Inflatable plstic splints have been in use for some time in the United States for the emergency splinting of fracures;t are also gaining popularity in casualty departmentsand clinics in the United Kingdom. Splints of this type cost essentially of a double-walled trAhsparent plastic jacket with a slide fastener and a screw valve in the outer _wa for tion (Pig,,1). The jacket is placed on the lim...

Eddy current inspection is widely used in nondestructive evaluation to detect cracks in metal structures. The impedance plane measurement response collected using our motion controlled eddy current inspection system, are used in the analysis. A scalar reduction from the impedance plane response is used to minimize human-factor variation. We apply a noise interference model to the data from a la...

The detection, location, and sizing of a fatigue crack emanating from a fastener hole in an aluminum plate is investigated. Two linear arrays of surface mounted piezoelectric disk transducers send and receive ultrasonic guided waves that are transmitted, reflected, and scattered by both the joint geometry and the fatigue crack. A tomography algorithm is used to detect and locate the crack. Ampl...

NUMA multicore machines are pervasive and many multithreaded applications are suffering from lock contention. To mitigate this issue, application and library developers can choose from the plethora of optimized mutex lock algorithms that have been designed over the past 25 years. Unfortunately, there is currently no broad study of the behavior of these optimized lock algorithms on realistic app...

Lock-free shared data structures in the setting of distributed computing have received a fair amount of attention. Major motivations of lock-free data structures include increasing fault tolerance of a (possibly heterogeneous) system and alleviating the problems associated with critical sections such as priority inversion and deadlock. For parallel computers with tightly-coupled processors and ...

Synchronization overhead may limit the number of applications that can take advantage of a shared-memory abstraction on top of emerging network of workstation organizations. While the programmer could spend additional efforts into getting rid of such overhead by restructuring the computation, this paper focuses on a simpler approach where the overhead of lock operations is hidden through lock p...

Mutual-exclusion locks are currently the most popular mechanism for interpro-cess synchronisation, largely due to their apparent simplicity and ease of implementation. In the parallel-computing environments that are increasingly commonplace in high-performance applications, this simplicity is deceptive: mutual exclusion does not scale well with large numbers of locks and many concurrent threads...

Applications of a new model for predicting power threaded-fastener-driving tool operator response and capacity to react against impulsive torque reaction forces are explored for use in tool selection and ergonomic workplace design. The model is based on a mechanical analog of the human operator, with parameters dependent on work location (horizontal and vertical distances); work orientation (ho...

An object is lock-free if it guarantees that in a system where multiple threads are manipulating the object, some thread will complete its operation on the object in a finite number of steps, no matter what happens to other threads. More practically, lock-free programming is a technique to achieve thread safety without the use of locks, which are the current standard. Lock-free objects (LFOs) h...

Techniques for Constructing Efficient Lock-free Data Structures Trevor Brown Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 2017 Building a library of concurrent data structures is an essential way to simplify the difficult task of developing concurrent software. Lock-free data structures, in which processes can help one another to complete operations, offer ...