7 - Central site computer facilities

The Intra-Laboratory Network (ILN) is a general-purpose computer communications network located at Argonne National Laboratory. This network provides communications between computers connected to the network. In addition to its general-purpose capability, the ILN also provides a remote job entry (RJE) system that allows users to move files from the user's computer system to ANL's Central Computing Facility (CCF), move files from the CCF to the user's computer system as batch job retrievals, check on the status of CCF jobs, cancel jobs, etc. This document describes the use of the ILN RJE system for users who have TI990 computer systems running the TX990/TXDS operating system. The ILN RJE system consists of three parts. Closest to the user is the ILN RJE utility program that runs on the user's host. Between the host and the CCF is the ILN which contains, in addition to the network control, an ILN RJE facility that supports the utility program and interfaces to the CCF. The third part is the CCF, which is accessed via the CCF front-end Varian V73 communications processors. The procedures for running the ILN RJE utility program are described first. Next, the commands that can be used to submit and retrieve jobs, check on job status, etc., are discussed. Each command description includes the command syntax, a brief description of the function, and one or more examples. Then techniques for transferring files between a host and either CCF or another host are outlined. Appendixes summarize the ILN RJE system commands, the possible error messages and the ASCII/EBCDIC conversion table that is used in the ILN. (RWR)

Many library and information people already use their organisation's mainframe for the provision of library services. More often than not the services will, in fact, be a computerised version of the basic library routines such as circulation, serials control, ordering, cataloguing and so on. The system might be a home‐grown one or it might be one of the many turn‐key integrated library systems available for mainframes. However, with thought, ingenuity and cooperation and some assistance from the Computer Department, the mainframe can be used to provide a whole host of other peripheral library services to staff throughout large organisations. In any such large organisation, especially of a scientific and technical R&D type, there will usually be a significant number of staff who have terminals connected to the main‐frame — for programming, running their own statistical software, CAD/CAE applications, in‐house database access, preparing documents, number‐crunching or whatever — and because they use their terminals daily they become a captive audience which you can reach far more easily, quickly and conveniently than you can with a flier or announcement list that gets distributed in the internal mail and then sits on their desks amidst a pile of other paper for days or longer.

The Advanced Scientific Computers Project of Argonne's Applied Mathematics Division has two objectives: to evaluate supercomputers and to determine their effect on Argonne's computing workload. Initial efforts have focused on the CRAY-1, which is the only advanced computer currently available. Users from seven Argonne divisions executed test programs on the CRAY and made performance comparisons with the IBM 370/195 at Argonne. This report describes these experiences and discusses various techniques for improving run times on the CRAY. Direct translations of code from scalar to vector processor reduced running times as much as two-fold, and this reduction will become more pronounced as the CRAY compiler is developed. Further improvement (two- to ten-fold) was realized by making minor code changes to facilitate compiler recognition of the parallel and vector structure within the programs. Finally, extensive rewriting of the FORTRAN code structure reduced execution times dramatically, in three cases by a factor of more than 20; and even greater reduction should be possible by changing algorithms within a production code. It is condluded that the CRAY-1 would be of great benefit to Argonne researchers. Existing codes could be modified with relative ease to run significantly faster than on the 370/195. More important, the CRAY would permit scientists to investigate complex problems currently deemed infeasibile on traditional scalar machines. Finally, an interface between the CRAY-1 and IBM computers such as the 370/195, scheduled by Cray Research for the first quarter of 1979, would considerably facilitate the task of integrating the CRAY into Argonne's Central Computing Facility. 13 tables.

ABSTRACTThe results of a study of computer utilization in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford are presented. The benefits and costs of a dedicated time‐sharing system acquired by the Business School to supplement the central campus computer facility are discussed. The study showed that the time‐sharing system produced many benefits, including improved service and a lower per student cost for computing. The implications of the Stanford experience for other schools are discussed.

Information technology can either replace human effort and skill or it can complement and enhance it. Computer systems introduced into industry reflect both of these capabilities. In general, the skills replaced by computer systems in industry are mechanical/repetitive skills, although some middle managers are now being by‐passed as large centralised computer systems and networks have made communications between the centre and the periphery more direct and reduced the need for intervening filtering and interpretation. Many computer systems also complement managerial skills by aiding decision making. In the future it is possible that expert systems may replace some managerial skills, but the intuitive and experiential nature of much managerial work makes it unlikely that this replacement will be widespread.

As high-performance computing (HPC) resources continue to grow in size and complexity, so too does the volume and velocity of the operational data that is associated with them. At such scales, new mechanisms and technologies are required to continuously gather, store, and analyze this data in near-real time from heterogeneous and distributed sources without impacting the underlying data center operations or HPC resource utilization. In this paper, we describe our experiences in designing and implementing an infrastructure for extreme-scale operational data collection, known as the Operations Monitoring and Notification Infrastructure (OMNI) at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. OMNI currently holds over 522 billion records of online operational data (totaling over 125TB) and can ingest new data points at an average rate of 25,000 data points per second. Using OMNI as a central repository, facilities and environmental data can be seamlessly integrated and correlated with machine metrics, job scheduler information, network errors, and more, providing a holistic view of data center operations. To demonstrate the value of real-time operational data collection, we present a number of real-world case studies for which having OMNI data readily available led to key operational insights at NERSC. The case results include a reduction in the downtime of an HPC system during a facility transition, as well as a $2.5 million electrical substation savings for the next-generation Perlmutter HPC system.

Currently, the interaction of human beings and robots is increasingly expanding in everyday life with the introduction of robots in the service area, and robots for medical applications, although robots appeared in the 50s from the last century. For this reason, the human-robot communication interface plays a very important role when introducing these mechanisms in the indicated areas. The largest number of jobs related to robot control propose the use of interfaces to map robot actions using a joystick or a haptic device. However, the use of these elements requires training of the personnel working with the robots. For the teleoperation of robots, natural interfaces have been proposed that allow generating commands from bioelectrical signals of the human body. The signals, which have greater acceptance in the development of this type of applications are surface electromyographic signals (sEMG). Additionally, due to the use of surface electrodes, the acquisition of sEMG signals does not require invasive techniques; however, since they are exposed to different sources of noise and interference, they require special processing before being used for the generation of control signals for robots.

Arterial blood pressure (ABP) is an important vital sign of the cardiovascular system. As with other physiological signals, its measurement can be corrupted by different sources of noise, interference, and artifact. Here, we present an algorithm for the quantification of signal quality and for the reconstruction of the ABP waveform in noise-corrupted segments of the measurement. The algorithm quantifies the quality of the ABP signal on a beat-by-beat basis by computing the normalized mean of successive differences of the ABP amplitude over each beat. In segments of poor signal quality, the ABP wavelets are then reconstructed on the basis of the expected cycle duration and envelope information derived from neighboring ABP wavelet segments. The algorithm was tested on two datasets of ABP waveform signals containing both invasive radial artery ABP and noninvasive ABP waveforms. Our results show that the approach is efficient in identifying the noisy segments (accuracy, sensitivity and specificity over 95%) and reliable in reconstructing beats that were artificially corrupted.

In this paper, we study the performance of the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) and linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) noise reduction filters when a source of interference and ambient noise coexist with the target signal. We demonstrate that both filters are related as we decompose the MVDR filter into the LCMV and a matched filter (MVDR solution in the absence of interference). Both components are properly weighted to achieve maximum interference-plus-noise reduction at each frequency bin. Furthermore, we elaborate new closed-form expressions for the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the output of the LCMV, MVDR, and matched filters. These expressions theoretically prove that a tradeoff between noise reduction and interference rejection has to be made. In fact, the total removal of the interference may severely amplify the output ambient noise. Conversely, totally focussing on noise reduction leads to increased level of residual interference. The proposed study is finally supported by numerical examples.

With combined heat and power (CHP) installations getting more and more complex, associated control systems are becoming very elaborate. For the user, this results in a higher level of difficulty for the operation of the installation. One aspect of this problem is the very high alarm rate the operator in the control room has to process. In this paper, an analysis of the alarm signals coming from a real CHP installation is made. Three different types of alarms are distinguished. For each of these types, a different approach for the possible elimination from the alarm flow is presented. The presented methods range from a simple elimination for the first type of alarms, to methods with a statistical approach for the second type. For the most complex type of alarms, a more advanced algorithm is presented: based on the formalism of fuzzy reasoning petri nets (FRPN), a tool for the diagnosis of the most likely cause of a fault is developed.

Ship surveillance by remote sensing technology has become a valuable tool for protecting marine environments. In recent years, the successful launch of advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors that have high resolution and multipolarimetric modes has enabled researchers to use SAR imagery for not only ship detection but also ship category recognition. A hierarchical ship detection and recognition scheme is proposed. The complementary information obtained from multipolarimetric modes is used to improve both the detection pre- cision and the recognition accuracy. In the ship detection stage, a three-class fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm is used to calculate the segmenting threshold for prescreening ship candi- dates. To reduce the false alarm rate (FAR), we use a two-step discrimination strategy. In the first step, we fuse the detection results from multipolarimetric channels to reduce the speckle noise, ambiguities, sidelobes, and other sources of interference. In the second step, we use a binary classifier, which is trained with prior data collected on ships and nonships, to reduce the FAR even further. In the ship category recognition stage, we concatenate texture- based descriptors extracted from multiple polarmetric channels to construct a robust ship representation for category recognition. Furthermore, we construct and release a ship category database with real SAR data. We hope that it can be used to promote investigations of SAR ship recognition in the remote sensing and related academic communities. The proposed method is validated by a comprehensive experimental comparison to the state-of-the-art methods. The validation procedure showed that the proposed method outperforms all of the competing meth- ods by about 5% and 15% in terms of ship detection and recognition, respectively. © 2014 Society

In early 1975, the Central Computer Facility of Argonne National Laboratory became saturated with work. The Facility's IBM 370/195 and 360/75 computers were unable to satisfy the needs of the more than fifteen hundred scientific and engineering computer users. Since procurement of additional computers would undoubtedly take a long time, the Computer Center started a project to secure access to and facilitate the use of other large computer installations which had spare capacity. Although the heaviest used sites have IBM equipment, we have run programs on a variety of equipment, including Control Data 7600S and the ILLIAC IV. The programs were frequently very large, up to 100,000 Fortran statements. The project was managed primarily by the User Services Group at Argonne. What follows is a list of the principal areas that required attention in the process of setting up this new service for our users.

The results and experiences of a simulation case-study conducted in a seminar for advanced students of applied computer science are reported.A simulation model of a hypothetical teleprocessing network linking a number of universities to a central computer facility was programmed in various versions by 2 groups of students, using the GPSS1100 and SIMSCRIPT II.5 simulation programming languages.After a brief description of the environment and the problem definitions, the basic modelling philosophies of both approaches are contrasted and compared. The simulation results show a surprising similarity. This must, however, at least in part be attributed to the relative "courseness" of the problem situation. Both models arrived at the "best" line-configuration for the data transmission network. The utilization-figures for single lines do not differ by more than 1%.A comparison of the computational resources used shows a marked difference in favour of the SIMSCRIPT models.Various conceptual and implementational problems faced by the programming groups are summarized and discussed.The report closes with the observation that the advantages and shortcomings experienced by using these 2 different modelling approaches and languages can be generalized and are certainly representative and inevitable reflections of basic trade-offs between user-efficiency & conceptual congruence on the one, and processor-efficiency, flexibility & representational power on the other hand.

Distinguished Author Series articles are general, descriptiverepresentations that summarize the state of the art in an area of technology bydescribing recent developments for readers who are not specialists in thetopics discussed. Written by individuals recognized as experts in the area, these articles provide key references to more definitive work and presentspecific details only to illustrate the technology. Purpose: to informthe general readership of recent advances in various areas of petroleumengineering. INTRODUCTION Well logging is an integral part of formation evaluation inthat borehole measurements provide the largest source of data. These are usedwith core and fluid data to determine reservoir depth and thickness, porosity, lithology, hydrocarbon saturation, and permeability. This porosity, lithology, hydrocarbon saturation, and permeability. This information also aids indrilling, completion, and operation of wells; geological and geophysicalexploration; and development of reservoir models for efficient production.Borehole measurements of geophysical parameters involve downhole sensors(sondes), means for transmitting data to the surface, and recording andprocessing systems. Physical properties are measured and recorded as functionsof depth to obtain well logs. Then the measured physical parameter logs areinterpreted to obtain logs of derived formation parameter logs are interpretedto obtain logs of derived formation parameters. These include fundamentalproperties such as porosity, parameters. These include fundamental propertiessuch as porosity, permeability, saturation, and any other subsurfaceinformation needed in permeability, saturation, and any other subsurfaceinformation needed in geological, reservoir, and economic analyses. Explorationfor hydrocarbons in high-cost areas and enhanced recovery operations with long, uncertain lead times have increased the demand for more accurate evaluation ofnew formations and re-evaluation of some old ones. This demand for accurateformation evaluation is increasing not only the number of well-logging sensorsneeded but the amount of data required of each. For example, the data rate fora conventional induction/ sonic log is 200 bits per borehole foot, two ordersof magnitude higher for a high-resolution dipmeter, and three times more for anacoustic full waveform log (60 kilobits per foot). Estimated data rates forfuture acoustic and induced gamma ray spectroscopy tools are two orders ofmagnitude higher than these (i.e., on the order of megabits per foot). To putit in a familiar perspective, in an average well the acoustic full waveform logrecords roughly the same amount of data that a conventional seismic surveyrecords over a 1-mile section. Several significant advances have been developedto meet the challenge of data explosion. Logging tools have been equipped withdownhole computers for digital transmission of data to the surface, where othercomputers are used for recording and real-time processing. Combination loggingtools have been developed to reduce rig time during logging; some can recordsix or more petrophysical measurements concurrently. For example, a combinationtool consisting of gamma ray, dual-induction, compensated-neutron, andcompensated-formation-density logs provides, in a single run, a complete suiteof logs for formation provides, in a single run, a complete suite of logs forformation evaluation. Wellsite computers provide quick-look processing of theselog data for immediate completion decisions. They also allow transmission bymeans of satellites or phone lines to central computer facilities. Well loggingmethods usually do not measure directly the primary rock properties needed forreservoir engineering purposes: porosity, properties needed for reservoirengineering purposes: porosity, permeability, fluid saturation, and fluidmobility. These parameters are permeability, fluid saturation, and fluidmobility. These parameters are inferred from borehole measurements ofelectromagnetic, acoustic, and nuclear properties. Nevertheless, these methodsdo provide the best, sometimes the only, opportunity for measuring theseproperties in place in a relatively undisturbed state. Well logging is arapidly developing technology encompassing far too many methods to describe.This article highlights some of the technology in a more general fashion. Ref.1 gives a more detailed overview; references cited therein give furtherdetails. ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVE METHODS(Resistivity Logs). Properties ofelectromagnetic waves are measured in boreholes in a broad frequency rangevarying from DC to gigaHertz, primarily for evaluation of hydrocarbonsaturation. Numerous tools and techniques involving focused resistivity andconductivity and microresistivity have been developed to measure the electricalresistivities of the formation, both within the invaded zone () and beyond(true formation resistivity,). However, none of these alone can measure trueformation resistivity under all borehole and formation conditions. Theselection of a proper combination of deep and shallow investigating tools fordetermining depends on formation conditions such as connate water resistivityand porosity as well as borehole conditions such as mud salinity and holesize. p. 1181

Today, information technology is fundamental to the operation of most businesses, whether they are small companies or multinational corporations. In recent times, the implementation of local and wide area networks and the installation of computing equipment in office areas has brought information technology to nearly every working environment. The result is an increasing dependence on the availability, integrity and confidentiality of information stored and processed by these systems. As the trend shifts from “fortress” style central computer facilities to distributed systems located in generally less secure office environments, the risk of disruption increases, owing to lack of physical security, support services limitations and absence of site monitoring. The net result is higher business impact coupled with greater exposure. Identifies the elements that are at risk, discusses the issues businesses face when seeking to minimize exposures, suggests some practical solutions and describes some selected events that illustrate the hazards associated with having inadequate protection.