We propose a reservation-based sustainable adaptive Grid supercomputing paradigm to enable tightly coupled computations of considerable scale (involving over 1,000 processors) and duration (over tens of continuous days) on a Grid of geographically distributed parallel supercomputers. The paradigm is demonstrated for an adaptive multiscale simulation application, in which accurate but compute-intensive quantum mechanical (QM) simulations are embedded within a classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulation only when and where high fidelity is required. Key technical innovations include: 1) an embedded divide-and-conquer algorithmic framework to maximally expose data and computation localities for enhanced scalability; 2) a buffered-cluster hybridization scheme to adaptively adjust MD/QM boundaries to maintain the model accuracy; and 3) a hybrid Grid remote procedure call (GridRPC) + message passing interface (MPI) Grid application framework to combine flexibility (adaptive resource allocation and migration), fault tolerance (automated fault recovery), and efficiency (scalable management of large computing resources). We have achieved an automated execution of multiscale MD/QM simulation on a Grid consisting of 6 supercomputer centers in Japan and the US (in total of 150 thousand processorhours) for the dynamic simulation of implanted oxygen atoms in a silicon substrate, in which the number of processors changes dynamically on demand and resources are allocated and migrated dynamically according to both reservations and unexpected faults. The simulation results reveal a strong dependence of the oxygen penetration depth on the incident oxygen-beam position, which is useful information to further advance SIMOX (separation by implanted oxygen) technique to fabricate high speed and low power-consumption semiconductor devices.

This paper proposes a technique which automatically estimates speakers' age only with acoustic, not linguistic, information of their utterances. This method is based upon speaker recognition techniques. In the current work, we firstly divided speakers of two databases, JNAS and S(senior)-JNAS, into two groups by listening tests. One group has only the speakers whose speech sounds so aged that one should take special care when he/she talks to them. The other group has the remaining speakers of the two databases. After that, each speaker group was modeled with GMM. Experiments of automatic identification of elderly speakers showed the correct identification rate of 91 %. To improve the performance, two prosodic features were considered, i.e, speech rate and local perturbation of power. Using these features, the identification rate was improved to 95%. Finally, using scores calculated by integrating GMMs with prosodic features, experiments were carried out to automatically estimate speakers' age. The results showed high correlation between speakers' age estimated subjectively by humans and automatically calculated score of 'agedness'.

No abstract

No abstract

A novel Copper (Cu) reflow process, which locates two kinds of barrier layers with different wetting characteristics, is proposed. It enables low temperature reflow in spite of using barrier layers with good wetting characteristics, and realizes higher reliability of Cu interconnects