Universität Stuttgart
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Item Open Access Automated composition of adaptive pervasive applications in heterogeneous environments(2012) Schuhmann, Stephan Andreas; Rothermel, Kurt (Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dr. h. c.)Distributed applications for Pervasive Computing represent a research area of high interest. Configuration processes are needed before the application execution to find a composition of components that provides the required functionality. As dynamic pervasive environments and device failures may yield unavailability of arbitrary components and devices at any time, finding and maintaining such a composition represents a nontrivial task. Obviously, many degrees of decentralization and even completely centralized approaches are possible in the calculation of valid configurations, spanning a wide spectrum of possible solutions. As configuration processes produce latencies which are noticed by the application user as undesired waiting times, configurations have to be calculated as fast as possible. While completely distributed configuration is inevitable in infrastructure-less Ad Hoc scenarios, many realistic Pervasive Computing environments are located in heterogeneous environments, where additional computation power of resource-rich devices can be utilized by centralized approaches. However, in case of strongly heterogeneous pervasive environments including several resource-rich and resource-weak devices, both centralized and decentralized approaches may lead to suboptimal results concerning configuration latencies: While the resource-weak devices may be bottlenecks for decentralized configuration, the centralized approach faces the problem of not utilizing parallelism. Most of the conducted projects in Pervasive Computing only focus on one specific type of environment: Either they concentrate on heterogeneous environments, which rely on additional infrastructure devices, leading to inapplicability in infrastructure-less environments. Or they address homogeneous Ad Hoc environments and treat all involved devices as equal, which leads to suboptimal results in case of present resource-rich devices, as their additional computation power is not exploited. Therefore, in this work we propose an advanced comprehensive adaptive approach that particularly focuses on the efficient support of heterogeneous environments, but is also applicable in infrastructure-less homogeneous scenarios. We provide multiple configuration schemes with different degrees of decentralization for distributed applications, optimized for specific scenarios. Our solution is adaptive in a way that the actual scheme is chosen based on the current system environment and calculates application compositions in a resource-aware efficient manner. This ensures high efficiency even in dynamically changing environments. Beyond this, many typical pervasive environments contain a fixed set of applications and devices that are frequently used. In such scenarios, identical resources are part of subsequent configuration calculations. Thus, the involved devices undergo a quite similar configuration process whenever an application is launched. However, starting the configuration from scratch every time not only consumes a lot of time, but also increases communication overhead and energy consumption of the involved devices. Therefore, our solution integrates the results from previous configurations to reduce the severity of the configuration problem in dynamic scenarios. We prove in prototypical real-world evaluations as well as by simulation and emulation that our comprehensive approach provides efficient automated configuration in the complete spectrum of possible application scenarios. This extensive functionality has not been achieved by related projects yet. Thus, our work supplies a significant contribution towards seamless application configuration in Pervasive Computing.Item Open Access Interacting with large high-resolution display workplaces(2018) Lischke, Lars; Schmidt, Albrecht (Prof.)Large visual spaces provide a unique opportunity to communicate large and complex pieces of information; hence, they have been used for hundreds of years for varied content including maps, public notifications and artwork. Understanding and evaluating complex information will become a fundamental part of any office work. Large high-resolution displays (LHRDs) have the potential to further enhance the traditional advantages of large visual spaces and combine them with modern computing technology, thus becoming an essential tool for understanding and communicating data in future office environments. For successful deployment of LHRDs in office environments, well-suited interaction concepts are required. In this thesis, we build an understanding of how concepts for interaction with LHRDs in office environments could be designed. From the human-computer interaction (HCI) perspective three aspects are fundamental: (1) The way humans perceive and react to large visual spaces is essential for interaction with content displayed on LHRDs. (2) LHRDs require adequate input techniques. (3) The actual content requires well-designed graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and suitable input techniques. Perceptions influence how users can perform input on LHRD setups, which sets boundaries for the design of GUIs for LHRDs. Furthermore, the input technique has to be reflected in the design of the GUI. To understand how humans perceive and react to large visual information on LHRDs, we have focused on the influence of visual resolution and physical space. We show that increased visual resolution has an effect on the perceived media quality and the perceived effort and that humans can overview large visual spaces without being overwhelmed. When the display is wider than 2 m users perceive higher physical effort. When multiple users share an LHRD, they change their movement behavior depending whether a task is collaborative or competitive. For building LHRDs consideration must be given to the increased complexity of higher resolutions and physically large displays. Lower screen resolutions provide enough display quality to work efficiently, while larger physical spaces enable users to overview more content without being overwhelmed. To enhance user input on LHRDs in order to interact with large information pieces, we built working prototypes and analyzed their performance in controlled lab studies. We showed that eye-tracking based manual and gaze input cascaded (MAGIC) pointing can enhance target pointing to distant targets. MAGIC pointing is particularly beneficial when the interaction involves visual searches between pointing to targets. We contributed two gesture sets for mid-air interaction with window managers on LHRDs and found that gesture elicitation for an LHRD was not affected by legacy bias. We compared shared user input on an LHRD with personal tablets, which also functioned as a private working space, to collaborative data exploration using one input device together for interacting with an LHRD. The results showed that input with personal tablets lowered the perceived workload. Finally, we showed that variable movement resistance feedback enhanced one-dimensional data input when no visual input feedback was provided. We concluded that context-aware input techniques enhance the interaction with content displayed on an LHRD so it is essential to provide focus for the visual content and guidance for the user while performing input. To understand user expectations of working with LHRDs we prototyped with potential users how an LHRD work environment could be designed focusing on the physical screen alignment and the placement of content on the display. Based on previous work, we implemented novel alignment techniques for window management on LHRDs and compared them in a user study. The results show that users prefer techniques, that enhance the interaction without breaking well-known desktop GUI concepts. Finally, we provided the example of how an application for browsing scientific publications can benefit from extended display space. Overall, we show that GUIs for LHRDs should support the user more strongly than GUIs for smaller displays to arrange content meaningful or manage and understand large data sets, without breaking well-known GUI-metaphors. In conclusion, this thesis adopts a holistic approach to interaction with LHRDs in office environments. Based on enhanced knowledge about user perception of large visual spaces, we discuss novel input techniques for advanced user input on LHRDs. Furthermore, we present guidelines for designing future GUIs for LHRDs. Our work creates the design space of LHRD workplaces and identifies challenges and opportunities for the development of future office environments.Item Open Access Partnerübergreifende Geschäftsprozesse und ihre Realisierung in BPEL(2016) Kopp, Oliver; Leymann, Frank (Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c.)Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit Geschäftsprozessen, die die Grenzen von Organisationen überspannen. Solche Geschäftsprozesse werden Choreographien genannt. In der Arbeit wird die CREAM-Methode vorgestellt, die zeigt, wie Choreographien modelliert werden können. Im Gegensatz zu Choreographien bezeichnen Orchestrierungen ausführbare Geschäftsprozesse einer einzelnen Organisation, die Dienste nutzen, um ein Geschäftsziel zu erreichen. Eine Variante der CREAM-Methode erlaubt, von einer Orchestrierung durch Aufteilung der Orchestrierung eine Choreographie zu erhalten. Um hierbei die impliziten orchestrierungsinternen Datenabhängigkeiten in Nachrichtenaustausche zu transformieren, wird der explizite Datenfluss der Orchestrierung benötigt. Die Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) ist eine verbreitete Sprache zur Modellierung von Geschäftsprozessen. In ihr wird der Datenfluss implizit modelliert und somit wird ein Verfahren benötigt, das den expliziten Datenfluss bestimmt. In dieser Arbeit wird ein solches Verfahren vorgestellt. Um eine Choreographie zu modellieren, wird eine Choreographiesprache benötigt. Zur Identifikation einer geeigneten Sprache werden in dieser Arbeit Kriterien zur Evaluation von Choreographiesprachen vorgestellt und damit Choreographiesprachen im Web-Service-Umfeld bewertet. Da keine der betrachteten Sprachen alle Kriterien erfüllt, wird die Sprache BPEL4Chor vorgestellt, die alle Kriterien erfüllt. Um die wohldefinierte Ausführungssemantik von BPEL wiederzuverwenden, verwendet BPEL4Chor die Sprache BPEL als Beschreibungssprache des Verhaltens jedes Teilnehmers in der Choreographie. BPEL4Chor verwendet analog zu BPEL XML als Serialisierungsformat und spezifiziert keine eigene graphische Repräsentation. Die Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) ist der de-facto Standard, um Geschäftsprozesse graphisch darzustellen. Deshalb wird in dieser Arbeit BPMN so erweitert, dass alle in BPEL4Chor verfügbaren Konstrukte mittels BPMN modelliert werden können.Item Open Access Visualization challenges in distributed heterogeneous computing environments(2015) Panagiotidis, Alexandros; Ertl, Thomas (Prof. Dr.)Large-scale computing environments are important for many aspects of modern life. They drive scientific research in biology and physics, facilitate industrial rapid prototyping, and provide information relevant to everyday life such as weather forecasts. Their computational power grows steadily to provide faster response times and to satisfy the demand for higher complexity in simulation models as well as more details and higher resolutions in visualizations. For some years now, the prevailing trend for these large systems is the utilization of additional processors, like graphics processing units. These heterogeneous systems, that employ more than one kind of processor, are becoming increasingly widespread since they provide many benefits, like higher performance or increased energy efficiency. At the same time, they are more challenging and complex to use because the various processing units differ in their architecture and programming model. This heterogeneity is often addressed by abstraction but existing approaches often entail restrictions or are not universally applicable. As these systems also grow in size and complexity, they become more prone to errors and failures. Therefore, developers and users become more interested in resilience besides traditional aspects, like performance and usability. While fault tolerance is well researched in general, it is mostly dismissed in distributed visualization or not adapted to its special requirements. Finally, analysis and tuning of these systems and their software is required to assess their status and to improve their performance. The available tools and methods to capture and evaluate the necessary information are often isolated from the context or not designed for interactive use cases. These problems are amplified in heterogeneous computing environments, since more data is available and required for the analysis. Additionally, real-time feedback is required in distributed visualization to correlate user interactions to performance characteristics and to decide on the validity and correctness of the data and its visualization. This thesis presents contributions to all of these aspects. Two approaches to abstraction are explored for general purpose computing on graphics processing units and visualization in heterogeneous computing environments. The first approach hides details of different processing units and allows using them in a unified manner. The second approach employs per-pixel linked lists as a generic framework for compositing and simplifying order-independent transparency for distributed visualization. Traditional methods for fault tolerance in high performance computing systems are discussed in the context of distributed visualization. On this basis, strategies for fault-tolerant distributed visualization are derived and organized in a taxonomy. Example implementations of these strategies, their trade-offs, and resulting implications are discussed. For analysis, local graph exploration and tuning of volume visualization are evaluated. Challenges in dense graphs like visual clutter, ambiguity, and inclusion of additional attributes are tackled in node-link diagrams using a lens metaphor as well as supplementary views. An exploratory approach for performance analysis and tuning of parallel volume visualization on a large, high-resolution display is evaluated. This thesis takes a broader look at the issues of distributed visualization on large displays and heterogeneous computing environments for the first time. While the presented approaches all solve individual challenges and are successfully employed in this context, their joint utility form a solid basis for future research in this young field. In its entirety, this thesis presents building blocks for robust distributed visualization on current and future heterogeneous visualization environments.Item Open Access Spatio-temporal and immersive visual analytics for advanced manufacturing(2019) Herr, Dominik; Ertl, Thomas (Prof. Dr.)The increasing amount of digitally available information in the manufacturing domain is accompanied by a demand to use these data to increase the efficiency of a product’s overall design, production, and maintenance steps. This idea, often understood as a part of Industry 4.0, requires the integration of information technologies into traditional manufacturing craftsmanship. Despite an increasing amount of automation in the production domain, human creativity is still essential when designing new products. Further, the cognitive ability of skilled workers to comprehend complex situations and solve issues by adapting solutions of similar problems makes them indispensable. Nowadays, customers demand highly customizable products. Therefore, modern factories need to be highly flexible regarding the lot size and adaptable regarding the produced goods, resulting in increasingly complex processes. One of the major challenges in the manufacturing domain is to optimize the interplay of human expert knowledge and experience with data analysis algorithms. Human experts can quickly comprehend previously unknown patterns and transfer their knowledge and gained experience to solve new issues. Contrarily, data analysis algorithms can process tasks very efficiently at the cost of limited adaptability to handle new situations. Further, they usually lack a sense of semantics, which leads to a need to combine them with human world knowledge to assess the meaningfulness of such algorithms’ results. The concept of Visual Analytics combines the advantages of the human’s cognitive abilities and the processing power of computers. The data are visualized, allowing the users to understand and manipulate them interactively, while algorithms process the data according to the users’ interaction. In the manufacturing domain, a common way to describe the different states of a product from the idea throughout the realization until the product is disposed is the product lifecycle. This thesis presents approaches along the first three phases of the lifecycle: design, planning, and production. A challenge that all of the phases face is that it is necessary to be able to find, understand, and assess relations, for example between concepts, production line layouts, or events reported in a production line. As all phases of the product lifecycle cover broad topics, this thesis focuses on supporting experts in understanding and comparing relations between important aspects of the respective phases, such as concept relationships in the patent domain, as well as production line layouts, or relations of events reported in a production line. During the design phase, it is important to understand the relations of concepts, such as key concepts in patents. Hence, this thesis presents approaches that help domain experts to explore the relationship of such concepts visually. It first focuses on the support of analyzing patent relationships and then extends the presented approach to convey relations about arbitrary concepts, such as authors in scientific literature or keywords on websites. During the planning phase, it is important to discover and compare different possibilities to arrange production line components and additional stashes. In this field, the digitally available data is often insufficient to propose optimal layouts. Therefore, this thesis proposes approaches that help planning experts to design new layouts and optimize positions of machine tools and other components in existing production lines. In the production phase, supporting domain experts in understanding recurring issues and their relation is important to improve the overall efficiency of a production line. This thesis presents visual analytics approaches to help domain experts to understand the relation between events reported by machine tools and comprehend recurring error patterns that may indicate systematic issues during production. Then, this thesis combines the insights and lessons learned from the previous approaches to propose a system that combines augmented reality with visual analysis to allow the monitoring and a situated analysis of machine events directly at the production line. The presented approach primarily focuses on the support of operators on the shop floor. At last, this thesis discusses a possible combination of the product lifecycle with knowledge generating models to communicate insights between the phases, e.g., to prevent issues that are caused from problematic design decisions in earlier phases. In summary, this thesis makes several fundamental contributions to advancing visual analytics techniques in the manufacturing domain by devising new interactive analysis techniques for concept and event relations and by combining them with augmented reality approaches enabling an immersive analysis to improve event handling during production.Item Open Access Concepts and methods for the design, configuration and selection of machine learning solutions in manufacturing(2021) Villanueva Zacarias, Alejandro Gabriel; Mitschang, Bernhard (Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil.)The application of Machine Learning (ML) techniques and methods is common practice in manufacturing companies. They assign teams to the development of ML solutions to support individual use cases. This dissertation refers as ML solution to the set of software components and learning algorithms to deliver a predictive capability based on available use case data, their (hyper) paremeters and technical settings. Currently, development teams face four challenges that complicate the development of ML solutions. First, they lack a formal approach to specify ML solutions that can trace the impact of individual solution components on domain-specific requirements. Second, they lack an approach to document the configurations chosen to build an ML solution, therefore ensuring the reproducibility of the performance obtained. Third, they lack an approach to recommend and select ML solutions that is intuitive for non ML experts. Fourth, they lack a comprehensive sequence of steps that ensures both best practices and the consideration of technical and domain-specific aspects during the development process. Overall, the inability to address these challenges leads to longer development times and higher development costs, as well as less suitable ML solutions that are more difficult to understand and to reuse. This dissertation presents concepts to address these challenges. They are Axiomatic Design for Machine Learning (AD4ML), the ML solution profiling framework and AssistML. AD4ML is a concept for the structured and agile specification of ML solutions. AD4ML establishes clear relationships between domain-specific requirements and concrete software components. AD4ML specifications can thus be validated regarding domain expert requirements before implementation. The ML solution profiling framework employs metadata to document important characteristics of data, technical configurations, and parameter values of software components as well as multiple performance metrics. These metadata constitute the foundations for the reproducibility of ML solutions. AssistML recommends ML solutions for new use cases. AssistML searches among documented ML solutions those that better fulfill the performance preferences of the new use case. The selected solutions are then presented to decision-makers in an intuitive way. Each of these concepts was evaluated and implemented. Combined, these concepts offer development teams a technology-agnostic approach to build ML solutions. The use of these concepts brings multiple benefits, i. e., shorter development times, more efficient development projects, and betterinformed decisions about the development and selection of ML solutions.Item Open Access Eine Methode zum Verteilen, Adaptieren und Deployment partnerübergreifender Anwendungen(2022) Wild, Karoline; Leymann, Frank (Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c.)Ein wesentlicher Aspekt einer effektiven Kollaboration innerhalb von Organisationen, aber vor allem organisationsübergreifend, ist die Integration und Automatisierung der Prozesse. Dazu zählt auch die Bereitstellung von Anwendungssystemen, deren Komponenten von unterschiedlichen Partnern, das heißt Abteilungen oder Unternehmen, bereitgestellt und verwaltet werden. Die dadurch entstehende verteilte, dezentral verwaltete Umgebung bedarf neuer Konzepte zur Bereitstellung. Die Autonomie der Partner und die Verteilung der Komponenten führen dabei zu neuen Herausforderungen. Zum einen müssen partnerübergreifende Kommunikationsbeziehungen realisiert und zum anderen muss das automatisierte dezentrale Deployment ermöglicht werden. Eine Vielzahl von Technologien wurde in den letzten Jahren entwickelt, die alle Schritte von der Modellierung bis zur Bereitstellung und dem Management zur Laufzeit einer Anwendung abdecken. Diese Technologien basieren jedoch auf einer zentralisierten Koordination des Deployments, wodurch die Autonomie der Partner eingeschränkt ist. Auch fehlen Konzepte zur Identifikation von Problemen, die aus der Verteilung von Anwendungskomponenten resultieren und die Funktionsfähigkeit der Anwendung einschränken. Dies betrifft speziell die partnerübergreifenden Kommunikationsbeziehungen. Um diese Herausforderungen zu lösen, stellt diese Arbeit die DivA-Methode zum Verteilen, Adaptieren und Deployment partnerübergreifender Anwendungen vor. Die Methode vereinigt die globalen und lokalen Partneraktivitäten, die zur Bereitstellung partnerübergreifender Anwendungen benötigt werden. Dabei setzt die Methode auf dem deklarativen Essential Deployment Meta Model (EDMM) auf und ermöglicht damit die Einführung deploymenttechnologieunabhängiger Modellierungskonzepte zur Verteilung von Anwendungskomponenten sowie zur Modellanalyse und -adaption. Das Split-and-Match-Verfahren wird für die Verteilung von Anwendungskomponenten basierend auf festgelegten Zielumgebungen und zur Selektion kompatibler Cloud-Dienste vorgestellt. Für die Ausführung des Deployments können EDMM-Modelle in unterschiedliche Technologien transformiert werden. Um die Bereitstellung komplett dezentral durchzuführen, werden deklarative und imperative Technologien kombiniert und basierend auf den deklarativen EDMM-Modellen Workflows generiert, die die Aktivitäten zur Bereitstellung und zum Datenaustausch mit anderen Partnern zur Realisierung partnerübergreifender Kommunikationsbeziehungen orchestrieren. Diese Workflows formen implizit eine Deployment-Choreographie. Für die Modellanalyse und -adaption wird als Kern dieser Arbeit ein zweistufiges musterbasiertes Verfahren zur Problemerkennung und Modelladaption eingeführt. Dafür werden aus den textuellen Musterbeschreibungen die Problem- und Kontextdefinition analysiert und formalisiert, um die automatisierte Identifikation von Problemen in EDMM-Modellen zu ermöglichen. Besonderer Fokus liegt dabei auf Problemen, die durch die Verteilung der Komponenten entstehen und die Realisierung von Kommunikationsbeziehungen verhindern. Das gleiche Verfahren wird auch für die Selektion geeigneter konkreter Lösungsimplementierungen zur Behebung der Probleme angewendet. Zusätzlich wird ein Ansatz zur Selektion von Kommunikationstreibern abhängig von der verwendeten Integrations-Middleware vorgestellt, wodurch die Portabilität von Anwendungskomponenten verbessert werden kann. Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellten Konzepte werden durch das DivA-Werkzeug automatisiert. Zur Validierung wird das Werkzeug prototypisch implementiert und in bestehende Systeme zur Modellierung und Ausführung des Deployments von Anwendungssystemen integriert.Item Open Access Elastic parallel systems for high performance cloud computing(2020) Kehrer, Stefan; Blochinger, Wolfgang (Prof. Dr.)High Performance Computing (HPC) enables significant progress in both science and industry. Whereas traditionally parallel applications have been developed to address the grand challenges in science, as of today, they are also heavily used to speed up the time-to-result in the context of product design, production planning, financial risk management, medical diagnosis, as well as research and development efforts. However, purchasing and operating HPC clusters to run these applications requires huge capital expenditures as well as operational knowledge and thus is reserved to large organizations that benefit from economies of scale. More recently, the cloud evolved into an alternative execution environment for parallel applications, which comes with novel characteristics such as on-demand access to compute resources, pay-per-use, and elasticity. Whereas the cloud has been mainly used to operate interactive multi-tier applications, HPC users are also interested in the benefits offered. These include full control of the resource configuration based on virtualization, fast setup times by using on-demand accessible compute resources, and eliminated upfront capital expenditures due to the pay-per-use billing model. Additionally, elasticity allows compute resources to be provisioned and decommissioned at runtime, which allows fine-grained control of an application's performance in terms of its execution time and efficiency as well as the related monetary costs of the computation. Whereas HPC-optimized cloud environments have been introduced by cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, existing parallel architectures are not designed to make use of elasticity. This thesis addresses several challenges in the emergent field of High Performance Cloud Computing. In particular, the presented contributions focus on the novel opportunities and challenges related to elasticity. First, the principles of elastic parallel systems as well as related design considerations are discussed in detail. On this basis, two exemplary elastic parallel system architectures are presented, each of which includes (1) an elasticity controller that controls the number of processing units based on user-defined goals, (2) a cloud-aware parallel execution model that handles coordination and synchronization requirements in an automated manner, and (3) a programming abstraction to ease the implementation of elastic parallel applications. To automate application delivery and deployment, novel approaches are presented that generate the required deployment artifacts from developer-provided source code in an automated manner while considering application-specific non-functional requirements. Throughout this thesis, a broad spectrum of design decisions related to the construction of elastic parallel system architectures is discussed, including proactive and reactive elasticity control mechanisms as well as cloud-based parallel processing with virtual machines (Infrastructure as a Service) and functions (Function as a Service). To evaluate these contributions, extensive experimental evaluations are presented.Item Open Access Process migration in a parallel environment(Stuttgart : Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum, Universität Stuttgart, 2016) Reber, Adrian; Resch, Michael (Prof. Dr.- Ing. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Prof. E.h.)To satisfy the ever increasing demand for computational resources, high performance computing systems are becoming larger and larger. Unfortunately, the tools supporting system management tasks are only slowly adapting to the increase in components in computational clusters. Virtualization provides concepts which make system management tasks easier to implement by providing more flexibility for system administrators. With the help of virtual machine migration, the point in time for certain system management tasks like hardware or software upgrades no longer depends on the usage of the physical hardware. The flexibility to migrate a running virtual machine without significant interruption to the provided service makes it possible to perform system management tasks at the optimal point in time. In most high performance computing systems, however, virtualization is still not implemented. The reason for avoiding virtualization in high performance computing is that there is still an overhead accessing the CPU and I/O devices. This overhead continually decreases and there are different kind of virtualization techniques like para-virtualization and container-based virtualization which minimize this overhead further. With the CPU being one of the primary resources in high performance computing, this work proposes to migrate processes instead of virtual machines thus avoiding any overhead. Process migration can either be seen as an extension to pre-emptive multitasking over system boundaries or as a special form of checkpointing and restarting. In the scope of this work process migration is based on checkpointing and restarting as it is already an established technique in the field of fault tolerance. From the existing checkpointing and restarting implementations, the best suited implementation for process migration purposes was selected. One of the important requirements of the checkpointing and restarting implementation is transparency. Providing transparent process migration is important enable the migration of any process without prerequisites like re-compilation or running in a specially prepared environment. With process migration based on checkpointing and restarting, the next step towards providing process migration in a high performance computing environment is to support the migration of parallel processes. Using MPI is a common method of parallelizing applications and therefore process migration has to be integrated with an MPI implementation. The previously selected checkpointing and restarting implementation was integrated in an MPI implementation, and thus enabling the migration of parallel processes. With the help of different test cases the implemented process migration was analyzed, especially in regards to the time required to migrated a process and the advantages of optimizations to reduce the process’ downtime during migration.Item Open Access Forming a hybrid intelligence system by combining Active Learning and paid crowdsourcing for semantic 3D point cloud segmentation(2023) Kölle, Michael; Sörgel, Uwe (Prof. Dr.-Ing.)While in recent years tremendous advancements have been achieved in the development of supervised Machine Learning (ML) systems such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), still the most decisive factor for their performance is the quality of labeled training data from which the system is supposed to learn. This is why we advocate focusing more on methods to obtain such data, which we expect to be more sustainable than establishing ever new classifiers in the rapidly evolving ML field. In the geospatial domain, however, the generation process of training data for ML systems is still rather neglected in research, with typically experts ending up being occupied with such tedious labeling tasks. In our design of a system for the semantic interpretation of Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) point clouds, we break with this convention and completely lift labeling obligations from experts. At the same time, human annotation is restricted to only those samples that actually justify manual inspection. This is accomplished by means of a hybrid intelligence system in which the machine, represented by an ML model, is actively and iteratively working together with the human component through Active Learning (AL), which acts as pointer to exactly such most decisive samples. Instead of having an expert label these samples, we propose to outsource this task to a large group of non-specialists, the crowd. But since it is rather unlikely that enough volunteers would participate in such crowdsourcing campaigns due to the tedious nature of labeling, we argue attracting workers by monetary incentives, i.e., we employ paid crowdsourcing. Relying on respective platforms, typically we have access to a vast pool of prospective workers, guaranteeing completion of jobs promptly. Thus, crowdworkers become human processing units that behave similarly to the electronic processing units of this hybrid intelligence system performing the tasks of the machine part. With respect to the latter, we do not only evaluate whether an AL-based pipeline works for the semantic segmentation of ALS point clouds, but also shed light on the question of why it works. As crucial components of our pipeline, we test and enhance different AL sampling strategies in conjunction with both a conventional feature-driven classifier as well as a data-driven CNN classification module. In this regard, we aim to select AL points in such a manner that samples are not only informative for the machine, but also feasible to be interpreted by non-experts. These theoretical formulations are verified by various experiments in which we replace the frequently assumed but highly unrealistic error-free oracle with simulated imperfect oracles we are always confronted with when working with humans. Furthermore, we find that the need for labeled data, which is already reduced through AL to a small fraction (typically ≪1 % of Passive Learning training points), can be even further minimized when we reuse information from a given source domain for the semantic enrichment of a specific target domain, i.e., we utilize AL as means for Domain Adaptation. As for the human component of our hybrid intelligence system, the special challenge we face is monetarily motivated workers with a wide variety of educational and cultural backgrounds as well as most different mindsets regarding the quality they are willing to deliver. Consequently, we are confronted with a great quality inhomogeneity in results received. Thus, when designing respective campaigns, special attention to quality control is required to be able to automatically reject submissions of low quality and to refine accepted contributions in the sense of the Wisdom of the Crowds principle. We further explore ways to support the crowd in labeling by experimenting with different data modalities (discretized point cloud vs. continuous textured 3D mesh surface), and also aim to shift the motivation from a purely extrinsic nature (i.e., payment) to a more intrinsic one, which we intend to trigger through gamification. Eventually, by casting these different concepts into the so-called CATEGORISE framework, we constitute the aspired hybrid intelligence system and employ it for the semantic enrichment of ALS point clouds of different characteristics, enabled through learning from the (paid) crowd.