Mitsugu Suzuki

An integrated laboratory for processor organization, compiler design, and computer networking

An integrated laboratory dealing with processor organization, compiler design, and computer networking has been developed. The goals of the laboratory are to make it possible for each student to work with modern and attractive materials and to learn about the interfaces between system modules, to provide students with opportunities to collaborate in the construction of a large system, and to give students a sense of accomplishment. The goals have been met based on the responses of students who have used it, verifying its effectiveness. This paper describes the design and development of the baseline components to be integrated, the laboratory organization and schedule, and the results and evaluation of the laboratory.

Impairment of macrophage function in Mongolian gerbils

Chemiluminescence studies on superoxide generation by phagosomes using opsonized zymosan showed the highest fluorescence in murine splenic macrophages among four different kinds of splenic or peritoneal macrophages from mice or gerbils. Murine splenic macrophages phagocytized two to three times more latex particles than gerbil splenic macrophages, but peritoneal macrophages did not show a significant difference in phagocytic activity between mice and gerbils. Phagocytosis by macrophages was determined by a technique based on measurement of the release of hydrogen peroxide and myeloperoxidase from phagosomes using microspheres conjugated with 3-(p-hydroxyphenyl) propionic acid (HPPA-MS). HPPA is a substrate of lysosomal myeloperoxidase. The fluorescence of HPPA-HPPA-MS produced by phagocytized HPPA-MS was measured with an immunoreaction analysis system (IMRAS), and the enzyme activities of the four different kinds of peritoneal or splenic macrophages from mice and gerbils were compared. All four kinds of macrophages produced HPPA-HPPA-MS in their phagosomes during phagocytosis and murine splenic macrophages showed the highest level of enzyme activity.

A new memory allocation method for shared memory multiprocessors with large virtual address space

This paper proposes a new memory allocation method for shared memory multiprocessors with large virtual address spaces. An evaluation of its performance is also presented. For effective use of shared memory multiprocessors, it is important that no processors execution is blocked. If several processors simultaneously access a shared variable, their processes are blocked and access to the variable is serialized. Thus, frequent access to shared variables reduces the parallelism. In particular, the parallelism is significantly reduced when a special shared variable – the ‘allocation pointer’ – is frequently accessed in the dynamic object allocation by an application program. In this paper, we propose a new method for allocating physical memory pages where the allocation pointer is monotonically increased in the virtual address space in contrast to the conventional method. This allows the critical sections for access to the allocation pointer to be executed effectively and atomically by using the fetch-and-add primitive. Our method improves the application programs parallelism by access to the allocation pointer with considerably short blocking time to the process.

SIMD optimization in COINS compiler infrastructure

COINS is a compiler infrastructure that makes it easy to construct a new compiler by adding/modifying only part of the COINS of compiling/optimization features. SIMD optimization is a major advantage. We present an overview of COINS and some topics on its SIMD optimization.

Trial of Learning Support System Using Kinect in After School Care Programs

The important roles of after school care programs are protecting the lives of students whose parents are working or unable to be at home after they finish school or on school holidays and helping them create self independence. We propose a learning support system for helping after school care students. The system is used for practicing the “Kuku” multiplication table and it has been implemented using the Kinect motion capture system to recognize “air characters” written by the body actions of learners. We conducted a trial to evaluate the proposed system by asking many students in after school care programs to participate and confirmed that this system was helpful for groups of students to learn. We explain here how we implemented the system, and report the results from the trial. We also suggest the future directions of the system.

Design and Implementation of a Facility for Wandering and Manipulating the Structure of On-Line Data

As the amount of information on the Web is getting bigger, creating a new tool to help people to find the needed information easily became one of the most important tasks. At the same time, a new trend called Mashup attracts attention because there is a lot of valuable data on-line. In this paper, we propose a new approach that enables users to collect the required information by exploring on the Web and do Mashup easily. The features of our tool are to be able to search information on the Web in consideration of html structures (e.g. table tag), mix up some data from different home pages, and manipulate data on the Web.

An integrated laboratory for computer architecture and networking

Processors, compilers, and networks -- important materials covered by computer science curricula -- are often treated independently in laboratories associated with corresponding lecture courses. An integrated laboratory called CNP for juniors majoring in computer science at the University of Electro-Communications has been developed and is now under way, where a networking protocol stack implemented by students is translated into object codes by a compiler implemented by students, which in turn are executed on a processor implemented also by students. The goals of the integrated laboratory are to deal with modern and attractive materials, to provide students with opportunities of collaborating in constructing a large system, as well as to have students share a feeling of accomplishments among them. Responses from students approved our intention and verified the effectiveness. In this paper, we describe the design and development of baseline components to be integrated, laboratory organizations and schedules, and results and evaluations of the laboratory.

A learning support system for 9 × 9 multiplication table with Kinect

We propose a learning support system for the 9 × 9 multiplication table “KuKu” and have implemented it using Kinect motion capture to recognize “air characters” written by the body actions of KuKu learners. We explain how to implement the system, report the results of a trial with elementary school students, and suggest the future directions of the system.

Dominance analysis of irreducible CFGs by reduction

This paper presents a simple and fast algorithm with proof of correctness for analyzing dominance relations of control flow graphs (CFGs). A dominator tree and dominance frontiers are obtained by reducing a DAG, which is obtained by adding dummy vertexes to the original CFG to transmit dominance relation of irreducible loops to the resultant DAG. A specific order of stacking vertexes eliminates the necessity to search for reduction candidates. The computational complexity of the algorithm for a real-world CFG with M edges is O(M), which is also confirmed by analyzing about 1700 CFGs extracted from real programs.

A playing and learning support system using Kinect for Romaji

The use of information devices in educational settings has been increasing over the years. We propose a learning support system that is an expansion of the original Kinect system. The proposed expansion has been implemented using the Kinect motion capture system to recognize “air characters” written by the body actions of learners and is used in this study for practicing Japanese letters expressed in Romaji by a combination of alphabets. We believe that students can have fun with learning by performing body actions, thus keeping their motivation to learn high. We had some elementary school students operate the system and then evaluated the results.