This paper describes innovative architectures and techniques for reserving and coordinating highly distributed resources, a capability required for many large scale applications. In the fall of 2006, Japan's G-lambda research team and the United States' EnLIGHTened Computing research team used these innovations to achieve the world's first inter-domain coordination of resource managers for in-advance reservation of network bandwidth and compute resources between and among both the US and Japan. The compute and network resource managers had different interfaces and were independently developed. Automated interoperability among the resources in both countries was enabled through various Grid middleware components. In this paper, we describe the middleware components, testbeds, results, and lessons learned.

This article describes a distributed classroom experiment carried out by five universities in the US and Europe at the beginning of 2007. This experiment was motivated by the emergence of new digital media technology supporting uncompressed high-definition video capture, transport and display as well as the networking services required for its deployment across wide distances. The participating institutes have designed a distributed collaborative environment centered around the new technology and applied it to join the five sites into a single virtual classroom where a real course has been offered to the registered students.Here we are presenting the technologies utilized in the experiment, the results of a technology evaluation done with the help of the participating students and we identify areas of future improvements of the system. While there are a few hurdles in the path of successfully deploying this technology on a large scale, our experiment shows that the new technology is sustainable and the significant quality improvements brought by it can help build an effective distributed and collaborative classroom environment.

Many emerging high performance applications require distributed infrastructure that is significantly more powerful and flexible than traditional Grids. Such applications require the optimization, close integration, and control of all Grid resources, including networks. The EnLIGHTened (ENL) Computing Project has designed an architectural framework that allows Grid applications to dynamically request (inadvance or on-demand) any type of Grid resource: computers, storage, instruments, and deterministic, high-bandwidth network paths, including lightpaths. Based on application requirements, the ENL middleware communicates with Grid resource managers and, when availability is verified, co-allocates all the necessary resources. ENL's Domain Network Manager controls all network resource allocations to dynamically setup and delete dedicated circuits using Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) control plane signaling. In order to make optimal brokering decisions, the ENL middleware uses near-real-time performance information about Grid resources. A prototype of this architectural framework on a national-scale testbed implementation has been used to demonstrate a small number of applications. Based on this, a set of changes for the middleware have been laid out and are being implemented.

Older adults are especially prone to anxiety if they are unable to keep pace with technological advances and are generally more technophobic than their younger counterparts. Older adults tend to limit their use of technology, if not avoid it altogether, such as using a smartphone for calls and text messages only, while eschewing more advanced functions. Currently, there is no measure of technophobia in older adults that captures fears and concerns about the use of these up-to-date technological tools. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the psychometric properties of a new scale of technophobia and corresponding smartphone challenge task in a sample of older adults. Community-dwelling older adults (N = 42, 81.0% female, Mage = 77.3) completed the following: the Older Adult Smartphone Challenge Task (OASCT), Older Adults’ Technophobia Scale (OATS), Older Adult Social Anxiety Scale, Computer Anxiety Rating Scale, and the IPIP Five Factor Personality Domains. Preliminary data indicate good internal consistency for the OATS (α = .87) and the OASCT (α = .86). The OASCT was negatively correlated with age, computer anxiety, and OATS anxiety/avoidance scores, but positively correlated with education. The OATS scores were positively correlated with social anxiety, social avoidance, and computer anxiety, but negatively correlated with extraversion. To keep pace with the contemporary world, older adults must achieve a level of comfort with the use of technological devices. Administering the OASCT and OATS could be a valuable first step in identifying older adults with technology-related deficits and anxiety for individual and/or community-wide intervention.