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The warp knitting machine market has long been dominated by large-scale flat models, which have been steadily developed. Tubular fabrics are generally made in a special version of flat warp knitting machines containing two needle bars, one for each side of the tube, joined on the sides by yarns knitting alternatively on each bar. Warp knitting technology has failed to enter the circular knitting industry, dominated by weft knitting, due to its complexity in achieving warp knit structures in circular form. This thesis presents the design, synthesis, manufacture and test of an innovative method of producing tubular warp knitting fabrics, using a circular format rather than flat needle bars. This novel concept opens up many industrial applications from medical textiles to fruit packaging.

There has been a tremendous growth in the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) for the acceleration of general purpose applications. The growth is primarily due to the huge computing power offered by the GPUs and the emergence of programming languages such as CUDA and OpenCL. A typical GPU consists of several 100s to a few 1000s of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) cores, organized as 10s of Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), each having several SIMD cores which operate in a lock-step manner, o ering a few TeraFLOPS of performance in a single socket. SMs execute instructions from a group of consecutive threads, called warps. At each cycle, an SM schedules a warp from a group of active warps and can context switch among the active warps to hide various stalls. However, various factors, such as global memory latency, divergence among warps of a thread block (TB), branch divergence among threads of a warp (Control Divergence), number of active warps, etc., can significantly impact the ability of a warp scheduler to hide stalls. This reduces the speedup of applications running on the GPU. Further, applications containing loops with potential cross iteration dependences, do not utilize the available resources (SIMD cores) effectively and hence su er in terms of performance. In this thesis, we propose several mechanisms which address the above issues and enhance the performance of GPU applications through efficient warp scheduling, taming branch and warp divergence, and runtime parallelization. First, we propose RLWS, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Warp Scheduler which uses unsupervised learning to schedule warps based on the current state of the core and the long-term benefits of scheduling actions. As the design space involving the state variables used by the RL and the RL parameters (such as learning and exploration rates, reward and penalty values, etc.) is large, we use a Genetic Algorithm to identify the useful subset of state variables and RL parameter values. We evaluated the proposed RL based scheduler using the GPGPU-SIM simulator on a large number of applications from the Rodinia, Parboil, CUDA-SDK and GPGPU-SIM benchmark suites. Our RL based implementation achieved an average speedup of 1.06x over the Loose Round Robin (LRR) strategy and 1.07x over the Two-Level (TL) strategy. A salient feature of RLWS is that it is robust, i.e., performs nearly as well as the best performing warp scheduler, consistently across a wide range of applications. Using the insights obtained from RLWS, we designed PRO, a heuristic warp scheduler which in addition to hiding the long latencies of certain operations, reduces the waiting time of warps at synchronization points. Evaluation of the proposed algorithm using the GPGPU-SIM simulator on a diverse set of applications showed an average speedup of 1.07x over the LRR warp scheduler and 1.08x over the TL warp scheduler. In the second part of the thesis, we address problems due to warp and branch divergences. First, many GPU kernels exhibit warp divergence due to various reasons such as, different amounts of work, cache misses, and thread divergence. Also, we observed that some kernels contain code which is redundant across TBs, i.e., all TBs will execute the code identically and hence compute the same results. To improve performance of such kernels, we propose a solution based on the concept of virtual TBs and loop independent code motion. We propose necessary code transformations which enable one virtual TB to execute the kernel code for multiple real TBs. We evaluated this technique using the GPGPU-SIM simulator on a diverse set of applications and observed an average improvement of 1.08x over the LRR and 1.04x over the Greedy Then Old (GTO) warp scheduling algorithms. Second, branch divergence causes execution of diverging branches to be serialized to execute only one control ow path at a time. Existing stack based hardware mechanism to reconverge threads causes duplicate execution of code for unstructured control ow graphs (CFG). We propose a simple and elegant transformation to convert an unstructured CFG to a structured CFG. The transformation eliminates duplicate execution of user code while incurring only a linear increase in the number of basic blocks and also the number of instructions. We implemented the proposed transformation at the PTX level using the Ocelot compiler infrastructure and demonstrate that the pro-posed technique is effective in handling the performance problem due to divergence in unstructured CFGs. Our third proposal is to enable efficient execution of loops with indirect memory accesses that can potentially cause cross iteration dependences. Such dependences are hard to detect using existing compilation techniques. We present an algorithm to compute at run-time, the cross iteration dependences in such loops, using both the CPU and the GPU. It effectively uses the compute capabilities of the GPU to collect the memory accesses performed by the iterations. Using the dependence information, the loop iterations are levelized such that each level contains independent iterations which can be executed in parallel. Experimental evaluation on real hardware (NVIDIA GPUs) reveals that the proposed technique can achieve an average speedup of 6.4x on loops with a reasonable number of cross iteration dependences.

This thesis contributes to the field of academic game studies by reworking and updating the established theories of Espen Aarseth, Janet Murray and Marie-Laure Ryan in understanding the path in videogames. It also draws upon the more recent theoretical discussions of figures such as Jesper Juul, Lev Manovich, Frans Mäyrä and James Newman in order to explore the player’s experience along these paths in the gameworld. By defining a vocabulary of routes through space, the thesis uses the maze in particular as a way of understanding the paths of videogames. The research starts by examining our cultural understanding of the maze within videogames. Various mazes around the UK were walked in order to understand their design and how this may translate into the virtual world of the videogame. The thesis examines the uses of real world mazes through the work of Penelope Doob, and Herman Kern to discuss how the videogame may rework our cultural understanding of the maze due to its increasingly ubiquitous nature. This enables a discussion of maze-paths found within many videogames that are not necessarily categorised by what is often discussed as the maze genre of games. A morphology of maze-paths is devised through comparing the mazes of the real world and the virtual mazes of the videogame. This is achieved by breaking down the maze into separate path types and shows how these paths may link to one another. The thesis argues that the paths of the videogame are generated by the player’s actions. Therefore the focus of this thesis is on the player’s experience along these paths and the objects found at points on them. In acknowledging how to overcome obstacles along the path it is also possible to understand the role of the path in the player’s learning and mastery of the gameworld. This leads to discussions of different types of play experienced by the player in the videogame. Play is separated into what I term purposeful play, being the activities intended by the designer, and appropriated play which is the play formed out of the player’s exploration of the game system. These two terms help to understand player’s incentives for playing along the ruled paths of the gameworld as well as exploring the game’s system further to find new types of play outside of the pre-determined rules. As this thesis is concerned with videogames involving the player’s avatar having a direct relationship with the path, the research also investigates what happens when certain devices break these paths. It was discovered that warp devices reconstruct both temporal and narrative elements within the gamespace, and cause the player’s avatar to temporarily move on tracks through the gameworld. In defining a vocabulary of movement through space on a fixed track, as opposed to a player-determined path, there is a further understanding of the player experience related to each type of route taken in the game. Through an understanding of the maze and defining a vocabulary of maze-paths, tracks and objects found along them, this thesis adds a new contribution to knowledge. It also acknowledges the importance of different types of play within videogames and how these can shape the player experience along the paths of the game.

"With the rapid development of the Internet, cloud gaming has increasingly gained attention. Cloud gaming is a new type of cloud service that allows a game to run on the cloud servers, and players interact with the game remotely on their own light-weight clients. There are many potential benefits for both players and game developers to deploy a game on a cloud server, such as reducing the need for clients to update the game, easing development of cross-device games and helping prevent software piracy. In this work, I developed a cloud game engine, Drizzle, with a time warp algorithm for latency compensation, and implemented a new transmission method that reduces the network bandwidth. Using Drizzle, I also developed a simple cloud game to evaluate the functionality and performance. Experiments with this game in a controlled laboratory environment provide objective measurements of game performance and subjective measurements of user performance. Analysis of the results shows Drizzle with time warp did not reduce noticeable latency but helped players get higher game scores compared to Drizzle without time warp. Moreover, Drizzle reduced network bitrates compared to some conventional cloud transmission methods."

Mannheim, Univ., Diss., 2008.

Mannheim, Univ., Diss., 2008.

The main objective of this thesis is an analysis of assessment techniques face, and cephalometric evaluation methods that are suitable for treatment of jaw position and design methods for treatment of jaw. At the same time the emphasis is on studying the methods,java advance imaging, which are used for the curvature of the image and should be able to meet the objectives of the assignment. These adjustments can be made using the Warp. Result of this work is an application developed in JAVA programming language, which demonstrates the best method for modifying the image. This method is WarpGrid. The application was made in the development environment eclipse. With this application, depending on the mouse action is possible to modify the image.

April 6, 2007 I submitted the first draft of this final project to Sabina Murray’s workshop in the fall of 2004. I was mainly concerned with narrative then. I wanted the story to move. I wasn’t interested in writing as much as providing a framework. I told myself, there’ll be time enough for writing, the creative kind—keep the flourishes to a minimum for now. The result was an outline with flimsy characters sifted in. Workshop feedback suggested the same. (Sabina also caught a malapropism I’ve not been allowed to forget: I described a character’s long legs as like those of a gelding. I meant yearling, I think. We all had a laugh. In a draft before this final project version Sabina snagged another one: ‘braying’ used when ‘rearing’ was intended. For a lobster.) I didn’t work much on that first draft for the next year, focused as I was on short stories. (During that time I planned on submitting a collection as my final project. I had six or seven that I thought were pretty fit and worth more work.) In the spring of 2006 I went at the novel more consistently. By the summer I was working on it daily, which has more or less been the case since. The basic narrative of the second attempt was the same: guy leaves corporate job to work on lobster boat on Cape Cod, meets many characters in that insular world, one of whom may be hauling other lobstermen’s pots. Guy also has love interest. Through that narrative I meant to explore the development of D.L., who saw himself as a lost, alienated 30-year-old with potential but unable to fit in anywhere. His journey from New York, the site of his two most recent failures, to Orleans would yield new and different perceptions. I like the idea that a protagonist continues to do what he/she’s always done until circumstances of the narrative prompt change. D.L. was meant to see that many of his problems existed only in his head. I read Dostoyevsky’s The Double in David Lenson’s Individualism and its Discontents course (spring 2005). It got me thinking again about self consciousness. I didn’t intend for D.L. to descend into paranoid madness like Golyadkin but The Double served as an example of how I might explore D.L. more than I had on the first go round. Changing perception was the broad theme to work through the narrative. I would fill D.L. out more, lend him more introspection. The challenge seemed to be in gauging when and how much the story should be in his head. I started doing an end around. I thought I could introduce new perceptions through other characters. Hence Jack’s early talk of cliffs moving. In previous iterations, D.L. ruminated more on that non sequitur. He was talking to himself and it seemed too obvious: Was Jack saying my problems were in my head? Another concern is that D.L.’s thoughts often felt and still do at times feel like commentary. The scene in Wellfleet, which is mostly dialogue between D.L. and Suzie, is an example. Dreamlike moments—the cliffs, high tide flowing as a river down Jack’s street, D.L.’s faux dream, Jack’s real dream, even H. erectus walking among us—are attempts to create more of D.L.’s world, to create more of a feeling. To whatever extent those moments are effective, I think there should be more. My biggest concern with this effort is that there’s still too much dialogue. I don’t know if I’ve lost some creative vigor or if the paucity of literary prose is a result of the process, particularly the initial narrative concern of wanting to keep the story moving. Or something else. But I’ve felt less natural, less like myself as a writer throughout much of the process of writing this novel. I handed over a new draft to committee this past winter. Feedback included concerns over the dialogue itself, that the characters weren’t moving while talking, weren’t described enough; missing connective tissue between chapters; problems with moving around in time rather than taking a more linear approach; and too much in the way of lobstering details. These are the areas I’ve focused on since. Switching to linear time has made a big difference, I think. I’ve worked on movement and dialogue but there are still long chunks in which characters are talking more than doing (as related to above creative concerns). Lobstering details have been a concern from the start as I didn’t want this to be Lobstering 101, but also because it can clog the narrative. I’ve often struggled with feeling the need to include information that isn’t necessary and gets in the way. It’s a tough habit to break for me but I think I’ve gotten better in that regard in my years in the program, particularly with short stories, in which more concision is a requirement because of space. The pages that follow are a considerable improvement from that first draft of 2004. I see this as the first half of the novel. I imagine the second half will be about as long. I’m not crazy about the title but I have a scene in mind at or near the end that makes sense of it. ‘Thin water’ is clear water, not turbid. - Jeremy Church

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