Information Systems and Technology Center

/ Hidesada Kanda / Professor
/ Akira Fujitsu / Assistant Professor
/ Tongjun Huang / Research Associate

ISTC consists of both the Information Processing Center and the University Library. A brief outline of these two parts in 1994 is given below.

Information Processing Center

In order to provide a convenient environment for faculty members, staff, and students, ISTC began to provide new support to the AINS (Univ. of Aizu Information Network System) in 1994 as follows.

• AINS was opened in September 1994. The workstations are able to communicate with systems outside through direct IP packets.
• With the open network, access through telephone lines will be available for both faculty members and students.
• In order to increase the available capacity on the disk, distribute the server loads, and make easier use of the application server, the home directories of faculty members were moved to an external hard disk.
• The computer systems in computer exercise rooms 5 and 6 and in hardware workshops 1, 2, 3, and 4 have been connected to AINS and opened to users.
• Many useful software such as tgifj, ImageMagick, etc were installed on AINS.
• A WWW server has been set up and the WWW service is available at our university.
• ISTC has done backup of the processor's local-disk since April 1994.

Up to end of 1994, the AINS had grown into a campus network including about 800 workstations, 2 super computers, 73 network printers, and 192 local printers (Table-1).

University Library

The University Library has been designed to provide both centralized and decentralized services. In accordance with the completion of construction of the University Library and the Research Quadrangles, full-scale service for Library users and management of the research libraries has begun. The statistics on the increase by Fiscal Year are shown in Table-2.

MUSE System (Multimedia University System Environment)

MUSE is a university information system and mainly consists of administration and library systems. Some new functions as shown in Table-3 were added to MUSE in 1994.

Organization

(1) In June 1994, a new member, assistant professor Akira Fujitsu joined our center. (2) In order to solve problems and respond to questions more quickly, the SSB (System Support Base) was opened in the Research Quadrangles.

Refereed Journal Papers

1. A. Fujitsu (KEK, Tsukuba). Ope. math: Operator product expansions in free field realizations of conformal field theory. Comput. Phys. Commun., 79:278--99, 1994.

   We present version 1.0 of the package "ope.math" for Mathematica to compute operator product expansions (OPEs) of composite operators ( currents) in terms of free fields in conformal field theories. Further, we can also calculate OPEs of currents expressed by vertex operators. We give examples of free filed realizations of current algebras, Hamiltonian reduction of current algebras and BRST cohomology of two-dimensional gravity coupled to $c\le1$ minimal models.

1. Tongjun HUANG, Zixue CHENG, Minetada Osano, and Norio SHIRATORI. A decentralized social algorithm for committee coordination problem. In The second international Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems ISADS 95, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, April 1995. IEEE, IPS, SICE, IFAC.

   In this paper, we consider an extended committee coordination problem in an autonomous decentralized social environment. The basic committee coordination problem and a distributed algorithm, as a solution to this problem in distributed environment, are presented by K.M.Chandy and J.Misra in. The algorithm guarantees the synchronous and exclusion properties of the problem and is fair (i.e. starvation-free) and makes progress (i.e. deadlock-free). In an autonomous decentralized social environment, besides the above mentioned properties, some social properties, such as individual preference, privacy protection, and stable assignment are required to be considered and guaranteed. In this paper, we extend the committee coordination problem by introducing some social properties, such as individual preference and stable assignment and give a decentralized social algorithm as a solution to this extended problem. The algorithm guarantees not only the synchronous and exclusion properties but also individual preference and stable assignment properties.

2. Zixue CHENG, Tongjun HUANG, and Norio SHIRATORI. A new distributed algorithm for implementation of lotos multi-rendezvous. In Dieter Hogrefe and Stefan Leue, editors, Formal Description Techniques VII: Seventh International Conference on Formal Description Techniques for Distributed Systems and Communications Protocols, pages 493--504. CHAPMAN & HALL, October 1994.

   LOTOS is a high level specification language which incorporates the Multi-Rendezvous. Multi-Rendezvous is a powerful communication mechanism that allows a set of processes to execute an event in synchronous way. Besides the multi-synchronous property, Multi-Rendezvous has nondeterministic and exclusion properties. It is not a trivial problem to implement Multi-Rendezvous in a network system. The implementation has to maintain the properties mentioned above, be fair and make progress. In this paper, we propose a new efficient distributed algorithm, based on the concept of coterie, for implementing Multi-Rendezvous with $O(N\sqrt{N})$ message passes. Our algorithm is fully distributed and does not use manager processes and auxiliary resources.

3. Zixue CHENG, Tongjun HUANG, and Norio SHIRATORI. A distributed algorithm for resource allocation among process groups. In The 9th International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN-9), Osaka, Japan, December 1994.

   Distributed resource allocation is an important problem in developing distributed systems. Many works have been done on the problem. However recent new applications, such as supporting collaborative group work, distributed cooperative development of software, cause some new problems. One of them is that some resources are competed for by several groups of processes. There may exist deadlock or starvation among groups. We call them ``group deadlock'' and ``group starvation''. In this paper, we first define the new resource allocation problem: Distributed Resources Allocation among Process Groups. This problem is an extension of the Distributed Resource Allocation problem. Then we present a new distributed algorithm as a solution to the problem. Our algorithm can allocate resources to groups of processes without group deadlock and group starvation.

4. Zixue CHENG, Tongjun HUANG, and Norio SHIRATORI. An efficient distributed implementeation for lotos multi-rendezvous. In The 9th International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN-9), Osaka, Japan, December 1994.

   In this paper, we propose a new efficient distributed algorithm for implementing Multi-Rendezvous with $2Nm$ message passes for a Multi-Rendezvous, without using auxiliary resources. Here, $N$ is the number of processes which participate in a Multi-Rendezvous, $m$ is the number of possible Multi-Rendezvous within a system. A formal specification of the algorithm in LOTOS is included in the paper.

1. Hidesada Kanda. Radial pressure distribution for flow in a circular pipe. In Abstracts of the Meeting of the Physical Society of Japan, 50th Annual Meeting Pt.4, page 65. The Physical Society of Japan, March 1995.

2. Naka Tajima, Kazuhiko Satoh, Shinichi Saitoh, Takao Saitoh, Tongjun Huang, and Zixue Cheng. Efficient rock-scissors-paper on distributed environment. Proceedings of the 50th Annual Convention IPS Japan, 1995.

1. Tongjun HUANG, Zixue CHENG, Minetada OSANO, and Norio SHIRATORI. Design of a coordinator for the committee coordination problem. 95-6-001, University of Aizu, 1995.

1. Akira Fujitsu. Ministry of education scientific research fund, 'shourei' research. A 02952048, Physics, Elementary Particles, 1994.

1. Hidesada Kanda, Japan Society of Computational Fluid Dynamics, 1994. Editor of CFD.

2. Tongjun Huang, The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineegs, 1994. Member.