Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Construction Projects involve a large number of participants with often overlapping activities. Schedules play a key role in coordination of these activities. A general contractor or a construction manager is usually responsible for coordination and has a master schedule that covers the scope of the entire project. The individual participants have different project management objectives and build schedules for their scope of work using different breakdown structures, different levels of detail, different scheduling software and different naming conventions. Existing scheduling techniques and software provide a robust set of constructs to generate these individual schedules. However, coordination of these schedules is a manual iterative task not adequately supported by existing theories and software tools. The primary aim of this research was to provide a framework to enable analysis across distributed heterogeneous schedules. The framework presented in this dissertation, schedule mappings, provides a set of constructs to dynamically link individual participant schedules to the master schedule. The schedule mappings approach uses the linked schedules to facilitate schedule coordination by rapid identification of scheduling conflicts. This identification enables rapid initial coordination of schedules and supports assessment of scheduling alternatives in response to a schedule change. A software tool was developed using Microsoft Visual Basic[trademark] programming language as a Shared Addin for Microsoft Project[trademark]. This dissertation contributes to state of the art of scheduling by providing a framework for reasoning across multiple schedules. From an industry perspective, this research makes a contribution by formalizing identification of scheduling conflicts. The formalisms and the tool should help industry professionals in rapid assessment of scheduling alternatives. The tool enabled the use of the schedule mappings approach by industry professionals and was used for validation. The approach was validated in a two step process and was shown to be beneficial. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2007. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 184-193).

With the fast-approaching limits of single-threaded CPU performance, chip vendors are manufacturing an array of radically different computing architectures, including multicore and heterogeneous architectures, to continue to accelerate computer performance. An important emerging data point in the heterogeneous architecture design space is heterogeneity in instruction-set architecture (ISA). ISA-heterogeneity is emerging in many forms. An exemplar case is Smart I/O devices such as SmartNICs and SmartSSDs that incorporate CPUs of the RISC ISA family (e.g, ARM64, RISC-V), which when integrated with a highperformance server with CPUs of the CISC ISA family (e.g., x86-64) yields a single machine with heterogeneous-ISA CPUs. This thesis presents the design of a shared memory OS for a cache-coherent, shared memory heterogeneous-ISA hardware. The OS, called ZxOS, is built by modifying the open-source ZephyrOS, including its architecture-specific code and page mapping mechanism to create a memory region that can be shared across heterogeneous- ISA CPUs. Since existent heterogeneous-ISA hardware has physically discrete memory for ISA-heterogeneous CPUs, ZxOS targets a software emulation environment that emulates cache-coherent, shared memory heterogeneous-ISA hardware. Our experimental evaluation using a set of micro- and macro-benchmarks demonstrate ZxOS's functionality. In particular, they show that a multithreaded application's threads can be split across (simulated) ISA-heterogeneous cores for parallel execution and that thread's concurrent access of shared memory variables is consistent. / Master of Science / The computing industry saw a growing difficulty with power management and heat dissipation in single-core CPUs with high clock speeds. Chip vendors adapted multi-core chip strategy because it improved power and performance characteristics. This idea evolved into heterogeneous computing paradigm, which uses heterogeneous instruction-set-architecture(ISA) cores in a single system. Many server-grade specialized devices were provided with RISCbased general-purpose CPU to efficiently manage requests from the server. SmartNICs and SmartSSDs are the best examples of these smart devices. When integrated with generally present CISC(x86_64) processors in server space, these devices resulted in machine-level heterogeneous-ISA CPUs. This thesis presents a novel design of a shared memory OS for a cache-coherent, shared memory heterogeneous-ISA hardware. The OS, called ZxOS, is built by extending the ZephyrOS. Many of the architecture-specific codes were modified to create a memory region that can be shared across the cores. ZxOS is aimed at a software emulation environment for cache-coherent, shared memory heterogeneous-ISA systems. ZxOS has demonstrated the capability to run multi-threaded applications in a split fashion across heterogeneous-ISA cores. The heterogeneous-ISA cores execute threads parallelly, and the thread's shared memory interactions were observed to be consistent.

<p> An emerging trend in computing is to use distributed heterogeneous computing (HC) systems to execute a set of tasks. Cluster computer systems, grids, and Desktop Grids are three popular kinds of HC systems. An important component of an HC system is its resource management system (RMS). The main responsibility of an RMS is assigning resources to tasks in order to satisfy certain performance requirements. </p> <p> For cluster computer systems, we propose a new mapping heuristic which requires less state information than current heuristics. For Desktop Grids, we propose a new scheduling policy that exploits knowledge of the effective computing power delivered by the machines and the distribution of their fault times in order to improve performance. Finally, for grids, we propose a new decentralized load balancing policy which dramatically cuts down the communication overhead incurred in state information update. </p> <p> The proposed resource management policies utilize the solution to a linear programming problem (LP) which maximizes the system capacity. Our simulation experiments show that these policies perform very competitively, especially in highly heterogeneous systems. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

"January 2004" / Bibliography: leaves 183-198. / xv, 198 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / As no single specification or verification method is able to solve all classes of problems, especially with industrial-sized applications, a diversity of modelling languages and analysis techniques specialised and optimized for various domains is needed, along with the ability to use them in combination. The work presented in this thesis has concentrated on developing techniques to support the use of a combination of modelling languages, especially visual languages, for system specification. Also, in order to tackle the main obstacles of model checking and make it more accessible to and usable by practising engineers, this work has focused on providing lightweight but effective methods and tools to alleviate the state space explosion problem in model checking. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 2004

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 124 p. : ill. (some col.). Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-124).

"January 2004" / Bibliography: leaves 183-198. / xv, 198 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / As no single specification or verification method is able to solve all classes of problems, especially with industrial-sized applications, a diversity of modelling languages and analysis techniques specialised and optimized for various domains is needed, along with the ability to use them in combination. The work presented in this thesis has concentrated on developing techniques to support the use of a combination of modelling languages, especially visual languages, for system specification. Also, in order to tackle the main obstacles of model checking and make it more accessible to and usable by practising engineers, this work has focused on providing lightweight but effective methods and tools to alleviate the state space explosion problem in model checking. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 2004

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references (ℓ. 112-116)