In recent years, many researchers investigated a new class of computer architecture, called intelligent memory (IRAM), to reduce the performance gap between the CPU and memory. In order to increase the flexibility of designing parallel applications, we develop the communication mechanisms for FlexRAM, one of the IRAM architectures. The communication protocol is called CPFR (Communication Protocol for FlexRAM). For the reason of lacking whole communication mechanism in the original FlexRAM architecture, we construct CPFR by using the features of shared-memory and the notification primitive centrally controlled by the main memory processor (P.Mem). In addition, we provide a uniform programming interface in CPFR for the programmers. An example is also used to demonstrate the usage of our communication protocol in detail.

I dagsläget tenderar många att använda tjänster som hanteras separat. Arbetet undersöker om det är möjligt att sammankoppla ett fåtal tjänster i en gemensam webbapplikation för att underlätta kommunicering mellan tjänsterna samt att förbättra användarvänligheten. Företaget A Great Thing har i åtanke att skapa en webbapplikation som tillåter användare att med hjälp av deras applikation skapa agenter som sköter händelser från användarens begäran, exempelvis “spela upp en låt vid en viss tid”. Metodiken som tillämpats har dels varit en fallstudie och dels användarbaserade metoder i form av enkätundersökning samt ett användartest. Ytterligare undersöktes hur kommunikationen går mellan tjänsters API, och de nödvändiga parametrar som utbyter data. Slutligen evalueras den framtagna prototypen enligt vissa riktlinjer inom användarvänlighet. Examensarbetets resultat är i form av en webbprototyp med fokus på användarvänlighet, implementering av API:er, användartest på faktiska användare samt statistik på efterfrågan av tjänster. Vidare har även en marknadsundersökning utförts för att belysa ekonomiska vinstmöjligheter genom API-distribution. Slutsatsen dras att det är möjligt att sammankoppla API:er och dess tjänster för att uppnå ett användarvänligt gränssnitt samt hur nödvändiga parametrar disponeras på ett effektivt vis. Vidare är förhoppningen att utomstående läsare skapar en förståelse om hur sammankopplingen går till på ett strukturerat och informativt tillvägagångssätt. Även hur olika tekniska metoder inom användarvänlighet kan tillämpas vid konstruktion av prototyper. / Nowadays people tend to use services and appliances that are managed seperately. This thesis examines the possibility of connecting different services into one main web application to faciliate communication between these services. A Great Thing have embraced the need of connecting applications to a single device and therefore, wants to create a web application integrated with the use of agents. These agents are built to manage the events a user request. For example ”Play a song at a specific time”. The methodology applied has partly been a case study and partly user-based methods in form of a survery and a user test. Further research was conducted on communication between service API:s and the necessary parameters that exchange data. Finally, the developed prototype was evaluated according to some usability guidelines. The thesis’s results are presented in the form of a web prototype focused on usability, implementation of APIs, user test of actual users and statistics of demanded services. In addition, a market research has been conducted to highlight economic benefits through API distribution. The conclusion is drawn that it is possible to link API:s and their services to achieve a user-friendly interface and how to use different parameters in an efficient way. Furthermore, the hope is that external readers will understand how the connection between API:s works in a structured and informative approach. Also how different technical methods for usability can be applied in construction of prototypes.

In the context of cloud computing, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) are isolated areas of application software that can be executed with better security, building a trusted and secure environment that is detached from the rest of the memory. Trusted Execution Environment is a technology that become available only in the last few years, and it is not widespread yet. This thesis investigates the most popular approaches to build a TEE, namely the process-based and the virtualization-based, and will abstract them as much as possible to design a common infrastructure that can deploy TEEs on an external cloud provider, no matter which technology approach is used. The thesis is relevant and novel because the project will give the possibility to use different technologies for the deployment, such as Intel SGX and AMD SEV, which are the two main solutions, but without being reliant on any particular one. If in the future new technologies or vendors’ solutions will become popular, they can be simply added to the list of options. The same can be said for the cloud provider choice. The results show that it is possible to abstract the common features of different TEE’s technologies and to use a unique Application Programming Interface (API) to deploy different TEE´s technologies. We will also ran a performance and quality evaluation, and the results show that the API is performant and respect the common standard quality. This tool is useful for the problem owner and future works on the topic of cloud security. / I samband med cloud computing är Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) isolerade områden av applikationsprogramvara som kan köras med bättre säkerhet, bygga en pålitlig och säker miljö som är frikopplad från resten av minnet. Trusted Execution Environment är en teknik som blivit tillgänglig först under de senaste åren, och den är inte utbredd ännu. Denna avhandling undersöker de mest populära metoderna för att bygga en TEE, nämligen den processbaserade och den virtualiseringsbaserade, och kommer att abstrahera dem så mycket som möjligt för att designa en gemensam infrastruktur som kan distribuera TEEs på en extern molnleverantör, oavsett vilken teknik tillvägagångssätt används. Avhandlingen är relevant och ny eftersom projektet kommer att ge möjligheten att använda olika teknologier för implementeringen, såsom Intel SGX och AMD SEV, som är de två huvudlösningarna, men utan att vara beroende av någon speciell. Om i framtiden nya teknologier eller leverantörers lösningar kommer att bli populära kan de helt enkelt läggas till i listan över alternativ. Detsamma kan sägas om valet av molnleverantör. Resultaten visar att det är möjligt att abstrahera de gemensamma egenskaperna hos olika TEE:s teknologier och att använda ett unikt Application Programming Interface (API) för att distribuera olika TEE:s teknologier. Vi kommer också att göra en prestanda- och kvalitetsutvärdering, och resultaten visar att API:et är prestanda och respekterar den gemensamma standardkvaliteten. Det här verktyget är användbart för problemägaren och framtida arbeten på ämnet molnsäkerhet.

With sales reaching $4.4 billion dollars in the first half of 2006 in the United States alone, and an estimated 80% of the world receiving coverage for their wireless phones in that year, interest in these devices as more than mere communicators has greatly increased. In the mid-to-late 1990s, digital cameras began to be incorporated into cellphones, followed shortly thereafter by Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware allowing location-based services to be offered to customers. Since then the use of mobile phone hardware for non-communication purposes has continued to expand. Some models, such as the Motorola V3M, have been specifically geared toward the storage and display of music and visual media, as well as receiving Internet broadcasts. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that relatively little has been done from an academic standpoint to provide a qualitative and comprehensive method of evaluating the performance of mobile phones regarding their ability to function as computing devices. While some manuals do offer comparisons of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that aid in the development of cellphone applications, little documentation exists to provide objective measurements of performance parameters. This dissertation proposes a framework for evaluating the performance of mobile phones from a computational angle, focusing on three criteria: the processing power of the Central Processing Unit (CPU), data transfer capabilities, and the performance of the phone's GPS functionality for the appropriation of geographic location data. Power consumption has always been a major source of interest in the study of computer systems, and the limited hardware resources of mobile devices such as laptop computers, Personal Data Assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones makes this a key concern. The power consumption factors associated with operation are therefore considered alongside the three core criteria being studied in this framework. In addition to framework design, software tools for the evaluation of cellphones were also developed, and these were applied to a test case of the Sanyo SCP-7050 model. This provides an example of the utility of the framework in evaluating existing phone models and a foundation for the assessment of new models as they are released.

This research investigates and proposes methods to be used for the automation of the conceptual design phases of variational mechanisms. It employs the concept of feature-based modeling approaches. A method is proposed for integrating the dimensional synthesis, mechanical design and CAD generation phases with minimal designer intervention. Extended feature definitions are used in this research to create a smooth data transfer platform between different engineering tools and applications. This paper also introduces another method by which a set of dimensional data collected from a family of existing products is used to predict possible solutions for a new design. This method, based on artificial neural networks for training and solution generation, is used with optimization algorithms for the dimensional synthesis of mechanisms. An excavator arm mechanism is used as a case study to demonstrate these methods. The design of this mechanism is carried out based on its digging mode configurations. / Engineering Design

<p>Digital television broadcasters use conditional access (CA) systems to protect some of their services from being viewed by people not subscribing for these services. A manufacturer of digital television receivers develops applications to handle the CA systems that the receiver shall support. A problem for the application developer is that a CA application developed for one specific CA system is usually not reusable for other CA systems because of the differences between CA systems. The CA systems are different in both their application programming interfaces (API) as well as the types of functionality that they support. </p><p>This master thesis presents a study of three APIs from different CA systems. The possibilities of defining a new CA API that supports all the functionality that is provided by existing CA APIs while still being as similar as possible to these existing APIs are investigated. The conclusion from the study is that it is not possible to define this new CA API because the studied CA systems are so different and only small parts of the provided functionality are shared between them.</p>

Epidemiological models traditionally make the assumption that populations are homogeneous. By relaxing that assumption, models often become more complicated, but better representations of the real world. Here we describe new computational tools for studying heterogeneous populations, and we examine consequences of two particular types of heterogeneity: that people are not all equally likely to interact, and that people are not all equally likely to become infected if exposed to a pathogen. Contact network epidemiology provides a robust and flexible paradigm for thinking about heterogeneous populations. Despite extensive mathematical and algorithmic methods, however, we lack a programming framework for working with epidemiological contact networks and for the simulation of disease transmission through such networks. We present EpiFire, a C++ applications programming interface and graphical user interface, which includes a fast and efficient library for generating, analyzing and manipulating networks. EpiFire also provides a variety of traditional and network-based epidemic simulations. Heterogeneous population structure may cause multi-wave epidemics, but urban populations are generally assumed to be too well mixed to have such structure. Multi-wave epidemics are not predicted by simple models, and are particularly problematic for public health officials deploying limited resources. Using a unique empirical interaction network for 103,000 people in Montreal, Canada, we show that large, urban populations may feature sufficient community structure to drive multi-wave dynamics, and that highly connected individuals may play an important role in whether communities are synchronized. Finally, we show that heterogeneous immunity is an important determinant of influenza epidemic size. While many epidemic models assume a homogeneously susceptible population and describe dynamics for one season, the trans-seasonal dynamics of partially immunizing diseases likely play a critical role in determining both future epidemic size and pathogen evolution. We present a multi-season network model of a population exposed to a pathogen conferring partial cross-immunity that decays over time. We fit the model to 25 years of influenza-like illness epidemic data from France using a novel Bayesian technique. Using conservative priors, we estimate important epidemiological quantities that are consistent with empirical studies. / text

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>Magister Scientiae - MSc / Reference single nucleotide polymorphism (refSNP) identifiers are used to earmark SNPs in the human genome. These identifiers are often found in variant call format (VCF) files. RefSNPs can be useful to include as terms submitted to search engines when sourcing biomedical literature. In this thesis, the development of a bioinformatics software package is motivated, planned and implemented as a web application (http://sniphunter.sanbi.ac.za) with an application programming interface (API). The purpose is to allow scientists searching for relevant literature to query a database using refSNP identifiers and potential keywords assigned to scientific literature by the authors. Multiple queries can be simultaneously launched using either the web interface or the API. In addition, a VCF file parser was developed and packaged with the application to allow users to upload, extract and write information from VCF files to a file format that can be interpreted by the novel search engine created during this project. The parsing feature is seamlessly integrated with the web application's user interface, meaning there is no expectation on the user to learn a scripting language. This multi-faceted software system, called SNiPhunter, envisions saving researchers time during life sciences literature procurement, by suggesting articles based on the amount of times a reference SNP identifier has been mentioned in an article. This will allow the user to make a quantitative estimate as to the relevance of an article. A second novel feature is the inclusion of the email address of a correspondence author in the results returned to the user, which promotes communication between scientists. Moreover, links to external functional information are provided to allow researchers to examine annotations associated with their reference SNP identifier of interest. Standard information such as digital object identifiers and publishing dates, that are typically provided by other search engines, are also included in the results returned to the user. / National Research Foundation (NRF) /The South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI)

Digital television broadcasters use conditional access (CA) systems to protect some of their services from being viewed by people not subscribing for these services. A manufacturer of digital television receivers develops applications to handle the CA systems that the receiver shall support. A problem for the application developer is that a CA application developed for one specific CA system is usually not reusable for other CA systems because of the differences between CA systems. The CA systems are different in both their application programming interfaces (API) as well as the types of functionality that they support. This master thesis presents a study of three APIs from different CA systems. The possibilities of defining a new CA API that supports all the functionality that is provided by existing CA APIs while still being as similar as possible to these existing APIs are investigated. The conclusion from the study is that it is not possible to define this new CA API because the studied CA systems are so different and only small parts of the provided functionality are shared between them.