiple levels of parallelism to be exploited by programmers. The use of multiple multi-core/multi-processor computers to form a computer cluster supports both fine-grain and large-grain parallel computation. Aggregate function communications provide an easy to use and efficient set of mechanisms for communicating and coordinating between processing elements, but the model originally targeted only fine grain parallel hardware. This work shows that a hierarchical implementation of aggregate functions is a viable alternative to MPI (the standard Message Passing Interface library) for programming clusters that provide both fine grain and large grain execution. Performance of a prototype implementation is evaluated and compared to that of MPI.

To get the best prices, sweet cherry growers must supply blemish-free fruit. Unfortunately, mature cherries have a fragile composition, rendering them susceptible to damage from heat, wind, birds, and rain. Rain is particularly devastating, because cherries split when they absorb too much water. Since rainstorms are common in the otherwise arid regions where most cherries are grown, growers must have a system for quickly deploying rain removal methods. The current industry solution relies on human observation and implementation, which is error-prone and costly. This project proposes an automated cherry wetness system using a Decagon Devices leaf wetness sensor (LWS) and a wireless sensor network (WSN). The research consists of analyzing industry and literature for uses of WSNs and LWSs in orchards and testing a LWS in a prototype WSN. The system will be evaluated for its potential to provide a precision-agriculture solution to the problem of remote cherry wetness detection.

In recent years, mobile devices have played a significant role in daily life. As a result, Mobile Applications have become very popular. An increasing number of people are using mobile applications to handle an increasing number of personal tasks, as well as for amusement. To date, there are thousands of mobile applications available for a variety of purposes. However, there are very few specifically designed for local church use. Mobile applications are potentially more convenient and easier to operate than normal website for parishioners. Designing and implementing a mobile application for Crest Community Church, in Riverside, based on Android Developer Tools (ADT) and Android Software Development Kit (Android SDK) is this project’s primary objective. The objective of this project is to provide a communications platform where members of Crest Community Church can share news, discuss coming church events, promote and enhance the connectivity of this worship community, and provide mobile access to information not available on their present systems. A distinct feature of this project allows for communication between mobile application and webserver by creating a HTTP URL Connection. As a result, church members can publish news and events in a discussion forum as well as a dialog with other church members in a near real time format. The Crest users can also indicate that posted prayer request has been prayed for. In addition, this new application displays general church information, and provides the address and driving direction for potential visitors. Church members can also check the church’s calendar of events, special meetings and information about the Passion Center for Children ministry. This project has the ability to store and track pertinent information about each user, the content of all discussions, and retains member’s key contact data. This project successfully implemented a church mobile application. It demonstrated that a tailored mobile application can enhance the sense of community via internet for this congregation. It feather shows that mobile applications can greatly assist churches in community with members as well as visitors. The application also expanded the internet footprint of Crest Community Church, and offers other churches an avenue to improve their connectivity for the future.

The main aim of the project is to launch multiple processes and have those processes communicate with each other using peer to peer communication to eliminate the problems of multiple processes running on a single server, and multiple processes running on inhomogeneous servers as well as the problems of scalability. This entire process is done using MPICH which is a high performance and portable implementation of Message Passing Interface standard. The project involves setting up the passwordless authentication between two local servers with the help of SSH connection. By establishing a peer to peer communication and by using a unique shell script which is written using MPICH and its derivatives, I am going to demonstrate the process of inter-process communication between the servers.

Aim: To evaluate the ability of a publicly available facial recognition application program interface (API) to calculate similarity scores for pre- and post-surgical photographs of patients undergoing orthognathic surgeries. Our primary objective was to identify which surgical procedure(s) had the greatest effect(s) on similarity score. Methods: Standard treatment progress photographs for 25 retrospectively identified, orthodontic-orthognathic patients were analyzed using the API to calculate similarity scores between the pre- and post-surgical photographs. Photographs from two pre-surgical timepoints were compared as controls. Both relaxed and smiling photographs were included in the study to assess for the added impact of facial pose on similarity score. Surgical procedure(s) performed on each patient, gender, age at time of surgery, and ethnicity were recorded for statistical analysis. Nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis Rank Sum Tests were performed to univariately analyze the relationship between each categorical patient characteristic and each recognition score. Multiple comparison Wilcoxon Rank Sum Tests were performed on the subsequent statistically significant characteristics. P-Values were adjusted for using the Bonferroni correction technique. Results: Patients that had surgery on both jaws had a lower median similarity score, when comparing relaxed expressions before and after surgery, compared to those that had surgery only on the mandible (p = 0.014). It was also found that patients receiving LeFort and bilateral sagittal split osteotomies (BSSO) surgeries had a lower median similarity score compared to those that received only BSSO (p = 0.009). For the score comparing relaxed expressions before surgery versus smiling expressions after surgery, patients receiving two-jaw surgeries had lower scores than those that had surgery on only the mandible (p = 0.028). Patients that received LeFort and BSSO surgeries were also found to have lower similarity scores compared to patients that received only BSSO when comparing pre-surgical relaxed photographs to post-surgical smiling photographs (p = 0.036). Conclusions: Two-jaw surgeries were associated with a statistically significant decrease in similarity score when compared to one-jaw procedures. Pose was also found to be a factor influencing similarity scores, especially when comparing pre-surgical relaxed photographs to post-surgical smiling photographs.

Network virtualization is becoming a fundamental building block of future Internet architectures. By adding networking resources into the “cloud”, it is possible for users to rent virtual routers from the underlying network infrastructure, connect them with virtual channels to form a virtual network, and tailor the virtual network (e.g., load application-specific networking protocols, libraries and software stacks on to the virtual routers) to carry out a specific task. In addition, network virtualization technology allows such special-purpose virtual networks to co-exist on the same set of network infrastructure without interfering with each other. Although the underlying network resources needed to support virtualized networks are rapidly becoming available, constructing a virtual network from the ground up and using the network is a challenging and labor-intensive task, one best left to experts. To tackle this problem, we introduce the concept of a HyperNet, a pre-built, pre-configured network package that a user can easily deploy or access a virtual network to carry out a specific task (e.g., multicast video conferencing). HyperNets package together the network topology configuration, software, and network services needed to create and deploy a custom virtual network. Users download HyperNets from HyperNet repositories and then “run” them on virtualized network infrastructure much like users download and run virtual appliances on a virtual machine. To support the HyperNet abstraction, we created a Network Hypervisor service that provides a set of APIs that can be called to create a virtual network with certain characteristics. To evaluate the HyperNet architecture, we implemented several example Hyper-Nets and ran them on our prototype implementation of the Network Hypervisor. Our experiments show that the Hypervisor API can be used to compose almost any special-purpose network – networks capable of carrying out functions that the current Internet does not provide. Moreover, the design of our HyperNet architecture is highly extensible, enabling developers to write high-level libraries (using the Network Hypervisor APIs) to achieve complicated tasks.

The ability to use Software Defined Radio (SDR) in the civilian mobile applications will make it possible for the next generation of mobile devices to handle multi-standard personal wireless devices and ubiquitous wireless devices. The original military standard created many beneficial characteristics for SDR, but resulted in a number of disadvantages as well. Many challenges in commercializing SDR are still the subject of interest in the software radio research community. Four main issues that have been already addressed are performance, size, weight, and power. This investigation presents an in-depth study of SDR inter-components communications in terms of total link delay related to the number of components and packet sizes in systems based on Software Communication Architecture (SCA). The study is based on the investigation of the controlled environment platform. Results suggest that the total link delay does not linearly increase with the number of components and the packet sizes. The closed form expression of the delay was modeled using a logistic function in terms of the number of components and packet sizes. The model performed well when the number of components was large. Based upon the mobility applications, energy consumption has become one of the most crucial limitations. SDR will not only provide flexibility of multi-protocol support, but this desirable feature will also bring a choice of mobile protocols. Having such a variety of choices available creates a problem in the selection of the most appropriate protocol to transmit. An investigation in a real-time algorithm to optimize energy efficiency was also performed. Communication energy models were used including switching estimation to develop a waveform selection algorithm. Simulations were performed to validate the concept.

In the past decade or so, significant advances were made in the field of Future Internet Architecture (FIA) design. Undoubtedly, the size of Future Internet will increase tremendously, and so will the complexity of its users’ behaviors. This advancement means most of future Internet applications and services can only achieve and demonstrate full potential on a large-scale basis. The development of network testbeds that can validate key design decisions and expose operational issues at scale is essential to FIA research. In conjunction with the development and advancement of FIA, cyber-infrastructure testbeds have also achieved remarkable progress. For meaningful network studies, it is indispensable to utilize cyber-infrastructure testbeds appropriately in order to obtain accurate experiment results. That said, existing current network experimentation is intrinsically deficient. The existing testbeds do not offer scalability, flexibility, and realism at the same time. This dissertation aims to construct a hybrid system of conducting at-scale network studies and experiments by exploiting the distributed computing ability of current testbeds. First, this work presents a synchronization of parallel discrete event simulation that offers the simulation with transparent scalability and performance on various high-end computing platforms. The parallel simulator that we implement is configured so that it can self-adapt for the performance while running on supercomputers with disparate architectures. The simulator could be used to handle models of different sizes, varying modeling details, and different complexity levels. Second, this works addresses the issue of researching network design and implementation realistically at scale, through the use of distributed cyber-infrastructure testbeds. An existing symbiotic approach is applied to integrate emulation with simulation so that they can overcome the limitations of physical setup. The symbiotic method is used to improve the capabilities of a specific emulator, Mininet. In this case, Mininet can be used to run applications directly on the virtual machines and software switches, with network connectivity represented by detailed simulation at scale. We also propose a method for using the symbiotic approach to coordinate separate Mininet instances, each representing a different set of the overlapping network flows. This approach provides a significant improvement to the scalability of the network experiments.

A wireless mesh network is a mesh network implemented over a wireless network system such as wireless LANs. Wireless Mesh Networks(WMNs) are promising for numerous applications such as broadband home networking, enterprise networking, transportation systems, health and medical systems, security surveillance systems, etc. Therefore, it has received considerable attention from both industrial and academic researchers. This dissertation explores schemes for resource management and optimization in WMNs by means of network routing and network coding. In this dissertation, we propose three optimization schemes. (1) First, a triple-tier optimization scheme is proposed for load balancing objective. The first tier mechanism achieves long-term routing optimization, and the second tier mechanism, using the optimization results obtained from the first tier mechanism, performs the short-term adaptation to deal with the impact of dynamic channel conditions. A greedy sub-channel allocation algorithm is developed as the third tier optimization scheme to further reduce the congestion level in the network. We conduct thorough theoretical analysis to show the correctness of our design and give the properties of our scheme. (2) Then, a Relay-Aided Network Coding scheme called RANC is proposed to improve the performance gain of network coding by exploiting the physical layer multi-rate capability in WMNs. We conduct rigorous analysis to find the design principles and study the tradeoff in the performance gain of RANC. Based on the analytical results, we provide a practical solution by decomposing the original design problem into two sub-problems, flow partition problem and scheduling problem. (3) Lastly, a joint optimization scheme of the routing in the network layer and network coding-aware scheduling in the MAC layer is introduced. We formulate the network optimization problem and exploit the structure of the problem via dual decomposition. We find that the original problem is composed of two problems, routing problem in the network layer and scheduling problem in the MAC layer. These two sub-problems are coupled through the link capacities. We solve the routing problem by two different adaptive routing algorithms. We then provide a distributed coding-aware scheduling algorithm. According to corresponding experiment results, the proposed schemes can significantly improve network performance.

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