Cilk (pronounced "silk") is a C-based runtime system for multithreaded parallel programming. In this paper, we document the efficiency of the Cilk work-stealing scheduler, both empirically and analytically. We show that on real and synthetic applications, the "work" and "

of problems. According to the tests we have done so far, the optimizations substantially improve the time performance of the system.

total sales. The values of many of these cells are dependent on the values of other cells in the data cube..A common and powerful query optimization technique is to materialize some or all of these cells rather than compute them from raw data each time. Commercial systems differ mainly in their approach

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The ICP (Iterative Closest Point) algorithm is widely used for geometric alignment of three-dimensional models when an initial estimate of the relative pose is known. Many variants of ICP have been proposed, affecting all phases of the algorithm from the selection and matching of points to the minimization strategy. We enumerate and classify many of these variants, and evaluate their effect on the speed with which the correct alignment is reached. In order to improve convergence for nearly-flat meshes with small features, such as inscribed surfaces, we introduce a new variant based on uniform sampling of the space of normals. We conclude by proposing a combination of ICP variants optimized for high speed. We demonstrate an implementation that is able to align two range images in a few tens of milliseconds, assuming a good initial guess. This capability has potential application to real-time 3D model acquisition and model-based tracking.

and similarity measures allowing query by color, texture, and shape of image object. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the QBIC system with normalized precision and recall experiments on test databases containing over 1000 images and 1000 objects populated from commercially available photo clip art images

The problem of combining preferences arises in several applications, such as combining the results of different search engines. This work describes an efficient algorithm for combining multiple preferences. We first give a formal framework for the problem. We then describe and analyze a new

We propose an indexing method for time sequences for processing similarity queries. We use the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) to map time sequences to the frequency domain, the crucial observation being that, for most sequences of practical interest, only the first few frequencies are strong. Another important observation is Parseval's theorem, which specifies that the Fourier transform preserves the Euclidean distance in the time or frequency domain. Having thus mapped sequences to a lower-dimensionality space by using only the first few Fourier coe cients, we use R-trees to index the sequences and e ciently answer similarity queries. We provide experimental results which show that our method is superior to search based on sequential scanning. Our experiments show that a few coefficients (1-3) are adequate to provide good performance. The performance gain of our method increases with the number and length of sequences.

Wireless distributed microsensor systems will enable the reliable monitoring of a variety of environments for both civil and military applications. In this paper, we look at communication protocols, which can have significant impact on the overall energy dissipation of these networks. Based on our

This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in almost every way: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules. Inspired by PAMAS, S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-andforward processing as data move through the network. We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the Mote, developed at University of California, Berkeley. The experiment results show that, on a source node, an 802.11-like MAC consumes 2--6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load with messages sent every 1-10s.