Massive star formation occurs in Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs); an understanding of the evolution of GMCs is a prerequisite to develop theories of star formation and galaxy evolution. We report the highest-fidelity observations of the grand-design spiral galaxy M51 in carbon monoxide (CO) emission, revealing the evolution of GMCs vis-a-vis the large-scale galactic structure and dynamics. The most massive GMCs (Giant Molecular Associations -GMAs) are first assembled and then broken up as the gas flow through the spiral arms. The GMAs and their H 2 molecules are not fully dissociated into atomic gas as predicted in stellar feedback scenarios, but are fragmented into smaller GMCs upon leaving the spiral arms. The remnants of GMAs are detected as the chains of GMCs that emerge from the spiral arms into interarm regions. The kinematic shear within the spiral arms is sufficient to unbind the GMAs against self-gravity. We conclude that the evolution of GMCs is driven by largescale galactic dynamics -their coagulation into GMAs is due to spiral arm streaming motions upon entering the arms, followed by fragmentation due to shear as they leave the arms on the downstream side. In M51, the majority of the gas remains molecular from arm entry through the inter-arm region and into the next spiral arm passage.

A relational database management system has been implemented on the Caltech millimeter-wave array for both real-time astronomical and engineering data and post-processing calibration and analysis. This system provides high storage efficiency for the data and on-line access to data from multiple observing seasons. The ability to access easily the full database enables more accurate calibration of the raw data and greatly facilitates the calibration process. In this article we describe both the structure of the millimeter-array database and the implementation of a data analysis program, both of which make extensive use of Sybase, a commercial database management system with application development software. This use of relational database technology in real-time astronomical data storage and calibration may serve as a prototype for similar systems at other observatories.

Using CARMA, we imaged the 87 GHz SiO v=0 J=2-1 line toward Orion-KL with 0.45 ′′ angular resolution. The maps indicate that radio source I drives a bipolar outflow into the surrounding molecular cloud along a NE-SW axis, in agreement with the model of Greenhill et al. (2004). The extended high velocity outflow from Orion-KL appears to be a continuation of this compact outflow. High velocity gas extends farthest along a NW-SE axis, suggesting that the outflow direction changes on time scales of a few hundred years.

Large-scale parallel computing is relying increasingly on clusters with thousands of processors. At such large counts of compute nodes, faults are becoming common place. Current techniques to tolerate faults focus on reactive schemes to recover from faults and generally rely on a checkpoint/restart mechanism. Yet, in today's systems, node failures can often be anticipated by detecting a deteriorating health status.Instead of a reactive scheme for fault tolerance (FT), we are promoting a proactive one where processes automatically migrate from "unhealthy" nodes to healthy ones. Our approach relies on operating system virtualization techniques exemplified by but not limited to Xen. This paper contributes an automatic and transparent mechanism for proactive FT for arbitrary MPI applications. It leverages virtualization techniques combined with health monitoring and load-based migration. We exploit Xen's live migration mechanism for a guest operating system (OS) to migrate an MPI task from a health-deteriorating node to a healthy one without stopping the MPI task during most of the migration. Our proactive FT daemon orchestrates the tasks of health monitoring, load determination and initiation of guest OS migration. Experimental results demonstrate that live migration hides migration costs and limits the overhead to only a few seconds making it an attractive approach to realize FT in HPC systems. Overall, our enhancements make proactive FT a valuable asset for long-running MPI application that is complementary to reactive FT using full checkpoint/restart schemes since checkpoint frequencies can be reduced as fewer unanticipated failures are encountered. In the context of OS virtualization, we believe that this is the first comprehensive study of proactive fault tolerance where live migration is actually triggered by health monitoring.

We present a 1~3 spatial resolution interferometric spectral line survey of the core of the Orion molecular cloud, obtained with the OVRO millimeter array. Covering 4 GHz bandwidth in total, the survey contains ,..._,100 emission lines from 18 chemical species. The spatial distributions of a number of molecules point to source I near the IRc2 complex as the dominant energy source in the region but do not rule out the presence of additional lower luminosity objects. At arcsecond resolution, the offsets between dust emission and various molecular tracers suggest that the spectacular "hot core" emission in the Orion core arises via the heating and ablation of material from the surfaces of very high density clumps located ;;:::500 AU from source I and traced by the dust emission. We find no evidence for a strong internal heating source within the hot core condensation(s).