High definition video requires substantial compression in order to be transmitted or stored economically. Advances in video coding standards from MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 to H.264/AVC have provided ever increasing coding efficiency, at the expense of great computational complexity which can only be delivered through massively parallel...

The 28 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions....

A single system of economic governance – capitalism – prevails in the world today, both in theory and in practice. Yet there is neither a standard definition of capitalism nor a theory of how it works. Moreover, the most common conception of capitalism is that of a one-level system governed by markets, i.e., supply and demand, where...

These are the proceedings of the 18th international conference on domain decomposition methods in science and engineering, held in Jerusalem, January 12-17, 2008. Domain decomposition methods are iterative methods for solving the often very large linear or nonlinear systems of algebraic equations that arise when various problems in...

The emergence of China as a future major participant in international aviation raises some interesting questions, especially from a strategic policy perspective. The progressive shift from a command to a mixed market economy under the central leadership of the Beijing administration now finds itself faced with the needs to balance a strategic...

The book presents the following seven, carefully cross-reviewed chapters, written by leading authorities in the field: Self-adjusting: Computation with Delta ML,...

Sex is the queen of problems in evolutionary biology. Generations of researchers have investigated one of the last remaining evolutionary paradoxes: why sex exists at all. Given that sexual reproduction is costly from an evolutionary point of view, one could wonder why not all animals and plants reproduce asexually. Dozens of contemporary...

This book covers technologies, applications, tools, languages, procedures, advantages, and disadvantages of reconfigurable supercomputing using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The target audience is the community of users of High Performance Computers (HPC) who may benefit from porting their applications into a reconfigurable...

The impact of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells on energy generation will parallel the impact of the integrated circuit on information technology. The underlying processes in PEM fuel cells have strong ties to energy generation at the mitochondrial level in organic life. The potential applications range from the micron scale to large...

This book presents the first integrated, single-source reference on market-oriented grid and utility computing. Divided into four main parts—and with contributions from a panel of experts in the field—it...

Engineering the Complex SOC The first unified hardware/software guide to processor-centric SOC design Processor-centric approaches enable SOC designers to complete far larger projects in far less time. Engineering the Complex SOCis a comprehensive, example-driven guide to creating designs with configurable, extensible processors. Drawing upon...

The authors present methods to reduce computer energy consumption by means of a better usage of a specific set of resources and maximizing the efficiency of the running applications. The processor frequency is adjusted to the needs of the running job, leading to a power drop by a factor of 2 and doubling battery life time of laptops. It is...