Discovering likely invariants of distributed transaction systems for autonomic system management

Large amount of monitoring data can be collected from distributed systems as the observables to analyze system behaviors. However, without reasonable models to characterize systems, we can hardly interpret such monitoring data effectively for system management. In this paper, a new concept named flow intensity is introduced to measure the intensity with which internal monitoring data reacts to the volume of user requests in distributed transaction systems. We propose a novel approach to automatically model and search relationships between the flow intensities measured at various points across the system. If the modeled relationships hold all the time, they are regarded as invariants of the underlying system. Experimental results from a real system demonstrate that such invariants widely exist in distributed transaction systems. Further we discuss how such invariants can be used to characterize complex systems and support autonomic system management. Guofei Jiang received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology, China, in 1993 and 1998, respectively. During 1998–2000, he was a postdoctoral fellow in computer engineering at Dartmouth College, NH. He is currently a research staff member with the Robust and Secure Systems Group in NEC Laboratories America at Princeton, NJ. During 2000–2004, he was a research scientist in the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth College. His current research focus is on distributed system, dependable and secure computing, system and information theory. He has published over 50 technical papers in these areas. He is an associate editor of IEEE Security and Privacy magazine and has served in the program committees of many conferences. Haifeng Chen received the BEng and MEng degrees, both in automation, from Southeast University, China, in 1994 and 1997 respectively, and the PhD degree in computer engineering from Rutgers University, New Jersey, in 2004. He has worked as a researcher in the Chinese national research institute of power automation. He is currently a research staff member at NEC laboratory America, Princeton, NJ. His research interests include data mining, autonomic computing, pattern recognition and robust statistics. Kenji Yoshihira received the B.E. in EE at University of Tokyo in 1996 and designed processor chips for enterprise computer at Hitachi Ltd. for five years. He employed himself in CTO at Investoria Inc. in Japan to develop an Internet service system for financial information distribution through 2002 and received the M.S. in CS at New York University in 2004. He is currently a research staff member with the Robust and Secure Systems Group in NEC Laboratories America, inc. in NJ. His current research focus is on distributed system and autonomic computing.     

Q & A. [interview

Elaine and Gary Ostrander spent their youth in New Jersey and New York before heading to Nebraska for their teen years and eventually Washington State for High School and college, as their father moved around in library administration. Elaine was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, a graduate student at the Oregon Health Sciences University and a postdoc with James Wang at Harvard, studying DNA supercoiling. She next went to Berkeley, where she began the canine genome project, initiating the meiotic linkage map and working on human chromosome 21 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. In 1993 she moved to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center where she is now a Member of the Divisions of Clinical Research and Human Biology. She is also an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington, and heads the Program in Genetics at the Hutchinson Center. Gary completed his undergraduate degree in Biology at Seattle University, a M.S. degree at Illinois State University and a Ph.D at the University of Washington in Ocean and Fisheries Science. He went on to be a postdoc in the Department of Pathology at the University of Washington Medical School while being mentored by Senitroh Hakomori of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Eric Holmes of the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation. His work focused on using novel aspects of the biology of fishes to address fundamental questions about cancer. He subsequently held both faculty and administrative positions at Oklahoma State University. Since 1996, he has been at the Johns Hopkins University, where he currently holds academic appointments in the Departments of Biology and Comparative Medicine and is the Associate Provost for Research.     

Q & A. Carl R. Woese. [interview

Carl R. Woese was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. His undergraduate training was at Amherst College (AB 1950) and graduate work at Yale University (PhD 1953). He is currently the Stanley O. Ikenberry University Professor and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), where he has been for the past forty years. He was trained as a biophysicist and molecular biologist. He views himself as a molecular biologist in search of Biology. Consequently, his career has been devoted to using molecular methods to approach evolutionary problems. His most notable accomplishments have been determining the universal phylogenetic tree, through molecular sequence analysis, and the discovery of the Archaea, the so-called ‘third form’ of life. For these he has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award, the Leeuwenhoek Medal 1990 (Netherlands Royal Academy), the Waksman Award (National Academy of Science USA), and the Crafoord Prize (Swedish Royal Academy). At present he works on the evolution of cellular organization.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:
The Ethics of Reproductive Technology edited by Kenneth D. Alpern. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992
Medical Confidentiality and Legal Privilege by Jean V. McHale. London and New York: Routledge, 1993
The Codes of Codes , edited by Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992
The Troubled Dream of Life: Living with Mortality by Daniel Callahan. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993
International Directory of Bioethics Organizations. Anita L. Nolen and Mary Carrington Coutts, editors. Bioethics Resource Series, Volume 1. Washington, DC: Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, 1993
The Codification of Medical Morality, Volume One: Medical Ethics and Etiquette in the Eighteenth Century , edited by Robert Baker, Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993
Pursuing Parenthood: Ethical Issues in Assisted Reproduction by Paul Lauritzen. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993     

Q & A. [interview

Joel Rosenbaum was born and grew up in Massena, New York state, on the St Lawrence River border with Ontario, Canada. He received his undergraduate and PhD degrees from Syracuse University, and a Masters Degree in high school biology teaching at St Lawrence University. His PhD work was done with the protozoologist, George Holz Jr, and his post doctoral research on cilia and flagella was at the University Of Chicago with Frank Child and Hewson Swift. He has been at Yale University for 37 years where he has taught Cell Biology. His research has been on the synthesis and assembly of the proteins of cilia and flagella, showing that the flagellar axoneme assembles at the distal tip and that detachment of the flagella upregulates the genes for flagellar proteins. More recently his group has shown that this tip assembly process is facilitated by a rapid kinesin and cytoplasmic dynein-mediated motility underneath the flagellar membrane called ‘intraflagellar transport’. He is a runner with more than 20 marathons under his belt.     

On Explicit Congestion Notification for Stream Control Transmission Protocol in Lossy Networks

As a congestion avoidance mechanism, Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) is designed to inform a data source to react to potential congestion early. Currently, the new transport protocol, Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), is not ECN-capable. An ECN-capable SCTP is proposed in this paper, which is bandwidth-efficient and robust to non-congestion losses. An SCTP source needs to adjust its congestion window when receiving ECN messages. We find the optimal value of the congestion window for an SCTP source in response to ECN messages, and develop a simple and practical method to achieve this optimal congestion window. Both simulation results and analysis are provided to support the effectiveness of the proposed ECN mechanism for SCTP. The simplified method in achieving the optimal congestion window is attractive because the total goodput performance of SCTP associations or the bottleneck link utilization is not sensitive to the window reduction policies when the network load is heavy. Using complicated methods to fine-tune SCTP or TCPs congestion window in response to congestion indications may not be worth the increase in complexity of the protocol.Prepared through collaborative participation in the Communications and Networks Consortium sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under the Collaborative Technology Alliance Program, Cooperative Agreement DAAD19-01-2-0011. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon.Guanhua Ye received the B.E. degree in Information & Electronic Technology from Zhejiang University, China, in 1997 and M.E. degree in Communication & Information Systems from China Academy of Telecommunications Technology in 2000. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at City College and Graduate Center of City University of New York.His research interests are in computer networks, congestion control, ad hoc networks, voice over IP and multimedia communications.Tarek N. Saadawi received the B.Sc. and the M.Sc. from Cairo University Egypt and the Ph.D from the University of Maryland, College Park (all in Electrical Engineering). Since 1980 he has been with the Electrical Engineering Department, The City University of New York, City College. His current research interests are telecommunications network, high-speed networks, multimedia networks, AD-HOC networks and packet radio networks. He has published extensively in the area of telecommunications networks. He is a Co-author of the book, Fundamentals of Telecommunication Networks, John Wiley & Sons, 1994. He is also the lead author of Egypt Telecommunications Infrastructure Master Plan covering the fiber network, IP/ATM, DSL and the wireless local loop. Dr. Saadawi is a Former Chairman of IEEE Computer Society of New York City (1986–87). He has received IEEE Region 1 Award, 1987, and the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) of America for research on Broadband Telecommunication Networks.Dr. Myung Jong Lee received the B.S from Seoul National University in Korea and M.S and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University, 1986 and 1990 respectively. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, City College and Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he is currently an associate professor.His recent researches focus on various aspects of wireless ad hoc networks, sensor networks, and personal area networks. He has published over 50 refereed journal and conference papers. He is the Director of Samsung-CUNY Joint Laboratory on Sensor Networks. Dr. Lee received CUNYs Excellence Performance Award in 1999. Dr. Lee is a senior member of IEEE, and served many IEEE and other conferences as program committee member and session chair, and also actively participates in ZigBee Alliance and IEEE1451 Smart Sensor WG.     

A parallel programming interface for out-of-core cluster applications

Clusters of workstations are a practical approach to parallel computing that provide high performance at a low cost for many scientific and engineering applications. In order to handle problems with increasing data sets, methods supporting parallel out-of-core computations must be investigated. Since writing an out-of-core version of a program is a difficult task and virtual memory systems do not perform well in some cases, we have developed a parallel programming interface and the support library to provide efficient and convenient access to the out-of-core data. This paper focuses on how these components extend the range of problem sizes that can be solved on the cluster of workstations. Execution time of Jacobi iteration when using our interface, virtual memory and PVFS are compared to characterize the performance for various problem sizes, and it is concluded that our new interface significantly increases the sizes of problems that can be efficiently solved. Jianqi Tang received B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1997 and 1999 respectively, both in computer application. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science and engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology. She has participated in several National research projects. Her research interests include parallel computing, parallel I/O and grid computing. Binxing Fang received M.Sc. in 1984 from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1989, both in computer science. From 1990 to 1993 he was with National University of Defense Technology as a postdoctor. Since 1984, he is a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science and engineering of Harbin Institute of Technology, where he is presently a Professor. He is a Member of the National Information Expert Consultant Group and a Standing Member of the Council of Chinese Society of Communications. His research efforts focus on parallel computing, computer network and information security. Professor Fang has implemented over 30 projects from the state and ministry/province. Mingzeng Hu was born in 1935. He has been with the Department of Computer Science and engineering in Harbin Institute of Technology since 1958, where he is currently a Professor. He was a visiting scholar in the Siemens Company, Germany from 1978 to 1979, a visiting associate professor in Chiba University, Japan from 1984 to 1985, and a visiting professor in York University, Canada from 1989 to 1995. He is the Director of the National Key Laboratory of Computer Information Content Security. He is also a Member of 3rd Academic Degree Committee under the State Council of China. Professor Hu’s research interests include high performance computer architecture and parallel processing technology, fault tolerant computing, network system, VL design, and computer system security technology. He has implemented many projects from the state and ministry/province and has won several Ministry Science and Technology Progress Awards. He published over 100 papers in core journals home and abroad and one book. Professor Hu has supervised over 20 doctoral students. Hongli Zhang received M.Sc in computer system software in 1996 and Ph.D. in computer architecture in 1999 from Harbin Institute of Technology. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology. Her research interests include computer network security and parallel computing.     

Finding Hamiltonian paths in tournaments on clusters

This paper presents a general methodology for the communication-efficient parallelization of graph algorithms using the divide-and-conquer approach and shows that this class of problems can be solved in cluster environments with good communication efficiency. Specifically, the first practical parallel algorithm, based on a general coarse-grained model, for finding Hamiltonian paths in tournaments is presented. On any such parallel machines, this algorithm uses only (3log p+1), where p is the number of processors, communication rounds, which is independent of the tournament size, and can reuse the existing linear-time algorithm in the sequential setting. For theoretical completeness, the algorithm is revised for fine-grained models, where the ratio of computation and communication throughputs is low or the local memory size, , of each individual processor is extremely limited for any , solving the problem with O(log p) communication rounds, while the hidden constant grows with the scalability factor 1/∊. Experiments have been carried out on a Linux cluster of 32 Sun Ultra5 computers and an SGI Origin 2000 with 32 R10000 processors. The algorithm performance on the Linux Cluster reaches 75% of the performance on the SGI Origin 2000 when the tournament size is about one million. Computational resources and technical support are provided by the Center for Computational Research (CCR) at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Chun-Hsi Huang received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2001. His is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut. His interests include High Performance Parallel Computing, Cluster and Grid Computing, Biomedical and Health Informatics, Algorithm Design and Analysis, Experimental Algorithms and Computational Biology. Sanguthevar Rajasekaran received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1988. Currently he is the UTC Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut and the Director of Booth Engineering Center for Advanced Technologies (BECAT). His research interests include Parallel Algorithms, Bioinformatics, Data Mining, Randomized Computing, Computer Simulations, and Combinatorial Optimization. Laurence Tianruo Yang received is Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Oxford University. He is currently a professor of Computer Science of the St. Francis Xavier University in Canada. His research interests include high-performance computing, embedded systems, computer archtecture and high-speed networking. Xin He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Ohio State University in 1987. He is currently Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research interests include Algorithms, Data Structures, Combinatorics and Computational Geometry.     

Q & A. [interview

George Oster is Professor of Biophysics, University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.S. at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He began his career in biophysics as a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute under Aharon Katchalsky, where his research involved membrane biophysics and irreversible thermodynamics. His concern for environmental issues led him into population biology, which shaded into evolutionary biology and thence to developmental biology, cell biology and, most recently, protein motors and bacterial motility and pattern formation. His tools are mathematics, physics and computer simulation. He is currently a faculty member in the Departments of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the College of Natural Resources at Berkeley.     

Eric Kandel: the future of memory

Watching ice floes glide by on the Hudson River from Eric Kandel's office, one gets a sense of placid reflection tempered by constant action-an apt analogy for Kandel's ability to calmly manage several ongoing projects and commitments at once. In addition to his well-lauded, ongoing research at Columbia University Medical Center's New York State Psychiatric Institute, Kandel has written several books on neurobiology, behavior, and memory. In addition to being a Nobel Laureate Scientist, he is well-known as an editor of the seminal textbook Principles of Neural Science. He and his colleagues are in the midst of working on a new edition of Principles, and he is working on a scientific autobiography. MI sat down with Dr. Kandel and discussed with him a range of topics including childhood and early career influences, intramural research at the NIH, the HHMI, ethical considerations of altering memory and, of course, Aplysia.     

Discretionary Caching for I/O on Clusters

I/O bottlenecks are already a problem in many large-scale applications that manipulate huge datasets. This problem is expected to get worse as applications get larger, and the I/O subsystem performance lags behind processor and memory speed improvements. At the same time, off-the-shelf clusters of workstations are becoming a popular platform for demanding applications due to their cost-effectiveness and widespread deployment. Caching I/O blocks is one effective way of alleviating disk latencies, and there can be multiple levels of caching on a cluster of workstations. Previous studies have shown the benefits of caching—whether it be local to a particular node, or a shared global cache across the cluster—for certain applications. However, we show that while caching is useful in some situations, it can hurt performance if we are not careful about what to cache and when to bypass the cache. This paper presents compilation techniques and runtime support to address this problem. These techniques are implemented and evaluated on an experimental Linux/Pentium cluster running a parallel file system. Our results using a diverse set of applications (scientific and commercial) demonstrate the benefits of a discretionary approach to caching for I/O subsystems on clusters, providing as much as 48% savings in overall execution time over indiscriminately caching everything in some applications. Parts of this paper have appeared in the Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE/ACM Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid'03). This paper is an extension of these prior results, and includes a more extensive performance evaluation. Murali Vilayannur is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests are in High-Performance Parallel I/O, File Systems, Virtual Memory Algorithms and Operating Systems. Anand Sivasubramaniam received his B.Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1989, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1995 respectively. He has been on the faculty at The Pennsylvania State University since Fall 1995 where he is currently an Associate Professor. Anand's research interests are in computer architecture, operating systems, performance evaluation, and applications for both high performance computer systems and embedded systems. Anand's research has been funded by NSF through several grants, including the CAREER award, and from industries including IBM, Microsoft and Unisys Corp. He has several publications in leading journals and conferences, and is on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Computers and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He is a recipient of the 2002 IBM Faculty Award. Anand is a member of the IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and ACM. Mahmut Kandemir received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in control and computer engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1988 and 1992, respectively. He received the Ph.D. from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York in electrical engineering and computer science, in 1999. He has been an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Pennsylvania State University since August 1999. His main research interests are optimizing compilers, I/O intensive applications, and power-aware computing. He is a member of the IEEE and the ACM. Rajeev Thakur is a Computer Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received a B.E. from the University of Bombay, India, in 1990, M.S. from Syracuse University in 1992, and Ph.D. from Syracuse University in 1995, all in computer engineering. His research interests are in the area of high-performance computing in general and high-performance networking and I/O in particular. He was a member of the MPI Forum and participated actively in the definition of the I/O part of the MPI-2 standard. He is the author of a widely used, portable implementation of MPI-IO, called ROMIO. He is also a co-author of the book “Using MPI-2: Advanced Features of the Message Passing Interface” published by MIT Press. Robert Ross received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Clemson University in 2000. He is now an Assistant Scientist in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. His research interests are in message passing and storage systems for high performance computing environments. He is the primary author and lead developer for the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS), a parallel file system for Linux clusters. Current projects include the ROMIO MPI-IO implementation, PVFS, PVFS2, and the MPICH2 implementation of the MPI message passing interface.     

An interview with Dr. Heiko Hermeking on his highly cited paper published in Cell Cycle

Heiko Hermeking holds a professorship for Experimental and Molecular Pathology at the Pathology Institute of the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich in Germany. He also received his Ph.D. from this university, working in Dirk Eick’s laboratory, where he discovered that p53 mediates c-MYC-induced apoptosis. He then carried out four years of postdoctoral studies in Bert Vogelstein and Ken Kinzler’s laboratory at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, MD, where he used the SAGE technique, which had just been developed in this laboratory, to identify important p53 (14-3-3 ) and c-MYC (CDK4) target genes. Then he was an independent group leader at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich. His current work focuses on the analysis of genes, microRNAs and pathways that are regulated by c-MYC or p53.     

Ivan Djaja (Jean Giaja) and the Belgrade School of Physiology

The founder of physiology studies in the Balkans and the pioneer of research on hypothermia, Ivan Djaja (Jean Giaja) was born 1884 in L'Havre. Giaja gained his PhD at the Sorbonne in 1909. In 1910 he established the first Chair of Physiology in the Balkans and organized the first Serbian Institute for Physiology at the School of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade. He led this Institute for more than 40 subsequent years. His most notable papers were in the field of thermoregulation and bioenergetics. Djaja became member of the Serbian and Croatian academies of science and doctor honoris causa of Sorbonne. In 1952 for the seminal work on the behavior of deep cooled warm blooded animals he became associate member of the National Medical Academy in Paris. In 1955 the French Academy of Sciences elected him as associate member in place of deceased Sir Alexander Fleming. Djaja died in 1957 during a congress held in his honor. He left more than 200 scientific and other papers and the golden DaVincian credo "Nulla dies sine experimento". His legacy was continued by several generations of researchers, the most prominent among them being Stefan Gelineo, Radoslav Andjus and Vojislav Petrovi?.     

Finding a suitable system scale to optimize program performance on software DSM systems

Recently, software distributed shared memory systems have successfully provided an easy user interface to parallel user applications on distributed systems. In order to prompt program performance, most of DSM systems usually were greedy to utilize all of available processors in a computer network to execute user programs. However, using more processors to execute programs cannot necessarily guarantee to obtain better program performance. The overhead of paralleling programs is increased by the addition in the number of processors used for program execution. If the performance gain from program parallel cannot compensate for the overhead, increasing the number of execution processors will result in performance degradation and resource waste. In this paper, we proposed a mechanism to dynamically find a suitable system scale to optimize performance for DSM applications according to run-time information. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can precisely predict the processor number that will result in the best performance and then effectively optimize the performance of the test applications by adapting system scale according to the predicted result. Yi-Chang Zhuang received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from National Cheng Kung University in 1995, 1997, and 2004. He is currently working as an engineer at Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan. His research interests include object-based storage, file systems, distributed systems, and grid computing. Jyh-Biau Chang is currently an assistant professor at the Information Management Department of Leader University in Taiwan. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Electrical Engineering Department of National Cheng Kung University in 1994, 1996, and 2005. His research interest is focused on cluster and grid computing, parallel and distributed system, and operating system. Tyng-Yeu Liang is currently an assistant professor who teaches and studies at Department of Electrical Engineering, National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences in Taiwan. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from National Cheng Kung University in 1992, 1994, and 2000. His study is interested in cluster and grid computing, image processing and multimedia. Ce-Kuen Shieh currently is a professor at the Electrical Engineering Department of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. He is also the chief of computation center at National Cheng Kung University. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Cheng Kung University in 1988. He was the chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department of National Cheng Kung University from 2002 to 2005. His research interest is focused on computer network, and parallel and distributed system. Laurence T. Yang is a professor at the Department of Computer Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. His research includes high performance computing and networking, embedded systems, ubiquitous/pervasive computing and intelligence, and autonomic and trusted computing.     

A brief history of the Graduate Studies Program at The New York Botanical Garden

The New York Botanical Garden initiated its Graduate Studies Program through a cooperative agreement with Columbia University in 1896. This arrangement continued until the late 1960s, when the Biology Department at Columbia chose to emphasize laboratory-related research and discontinued its organismal programs. At the time a new partnership was formed with what was to become Lehman College of the City University of New York—a program that has continued through the present. Since the inception of its Graduate Studies Program 100 years ago, the Garden has provided sponsorship, guidance, and resources to help more than 200 studients receive graduate degrees. In recent years the Garden has expanded its graduate program to include four additional university affiliates: the Department of Biology at New York University, the Institute of Systematic Botany at Cornell University, the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, and, in a new agreement with an old partner, the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia University.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviws in this Article
The Human Body and the Law, 2nd edition by D.W. Meyers, Edinburgh University Press, 1990
Classic Cases in Medical Ethics by Gregory E. Pence. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. 1990
Changing Values in Medical and Health Care Decision Making, edited by Uffejuul Jensen and Gavin Mooney. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1990
IVF and Justice by Teresa Iglesias, London: The Linacre Centre For Health Care Ethics, 1990
The Practical, Moral and Personal Sense of Nursing: A Phenomenon-ological Philosophy of Practice by Anne H. Bishop and John R. Scudder, Jr. New York: State University of New York Press, 1990
A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
Ethics and Law in Health Care and Research edited by Peter Byrne, Chichester, UK: 1990
The Human Embryo edited by G.R. Dunstan, Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1990
Everyday Ethics: Resolving Dilemmas in Nursing Home Life by Rosalie A. Kane and Arthur L. Caplan. N.Y.: Springer Publishing Company, 1990
Psychiatric Ethics, 2nd edition, edited by S. Bloch and P. Chodoff. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991
Health Care and Gender by Charlotte Muller. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990     

Potential of adenovirus as a vector for sustained gene expression

Inder Verma received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, in 1971, and was a postdoctoral fellow (with David Baltimore) in the Department of Biology, Massachussetts Institute of Technology. He is currently American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology, Chair of the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biology, University of California at San Diego. Inder Verma is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). He is a member of the editorial boards of The Journal of Gene Medicine, Journal of Virology and Gene, and serves on several other scientific advisory boards. His major fields of interest are molecular analysis of oncoproteins, and suppressor genes, gene therapy involving retroviral, adenoviral, AAV vectors, and generation of novel lentiviral vectors. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The interrelationships of disease and culture in a primitive New Guinea community

This article explores links between disease and social standing in a primitive New Guinea community. Social and cultural events have modified the incidence of certain diseases. Furthermore, the changing patterns of disease may have influenced the development and form of social distinctions.This work is based on data collected as a predoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Fieldwork in New Guinea was done with NIH support under Training Grant 1 T01-MH11775-01 (related to 2 F1 MH301640-02), with Dr. Margaret Mead as the sponsor. Additional funding for analysis of data was obtained from the Harvard School of Public Health, the Department of Preventive Medicine of the Harvard Medical School, and the Institute for Transcultural Studies in New York.     

An Autonomic Reservoir Framework for the Stochastic Optimization of Well Placement

The adequate location of wells in oil and environmental applications has a significant economic impact on reservoir management. However, the determination of optimal well locations is both challenging and computationally expensive. The overall goal of this research is to use the emerging Grid infrastructure to realize an autonomic self-optimizing reservoir framework. In this paper, we present a policy-driven peer-to-peer Grid middleware substrate to enable the use of the Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) optimization algorithm, coupled with the Integrated Parallel Accurate Reservoir Simulator (IPARS) and an economic model to find the optimal solution for the well placement problem. Wolfgang Bangerth is a postdoctoral research fellow at both the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, and the Institute for Geophyics, at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany in 2002. He is the project leader for the deal.II finite element library (http://www.dealii.org). Wolfgang is a member of SIAM, AAAS, and ACM. Hector Klie obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computational Science and Engineering at Rice University, 1996, he completed his Master and undergraduate degrees in Computer Science at the Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela in 1991 and 1989, respectively. Hector Klie's main research interests are in the development of efficient parallel linear and nonlinear solvers and optimization algorithms for large-scale transport and flow of porous media problems. He currently holds the position of Associate Director and Senior Research Associate in the Center for Subsurface Modeling at the Institute of Computational Science and Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Klie is current member of SIAM, SPE and SEG. Vincent Matossian obtained a Masters in applied physics from the French Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Vincent is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in distributed systems at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University under the guidance of Manish Parashar. His research interests include information discovery and ad-hoc communication paradigms in decentralized systems. Manish Parashar is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, where he also is director of the Applied Software Systems Laboratory. He received a BE degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from Bombay University, India and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University. He has received the Rutgers Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research (2004–2005), NSF CAREER Award (1999) and the Enrico Fermi Scholarship from Argonne National Laboratory (1996). His research interests include autonomic computing, parallel & distributed computing (including peer-to-peer and Grid computing), scientific computing, software engineering. He is a senior member of IEEE, a member of the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor Program (2004–2007), and a member of ACM. Mary Fanett Wheeler obtained her Ph.D. at Rice University in 1971. Her primary research interest is in the numerical solutions of partial differential systems with applications to flow in porous media, geomechanics, surface flow, and parallel computation. Her numerical work includes formulation, analysis and implementation of finite-difference/finite-element discretization schemes for nonlinear, coupled PDE's as well as domain decomposition iterative solution methods. She has directed the Center for Subsurface Modeling, The University of Texas at Austin, since its creation in 1990. Dr. Wheeler is recepient of the Ernest and Virginia Cockrell Chair in Engineering and is Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics and in the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering of The University of Texas