Rui Alves

High-Performance Computing involves exploiting the capabilities of powerful computing resources to achieve high computational performance, efficiency, and scalability. By enabling to process complex tasks and/or large amounts of data efficiently, HPC plays an essential role in multiple domains. Parallelization and distribution of workloads across multiple processing resources is at the core of HPC and has been done via many approaches, including different programmatic models and service frameworks. In recent years, HPC has been coupled with Containerization, as a way to deploy, manage and run workloads in an automated and efficient manner, including those relying on accelerators. The performance of heterogeneous workloads, however, depends on the behavior of the platform scheduler, and of the mechanisms used to share accelerators, being also constraint by the limited number of accelerators that each node may host. This paper describes an approach by which the last limitation may be overcome, using a Kubernetes cluster as a show case. The approach builds on the integration of Kubernetes with rOpenCL, an OpenCL API forwarder for remote execution of OpenCL calls. This combination may also be particularly useful in Edge Computing scenarios, where containerized edge services gain the ability to access, transparently and efficiently, remote (e.g. cloud-based) accelerators. Some preliminary experimental results are presented, demonstrating the feasibility of this integration, and the impact on performance for an OpenCL application.

Nowadays, flying is a fundamental part of society. Traveling is increasingly accessible, which supports not only the aeronautical industry but also the tourism sector in some regions around the world. However, despite its importance in society in general, where there are more and more airplanes in the air, the aviation industry has also become one of the primary sources of pollution, and when considering entertainment aviation, the problem becomes even more complicated. In recent years, all aeronautical manufacturers have been working on solutions that reduce the sector’s impact on climate change. Landings are of particular importance in the fuel consumption aspect, especially if it is taken into account that for various reasons a pilot may decide to abort the maneuver, meaning a few more kilos of fuel that will be consumed consequently making more pollution. The present work suggests an architecture based on the history of successful landings providing the pilot suggestions to reduce the probability of a go-around.

Farm tractors have become a key part of daily routine agriculture, converting complex and time-consuming tasks into tasks that are easier to perform and less dependent on human labor, contributing directly to increasing the economic value generated by this activity sector, either by increasing the productivity or by making certain agricultural crops viable, which otherwise would not be sustainable. However, despite all the advantages, accidents with this type of equipment are common, often with critical and sometimes fatal consequences. The evolution of safety requirements of these machines has occurred at a good level; however, a significant part of the agricultural tractors in use are older models that do not have such solutions. Even in the new models, which contain such solutions, these are not always correctly used, and it is even common that they are turned off or simply not used at all. It is therefore natural that accidents continue to occur, a situation that is aggravated by other factors. Lack of situational awareness of the operators, which can result from advanced age, inadequate training, reduced sensitivity/respect for safety rules, or working on irregular terrain like mountainous areas, contribute to high-risk contexts that end in the loss of human life. The consequences of such accidents are clearly aggravated by the time it takes to assist the victims—either because accidents are simply not identified/reported immediately, or by the time it takes to locate and provide help to the victims. This is a scenario that is more common in mountainous regions and regions with low population density. The current paper, using NB-IoT, a set of sensors, and a web application, presents a conceptual toolset conceived to prevent accidents and minimize consequences (human and material) that can be applied to old and new farm tractors. The development was carried out taking the characterization of the farmers and the land in the region in which the authors’ research institution is located into account, which has the highest rate of fatal accidents with agricultural tractors in the country; it is a region of mountainous with a very low population density.