HASLab - Indexed Articles in Journals
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ItemDatabases in Edge and Fog Environments : A Survey( 2024)While a significant number of databases are deployed in cloud environments, pushing part or all data storage and querying planes closer to their sources (i.e., to the edge) can provide advantages in latency, connectivity, privacy, energy and scalability. This article dissects the advantages provided by databases in edge and fog environments, by surveying application domains and discussing the key drivers for pushing database systems to the edge. At the same time, it also identifies the main challenges faced by developers in this new environment, and analysis the mechanisms employed to deal with them. By providing an overview of the current state of edge and fog databases, this survey provides valuable insights into future research directions.
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ItemDigital quantum simulation of non-perturbative dynamics of open systems with orthogonal polynomials( 2024)Classical non-perturbative simulations of open quantum systems' dynamics face several scalability problems, namely, exponential scaling of the computational effort as a function of either the time length of the simulation or the size of the open system. In this work, we propose the use of the Time Evolving Density operator with Orthogonal Polynomials Algorithm (TEDOPA) on a quantum computer, which we term as Quantum TEDOPA (Q-TEDOPA), to simulate nonperturbative dynamics of open quantum systems linearly coupled to a bosonic environment (continuous phonon bath). By performing a change of basis of the Hamiltonian, the TEDOPA yields a chain of harmonic oscillators with only local nearestneighbour interactions, making this algorithm suitable for implementation on quantum devices with limited qubit connectivity such as superconducting quantum processors. We analyse in detail the implementation of the TEDOPA on a quantum device and show that exponential scalings of computational resources can potentially be avoided for time-evolution simulations of the systems considered in this work. We applied the proposed method to the simulation of the exciton transport between two light-harvesting molecules in the regime of moderate coupling strength to a non-Markovian harmonic oscillator environment on an IBMQ device. Applications of the Q-TEDOPA span problems which can not be solved by perturbation techniques belonging to different areas, such as the dynamics of quantum biological systems and strongly correlated condensed matter systems.
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ItemA large-scale empirical study on mobile performance: energy, run-time and memory( 2024)Software performance concerns have been attracting research interest at an increasing rate, especially regarding energy performance in non-wired computing devices. In the context of mobile devices, several research works have been devoted to assessing the performance of software and its underlying code. One important contribution of such research efforts is sets of programming guidelines aiming at identifying efficient and inefficient programming practices, and consequently to steer software developers to write performance-friendly code.Despite recent efforts in this direction, it is still almost unfeasible to obtain universal and up-to-date knowledge regarding software and respective source code performance. Namely regarding energy performance, where there has been growing interest in optimizing software energy consumption due to the power restrictions of such devices. There are still many difficulties reported by the community in measuring performance, namely in large-scale validation and replication. The Android ecosystem is a particular example, where the great fragmentation of the platform, the constant evolution of the hardware, the software platform, the development libraries themselves, and the fact that most of the platform tools are integrated into the IDE's GUI, makes it extremely difficult to perform performance studies based on large sets of data/applications. In this paper, we analyze the execution of a diversified corpus of applications of significant magnitude. We analyze the source-code performance of 1322 versions of 215 different Android applications, dynamically executed with over than 27900 tested scenarios, using state-of-the-art black-box testing frameworks with different combinations of GUI inputs. Our empirical analysis allowed to observe that semantic program changes such as adding functionality and repairing bugfixes are the changes more associated with relevant impact on energy performance. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that several coding practices previously identified as energy-greedy do not replicate such behavior in our execution context and can have distinct impacts across several performance indicators: runtime, memory and energy consumption. Some of these practices include some performance issues reported by the Android Lint and Android SDK APIs. We also provide evidence that the evaluated performance indicators have little to no correlation with the performance issues' priority detected by Android Lint. Finally, our results allowed us to demonstrate that there are significant differences in terms of performance between the most used libraries suited for implementing common programming tasks, such as HTTP communication, JSON manipulation, image loading/rendering, among others, providing a set of recommendations to select the most efficient library for each performance indicator. Based on the conclusions drawn and in the extension of the developed work, we also synthesized a set of guidelines that can be used by practitioners to replicate energy studies and build more efficient mobile software.
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ItemBerry: A code for the differentiation of Bloch wavefunctions from DFT calculations( 2024)Density functional calculation of electronic structures of materials is one of the most used techniques in theoretical solid state physics. These calculations retrieve single electron wavefunctions and their eigenenergies. The berry suite of programs amplifies the usefulness of DFT by ordering the eigenstates in analytic bands, allowing the differentiation of the wavefunctions in reciprocal space. It can then calculate Berry connections and curvatures and the second harmonic generation conductivity. The berry software is implemented for two dimensional materials and was tested in hBN and InSe. In the near future, more properties and functionalities are expected to be added.Program summary Program Title: berry CPC Library link to program files: https://doi .org /10 .17632 /mpbbksz2t7 .1 Developer's repository link: https://github .com /ricardoribeiro -2020 /berry Licensing provisions: MIT Programming language: Python3 Nature of problem: Differentiation of Bloch wavefunctions in reciprocal space, numerically obtained from a DFT software, applied to two dimensional materials. This enables the numeric calculation of material's properties such as Berry geometries and Second Harmonic conductivity. Solution method: Extracts Kohn-Sham functions from a DFT calculation, orders them by analytic bands using graph and AI methods and calculates the gradient of the wavefunctions along an electronic band. Additional comments including restrictions and unusual features: Applies only to two dimensional materials, and only imports Kohn-Sham functions from Quantum Espresso package.
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ItemSupporting the Analysis of Safety Critical User Interfaces: An Exploration of Three Formal Tools( 2020)Use error due to user interface design defects is a major concern in many safety critical domains, for example avionics and health care. Early detection of latent user interface problems can be facilitated by user-centered design methods that integrate formal verification technologies. This article considers the role that formal verification technologies can play in the context of user-centered design by considering the following three existing tools: CIRCUS, PVSio-web, and IVY. These tools have been developed to support the model based analysis of critical user interfaces. They have their foundations in existing formal verification technologies, but each of them is focused towards particular issues relating to user interface design. The article explores the different phases of the user-centered design process and the extent to which each of these tools supports these phases. Criteria are developed for assessing their role at each stage of the design process. The results of the evaluation provide guidance to developers to help choose the most appropriate tool based on their analysis needs while at the same time setting challenges for future developments.