Thread cell differentiation in the slime gland of the Pacific hagfish Eptatretus stouti has been studied using light microscopy and scanning and transmission electron microscopy. Thread cell differentiation is remarkable in that the life history of the cell is largely dedicated to the production of a single, tapered, cylindrical, highly coiled, and precisely packaged cytoplasmic thread that may...

The blue mussel Mytilus edulis maintains a strong attachment to the substrate in high energy environments by producing byssal threads. On the shores of Rhode Island, USA, mussel attachment strength increases twofold in spring compared to that in the fall. While many factors could influence attachment strength (temperature, food supply, predator cues, etc.), it has been proposed that the variati...

Networked embedded systems present unique challenges for system designers composing distributed applications with dyanmic, real-time, and resilience requirements. We consider the problem of recovering from failures of distributable threads with assured timeliness in dynamic systems with overloads, and node and (permanent/transient) network failures. When a distributable thread encounters a fail...

Thread affinity has appeared as an important technique to improve the overall program performance and for better performance stability. However, if we consider a program with multiple phases, it is unlikely that a single thread affinity produces the best program performance for all these phases. If we consider the case of OpenMP, applications may have multiple parallel regions, each with a dist...

The rising availability of multiprocessing platforms has increased the importance of providing programming models that allow users to express parallelism simply, portably, and efficiently. One popular way to write parallel programs is to use threads for concurrent sections of code. User-level threads packages allow programmers to implement multithreaded programs in which thread creation, thread...