There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

"Grid" computing has emerged as an important new field, distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, innovative applications, and, in some cases, high performance orientation. In this article, the authors define this new field. First, they review the "Grid problem," which is defined as flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources--what is referred to as virtual organizations. In such settings, unique authentication, authorization, resource access, resource discovery, and other challenges are encountered. It is this class of problem that is addressed by Grid technologies. Next, the authors present an extensible and open Grid architecture, in which protocols, services, application programming interfaces, and software development kits are categorized according to their roles in enabling resource sharing. The authors describe requirements that they believe any such mechanisms must satisfy and discuss the importance of defining a compact set of intergrid protocols to enable interoperability among different Grid systems. Finally, the authors discuss how Grid technologies relate to other contemporary technologies, including enterprise integration, application service provider, storage service provider, and peer-to-peer computing. They maintain that Grid concepts and technologies complement and have much to contribute to these other approaches.

The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations

Cloud Computing, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours. This elasticity of resources, without paying a premium for large scale, is unprecedented in the history of IT. Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the general public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds. People can be users or providers of SaaS, or users or providers of Utility Computing. We focus on SaaS Providers (Cloud Users) and Cloud Providers, which have received less attention than SaaS Users. From a hardware point of view, three aspects are new in Cloud Computing.

/pdf/above-the-clouds-a-berkeley-view-of-cloud-computing-tkj3etim13.pdf

Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing

A 2001 IBM manifesto observed that a looming software complexity crisis -caused by applications and environments that number into the tens of millions of lines of code - threatened to halt progress in computing. The manifesto noted the almost impossible difficulty of managing current and planned computing systems, which require integrating several heterogeneous environments into corporate-wide computing systems that extend into the Internet. Autonomic computing, perhaps the most attractive approach to solving this problem, creates systems that can manage themselves when given high-level objectives from administrators. Systems manage themselves according to an administrator's goals. New components integrate as effortlessly as a new cell establishes itself in the human body. These ideas are not science fiction, but elements of the grand challenge to create self-managing computing systems.

The vision of autonomic computing

Formation of 3-Oxa- and 3-Thiacyclohexyne from Ring Expansion of Heterocyclic Alkylidene Carbenes: A Mechanistic Study

/pdf/support-for-the-user-level-management-of-parallelism-10agg8w3fy.pdf

Support for the User-Level Management of Parallelism

https://zenodo.org/record/7950052/files/2023_1_0802.pdf

The use of generative models to speed up the discovery of materials

Portable systems demand energy effi ciency in order to maximize battery life. IRAM architectures, which combine DRAM and a processor on the same chip in a DRAM process, are more energy efficien t than conventional systems. The high density of DRAM permits a much larger amount of memory on-chip than a traditional SRAM cache design in a logic process. This allows most or all IRAM memory accesses to be satisfie d on-chip. Thus there is much less need to drive high-capacitance off-chip buses, which contribute significa ntly to the energy consumption of a system. To quantify this advantage we apply models of energy consumption in DRAM and SRAM memories to results from cache simulations of applications reflec tive of personal productivity tasks on low power systems. We fi nd that IRAM memory hierarchies consume as little as 22% of the energy consumed by a conventional memoryhierarchy for memoryintensive applications, while delivering comparable performance. Furthermore, the energy consumed by a system consisting of an IRAM memory hierarchy combined with an energy efficien t CPU core is as little as 40% of that of the same CPU core with a traditional memory hierarchy.

The Energy Efficiencyof IRAM Architectures

The core Internet protocols were not designed to protect the privacy of content or the identities of communicating users, thus making censorship and surveillance easy. The same problem persists at higher level protocols, popular peer-to-peer networks are trivial to monitor even for an adversary with limited resources. In fact, recent developments suggest that censorship and surveillance of Internet users is becoming more prevalent over time. 
This dissertation describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of two systems that can bring us towards a future where censorship and surveillance is hard. OneSwarm is a privacy-preserving data sharing network designed to give users performance comparable to the peer-to-peer networks commonly used today but without revealing their behavior to third party surveillance. Unblock is an overlay network that leverages many of the same building blocks but is designed to help users circumvent censorship of Internet services. Common to both systems is the use of existing social trust between participants to thwart surveillance and censorship respectively. These systems are designed to run on today's Internet and require no changes to core Internet infrastructure or protocols. Measurements of the systems in the wild, and simulations of their behavior at scale, show that they protect user privacy and improve performance over existing alternatives.

Thomas Anderson

Papers

Formation of 3-Oxa- and 3-Thiacyclohexyne from Ring Expansion of Heterocyclic Alkylidene Carbenes: A Mechanistic Study

Support for the User-Level Management of Parallelism

The use of generative models to speed up the discovery of materials

The Energy Efficiencyof IRAM Architectures

Privacy and performance in social overlay networks