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The recent interest in the surveillance of public, military, and commercial scenarios is increasing the need to develop and deploy intelligent and/or automated distributed visual surveillance systems. Many applications based on distributed resources use the socalled software agent technology. In this paper, a multi-agent framework is applied to coordinate videocamera-based surveillance. The ability to coordinate agents improves the global image and task distribution efficiency. In our proposal, a software agent is embedded in each camera and controls the capture parameters. Then coordination is based on the exchange of high-level messages among agents. Agents use an internal symbolic model to interpret the current situation from the messages from all other agents to improve global coordination.

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The influence of the process conditions of pulping of a trihybrid clone Paulownia on pulp properties for the soda anthraquinone process has been investigated in a semi-pilot scale. A composite central experimental design and a multiple regression were used to find the relationship between independent process variables and pulp properties. The ash content (0.89%) is lower and cellulose content (44.0%) is higher than those found for other species of Pauwlonia and other energetic crops. The elemental composition has a low content in S and N (0.21%) in comparation with poplar or willow. With a gross heating value of 20335 J/g, Paulownia is a suitable feedstock for use as solid biofuel. This is somewhat higher than those for hardwood, slightly higher than those for Pinus pinaster and softwood, and much higher than those for residues of food plants and agricultural crops. This supports the use of the genus Paulownia as an energy crop. The soda-anthraquinone pulping could be and adequate process for Paulownia. Fibre length (0.97 mm) is similar to hardwoods and suitable physical characteristics of paper sheets (tensile index) and acceptable chemical characteristics and yield pulping could be obtained by operating at lowintermediate temperature (163-171ºC) and alkali concentration (20%) and high or medium values for operation time (120-150 min). The pulp obtained at these conditions has suitable chemical (pulp) and physical (paper sheets) characteristics: yield (47.0%), ethanol-benzene extractives (2.22%), holocellulose contents (96.0%), α-cellulose contents (75.8%), lignin contents (8.28%), Shopper Riegler degree (23.2 ºSR), and tensile index (36.0) kN m/kg. HighlightsThe influences of the process conditions of pulping of a trihybrid clone Paulownia on pulp properties for the soda anthraquinone process have been investigated in a semi-pilot scale.The soda-anthraquinone pulping could be and adequate process for trihybrid clone Paulownia is similar to hardwoods and suitable physical characteristics of paper sheets.Trihybrid clone Paulownia is a suitable feedstock for use as solid biofuel.

In this work, we propose new techniques to analyze the behavior, the performance, and specially the scalability of High Performance Computing (in short, HPC) applications on different computing architectures. Our final objective is to test applications using a wide range of architectures (real or merely designed) and scaling it to any number of nodes or components. This paper presents a new simulation framework, called SIMCAN, for HPC architectures. The main characteristic of the proposed simulation framework is the ability to be configured for simulating a wide range of possible architectures that involve any number of components. SIMCAN is developed to simulate complete HPC architectures, but putting special emphasis on the storage and network subsystems. The SIMCAN framework can handle complete components (nodes, racks, switches, routers, etc.), but also key elements of the storage and network subsystems (disks, caches, sockets, file systems, schedulers, etc.). We also propose several methods to implement the behavior of HPC applications. Each method has its own advantages and drawbacks. In order to evaluate the possibilities and the accuracy of the SIMCAN framework, we have tested it by executing a HPC application called BIPS3D on a hardware-based computing cluster and on a modeled environment that represent the real cluster. We also checked the scalability A. Núñez ( ) · New techniques for simulating high performance MPI 41 of the application using this kind of architecture by simulating the same application with an increased number of computing nodes.

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SummaryCurrent parallel programming frameworks aid developers to a great extent in implementing applications that exploit parallel hardware resources. Nevertheless, developers require additional expertise to properly use and tune them to operate efficiently on specific parallel platforms. On the other hand, porting applications between different parallel programming models and platforms is not straightforward and demands considerable efforts and specific knowledge.Apart from that, the lack of high-level parallel pattern abstractions, in those frameworks, further increases the complexity in developing parallel applications. To pave the way in this direction, this paper proposes GRPPI, a generic and reusable parallel pattern interface for both stream processing and data-intensive C++ applications. GRPPI accommodates a layer between developers and existing parallel programming frameworks targeting multi-core processors, such as C++ threads, OpenMP and Intel TBB, and accelerators, as CUDA Thrust. Furthermore, thanks to its high-level C++ application programming interface and pattern composability features, GRPPI allows users to easily expose parallelism via standalone patterns or patterns compositions matching in sequential applications. We evaluate this interface using an image processing use case and demonstrate its benefits from the usability, flexibility, and performance points of view. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of using stream and data pattern compositions on CPUs, GPUs and heterogeneous configurations. An approach to relieve developers from this burden is the use of pattern-based parallel programming frameworks, such as SkePU, 2FastFlow 3 , or Intel TBB. 4 In this sense, design patterns provide a way to encapsulate (using a building blocks approach) algorithmic aspects, allowing users to implement more robust, readable, and portable solutions with such a high-level of abstraction. Basically, these patterns instantiate parallelism while hide away the complexity of concurrency mechanisms, eg, thread management, synchronizations, or data sharing. Examples of applications coming from multiple domains (eg, financial, medical, and mathematical) and improving their performance through parallel programming design patterns, can be widely found in the literature. [5][6][7] Nevertheless, although all these skeletons aim to simplify the development of parallel applications, there is not a unified standard. 8 Therefore, users require understanding different frameworks, not only to decide which fits best for their purposes, but also to properly use them. Not to mention the migration efforts of applications among frameworks, which becomes as well an arduous task.In order to mitigate this situation, this paper presents GRPPI, a generic and reusable high-level C++ parallel pattern interface that comprises both stream and data-parallel patterns. In general, the goal of