Cloud providers, like Amazon and Microsoft, must guarantee high availability for a large fraction of their workloads. For this reason, they build datacenters with redundant infrastructures for power delivery and cooling. Typically, the redundant resources are reserved for use only during infrastructure failure or maintenance events, so that workload performance and availability do not suffer. Unfortunately, the reserved resources also produce lower power utilization and, consequently, require more datacenters to be built. To address these problems, in this paper we propose "zero-reserved-power" datacenters and the Flex system to ensure that workloads still receive their desired performance and availability. Flex leverages the existence of software-redundant workloads that can tolerate lower infrastructure availability, while imposing minimal (if any) performance degradation for those that require high infrastructure availability. Flex mainly comprises (1) a new offline workload placement policy that reduces stranded power while ensuring safety during failure or maintenance events, and (2) a distributed system that monitors for failures and quickly reduces the power draw while respecting the workloads’ requirements, when it detects a failure. Our evaluation shows that Flex produces less than 5% stranded power and increases the number of deployed servers by up to 33%, which translates to hundreds of millions of dollars in construction cost savings per datacenter site. We end the paper with lessons from our experience bringing Flex to production in Microsoft’s datacenters.

Over the past four years the authors have conducted classes and workshops in design of systems for real-time digital synthesis of sound and haptic response. In response to current trends in Interaction Design education focusing on visual feedback and touchscreen interactions, the classes were developed to provide foundations for design students to leverage the potential of non-visual modes of interaction and provide them with tools and skills to develop complex multimodal, embodied experiences. These classes have been held in various institutions, have formed the basis for short workshops at conferences as well as provided tools for collaborations with external partners. In this paper we describe for the first time the extent of the project and reflect on this particular field of Interaction Design education.

MOTIVATION: Insertion sequences (ISs) are transposable elements present in most bacterial and archaeal genomes that play an important role in genomic evolution. The increasing availability of sequenced prokaryotic genomes offers the opportunity to study ISs comprehensively, but development of efficient and accurate tools is required for discovery and annotation. Additionally, prokaryotic genomes are frequently deposited as incomplete, or draft stage because of the substantial cost and effort required to finish genome assembly projects. Development of methods to identify IS directly from raw sequence reads or draft genomes are therefore desirable. Software tools such as Optimized Annotation System for Insertion Sequences and IScan currently identify IS elements in completely assembled and annotated genomes; however, to our knowledge no methods have been developed to identify ISs from raw fragment data or partially assembled genomes. We have developed novel methods to solve this computationally challenging problem, and implemented these methods in the software package ISQuest. This software identifies bacterial ISs and their sequence elements-inverted and direct repeats-in raw read data or contigs using flexible search parameters. ISQuest is capable of finding ISs in hundreds of partially assembled genomes within hours, making it a valuable high-throughput tool for a global search of IS elements. We tested ISQuest on simulated read libraries of 3810 complete bacterial genomes and plasmids in GenBank and were capable of detecting 82% of the ISs and transposases annotated in GenBank with 80% sequence identity. CONTACT: [email protected].

In this studio we present teaching material focused on dynamic force-feedback and sound synthesis for the learning of haptics. Using simple and low-cost tool sets that we have developed specifically for engaging interaction designers with the study of haptics, our aim is to advance the quality of haptics research and experimentation in the classroom. Using this studio opportunity to present what we have developed for design students, we aim to thereby advance the platform through effective learning.

This paper describes a flexible software system for the collection of parametric, functional pattern fail, and bitmap data on-line during production testing of VLSI devices. The data is automatically loaded into a relational database for subsequent analysis by process and yield improvement software. The user can control the type and amount of data that is collected at each stage of a product's life. By enabling data collection on every test, the same system can be used for engineering and debug analysis.

Robot tasks have come to demand flexible sensory-based "intelligent" behavior. The single robot has given way to multiple robots cooperating in three-dimensional dynamic environments which allow them to accomplish complex and intricate tasks. Because of the complex nature of the tasks performed, centralized control is no longer practical; workcells have become centers of distributed computing. This motivates the need for an interprocess communication (IPC) facility which would integrate the individual elements both within and between workcells. A survey of IPC is presented in the context of distributed robotics. To make the survey more meaningful, it is introduced by some remarks about general approaches to communication within a distributed computing environment. A discussion of the main IPC design issues for distributed robotics is included.