Sequential prefetching schemes are widely employed in storage servers to mask disk latency and improve system throughput. However, existing schemes cannot benefit parallel disk systems as expected due to the fact that they ignore the distinct internal characteristics of the parallel disk system, in particular, data striping. Moreover, their aggressive prefetching pattern suffers from premature evictions and prolonged request latencies. In this paper, we propose a strip-oriented asynchronous prefetching (SoAP) technique, which is dedicated to the parallel disk system. It settles the above-mentioned problems by providing multiple novel features, e.g., enhanced prediction accuracy, adaptive prefetching strength, physical data layout awareness, and timely prefetching. To validate SoAP, we implement a prototype by modifying the software redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID) under Linux. Experimental results demonstrate that SoAP can consistently offer improved average response time and throughput to the parallel disk system under non-random workloads compared with STEP, SP, ASP, and Linux-like SEQPs.

In forest dynamics models, the intensive computation and load involved in the simulation of seed dispersal can become unbearably huge for large-scale forest analysis. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-resolution algorithm to compute seed dispersal on GPU. By exploiting the computation parallelism of seed dispersal, the computation of the whole forest plot is divided into multiple small plot cells, which are computed independently by parallel threads on GPU. To further improve the calculation efficiency with limited threads scale for GPU computation, we propose a hierarchical method to cluster the plot cells into a multi-resolution form according to the biological curves of tree seed dispersal. Experimental results show that our algorithm not only greatly reduces computational time but also obtains comparably correct results as compared to the naive GPU algorithm, which makes it especially suitable for large-scale forest modeling.

In classic community detection, it is assumed that communities are exclusive, in the sense of either soft clustering or hard clustering. It has come to attention in the recent literature that many real-world problems violate this assumption, and thus overlapping community detection has become a hot research topic. The existing work on this topic uses either content or link information, but not both of them. In this paper, we deal with the issue of overlapping community detection by combining content and link information. We develop an effective solution called subgraph overlapping clustering (SOC) and evaluate this new approach in comparison with several peer methods in the literature that use either content or link information. The evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and promise of SOC in dealing with large scale real datasets.

Ball grid arrays (BGAs) have been used in the production of electronic devices/assemblies because of their advantages of small size, high I/O port density, etc. However, BGA voids can degrade the performance of the board and cause failure. In this paper, a novel blob filter is proposed to automatically detect BGA voids presented in X-ray images. The proposed blob filter uses the local image gradient magnitude and thus is not influenced by image brightness, void position, or component interference. Different sized average box filters are employed to analyze the image in multi-scale, and as a result, the proposed blob filter is robust to void size. Experimental results show that the proposed method obtains void detection accuracy of up to 93.47% while maintaining a low false ratio. It outperforms another recent algorithm based on edge detection by 40.69% with respect to the average detection accuracy, and by 16.91% with respect to the average false ratio.

This paper addresses the problem of approximating parameter dependent nonlinear systems in a unified framework. This modeling has been presented for the first time in the form of parameter dependent piecewise affine systems. In this model, the matrices and vectors defining piecewise affine systems are affine functions of parameters. Modeling of the system is done based on distinct spaces of state and parameter, and the operating regions are partitioned into the sections that we call ‘multiplied simplices’. It is proven that this method of partitioning leads to less complexity of the approximated model compared with the few existing methods for modeling of parameter dependent nonlinear systems. It is also proven that the approximation is continuous for continuous functions and can be arbitrarily close to the original one. Next, the approximation error is calculated for a special class of parameter dependent nonlinear systems. For this class of systems, by solving an optimization problem, the operating regions can be partitioned into the minimum number of hyper-rectangles such that the modeling error does not exceed a specified value. This modeling method can be the first step towards analyzing the parameter dependent nonlinear systems with a uniform method.

The parametric model of stratospheric airships is established in the body axes coordinate system. In this paper we study the turning mechanism of stratospheric airships including the generated forces and the key parameters for steady turning. We compare and analyze the different driven-characteristics between aerodynamic control surfaces and vectored thrust in turning. We design a composite control combining aerodynamic control surfaces and vectored thrust according to different dynamic pressure conditions, to achieve coordinated turning under high or low airspeed situations.

We describe a single sided matrix converter (SSMC) designed for safety critical applications like flight control actuation systems. Dynamic simulations of multi-phase SSMC using Matlab Simulink are carried out to evaluate the fault tolerance capabilities. Investigation into different numbers of phases and power converter topologies under single phase open circuit, single switch open circuit, and single switch short circuit has been executed. The simulation results confirm 5-phase SSMC design as a compromise between fault tolerance and converter size/volume. A 5-phase SSMC prototype was built. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our design.