Personal computer

About: Personal computer is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 58809 publications have been published within this topic receiving 800814 citations. The topic is also known as: PC.

Impact of unit commitment constraints on generation expansion planning with renewables

Abstract: Growing use of renewables pushes thermal generators against operating constraints — e.g. ramping, minimum output, and operating reserves — that are traditionally ignored in expansion planning models. We show how including such unit-commitment-derived details can significantly change energy production and optimal capacity mix. We introduce a method for efficiently combining unit commitment and generation expansion planning into a single mixed-integer optimization model. Our formulation groups generators into categories allowing integer commitment states from zero to the installed capacity. This formulation scales well, runs much faster (e.g. 5000×) than individual plant binary decisions, and makes the combined model computationally tractable for large systems (hundreds of generators) at hourly time resolutions (8760 hours) using modern solvers on a personal computer. We show that ignoring these constraints during planning can result in a sub-optimal capacity mix with significantly higher operating costs (17%) and carbon emissions (39%) and/or the inability to meet emissions targets.

Taming The Big Data Tidal Wave: Finding Opportunities in Huge Data Streams with Advanced Analytics

Abstract: You receive an e-mail. It contains an offer for a complete personal computer system. It seems like the retailer read your mind since you were exploring computers on their web site just a few hours prior. As you drive to the store to buy the computer bundle, you get an offer for a discounted coffee from the coffee shop you are getting ready to drive past. It says that since youre in the area, you can get 10% off if you stop by in the next 20 minutes. As you drink your coffee, you receive an apology from the manufacturer of a product that you complained about yesterday on your Facebook page, as well as on the companys web site. Finally, once you get back home, you receive notice of a special armor upgrade available for purchase in your favorite online video game. It is just what is needed to get past some spots youve been struggling with. Sound crazy? Are these things that can only happen in the distant future? No. All of these scenarios are possible today! Big data. Advanced analytics. Big data analytics. It seems you cant escape such terms today. Everywhere you turn people are discussing, writing about, and promoting big data and advanced analytics. Well, you can now add this book to the discussion. What is real and what is hype? Such attention can lead one to the suspicion that perhaps the analysis of big data is something that is more hype than substance. While there has been a lot of hype over the past few years, the reality is that we are in a transformative era in terms of analytic capabilities and the leveraging of massive amounts of data. If you take the time to cut through the sometimes-over-zealous hype present in the media, youll find something very real and very powerful underneath it. With big data, the hype is driven by genuine excitement and anticipation of the business and consumer benefits that analyzing it will yield over time. Big data is the next wave of new data sources that will drive the next wave of analytic innovation in business, government, and academia. These innovations have the potential to radically change how organizations view their business. The analysis that big data enables will lead to decisions that are more informed and, in some cases, different from what they are today. It will yield insights that many can only dream about today. As youll see, there are many consistencies with the requirements to tame big data and what has always been needed to tame new data sources. However, the additional scale of big data necessitates utilizing the newest tools, technologies, methods, and processes. The old way of approaching analysis just wont work. It is time to evolve the world of advanced analytics to the next level. Thats what this book is about. Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave isnt just the title of this book, but rather an activity that will determine which businesses win and which lose in the next decade. By preparing and taking the initiative, organizations can ride the big data tidal wave to success rather than being pummeled underneath the crushing surf. What do you need to know and how do you prepare in order to start taming big data and generating exciting new analytics from it? Sit back, get comfortable, and prepare to find out!

GPU virtualization on VMware's hosted I/O architecture

Abstract: Modern graphics co-processors (GPUs) can produce high fidelity images several orders of magnitude faster than general purpose CPUs, and this performance expectation is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in personal computers. Despite this, GPU virtualization is a nascent field of research. This paper introduces a taxonomy of strategies for GPU virtualization and describes in detail the specific GPU virtualization architecture developed for VMware's hosted products (VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion).We analyze the performance of our GPU virtualization with a combination of applications and microbenchmarks. We also compare against software rendering, the GPU virtualization in Parallels Desktop 3.0, and the native GPU. We find that taking advantage of hardware acceleration significantly closes the gap between pure emulation and native, but that different implementations and host graphics stacks show distinct variation. The microbenchmarks show that our architecture amplifies the overheads in the traditional graphics API bottlenecks: draw calls, downloading buffers, and batch sizes.Our virtual GPU architecture runs modern graphics-intensive games and applications at interactive frame rates while preserving virtual machine portability. The applications we tested achieve from 86% to 12% of native rates and 43 to 18 frames per second with VMware Fusion 2.0.

Methods and apparatus of displaying and evaluating motion data in a motion game apparatus

Abstract: Methods of displaying and evaluating of a motion data in a motion game apparatus are disclosed. According to the present invention, the motion of a game player following the motion of a dancer can be tracked and evaluated in real time. To induce the correct motion out of the player, in addition to simply showing the animated dancing (or any other motion) character, a display method called the “sliding ghost” metaphor is proposed. Sliding ghosts refers to consecutive freeze frames of the motion data representing key postures of the motion. Also, for enhanced viewing of the motion data, the player can set the view point and key postures may be augmented, with short texts/audio display to further inform the player of the next/current dance (motion) segment to perform. The motion of the player is captured by tracking five specific positions of the player's body. The five body positions are tracked by having the player wear reflective markers on the respective positions, by using four analog/digital cameras with infrared light diodes/filter, a digital signal processing (DSP) board and a personal computer. The computational cost is made lower by taking advantage of the history based prediction and reference motion data. As the motion capture of the player occurs, an instant evaluation is performed by a simple comparison at each discrete time instant and later totaled and averaged for an overall score.

Menu control in a graphical user interface

Abstract: In a graphical user interface (GUI) for a personal computer system, an improved method and apparatus for accessing and executing commands associated with user applications. In addition to the standard menu categories of a menubar and control icons of a tool bar, the present invention provides a "hyperbutton", a "context sensitive pop-up menu" and a "menu control editor". A hyperbutton displays, in a persistent subview, a user selected default hyperitem from the hyperitems of the menubar. The default hyperitem is automatically executed when selected by the user with a mouse. The hyperbutton displays a title of the default hyperitem. The user can change the default hyperitem using a pop-up menu displayed in response to an interface command such as a right mouse button. A context sensitive pop-up menu is associated with a particular object such as a grid subview. The user configures the context sensitive pop-up menu to contain a custom set of the hyperitems associated with the object. A hyperitem editor allows the user to configure the hyperbutton and context sensitive pop-up menu by defining the associated hyperitems and their attributes.