Sony Interactive Entertainment

est une filiale du conglomérat japonais Sony, spécialisée dans l'industrie vidéoludique et basée à San Mateo, en Californie. La compagnie développe, produit et commercialise des consoles de jeu et des jeux vidéo. Le succès de la gamme PlayStation en fait l'un des principaux acteurs du marché. La société est fondée en 1993 sous le nom de Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. (SCEI). Elle prend son nom actuel le . Histoire Sony se lance dans le marché du jeu vidéo en créant CSG Imagesoft, une filiale de CBS/Sony Group (CSG), en . Basée à Los Angeles, la société édite des jeux vidéo pour la console Nintendo Entertainment System. La division nord-américaine Sony Electronic Publishing est fondée en . CSG Imagesoft est alors renommée Sony Imagesoft et édite des jeux pour la Game Boy et la Super Nintendo. Le , Sony et Sega annoncent un partenariat pour la création de jeux MegaDrive, GameGear et Mega CD. est créé en 1993 en tant que filiale de Sony Music Entertainment Japan. En

Visualization, Interactive Handling and Simulation of Molecules in Commodity Augmented Reality in Web Browsers Using moleculARweb's Virtual Modeling Kits

Luciano Andres Abriata, Fabio Jose Cortes Rodriguez, Matteo Dal Peraro, Lucien Fabrice Krapp

moleculARweb (https://molecularweb.epfl.ch) began as a website for education and outreach in chemistry and structural biology through augmented reality (AR) content that runs in the web browsers of regular devices like smartphones, tablets, and computers. Here we present two evolutions of moleculARweb's Virtual Modeling Kits (VMK), tools where users can build and view molecules, and explore their mechanics, in 3D AR by handling the molecules in full 3D with custom-printed cube markers (VMK 2.0) or by moving around a simulated scene with mouse or touch gestures (VMK 3.0). Upon simulation the molecules experience visually realistic torsions, clashes, and hydrogen-bonding interactions that the user can manually switch on and off to explore their effects. Moreover, by manually tuning a fictitious temperature the users can accelerate conformational transitions or 'freeze' specific conformations for careful inspection in 3D. Even some phase transitions and separations can be simulated. We showcase here these and other features of the new VMKs connecting them to possible specific applications to teaching and self-learning of concepts from general, organic, biological, and physical chemistry; and in assisting with small tasks in molecular modelling for research. Last, in a short discussion section we overview what future developments are needed for the 'dream tool' for the future of chemistry education and work.

SWISS CHEMICAL SOC2022

Efficient Workload Colocation in Modern Data Centers

Calin Iorgulescu

Despite the high costs of acquisition and maintenance of modern data centers, machine resource utilization is often low. Servers running online interactive services are over-provisioned to support peak load (which only occurs for a fraction of the time), due to business continuity and fault-tolerance plans that dictate these services tolerate major unforeseen events (e.g., the failure of another data center). Underutilized computing resources correlate with reduced data center efficiency and capital losses incurred by operators. Colocating different types of workloads is a promising solution to increase resource utilization. The challenges are protecting interactive services from resource interference and handling limited resource availability: if a best-effort workload directly competes for resources with an interactive service, the latter can fail to meet its service-level objectives (SLOs), impacting user experience and resulting in lost revenue. In this dissertation we focus on how to mitigate CPU interference and limited memory availability when colocating interactive services with batch workloads such as data-parallel applications. Existing work on mitigating CPU interference assumes that progress and performance metrics are available in real-time, and that hardware support for low-level isolation mechanisms is prevalent, neither of which are always true in commercial environments. Furthermore, previous work on improving resource allocation in clusters does not attempt to over-commit memory due to concerns of unpredictable performance degradation and sporadic failures. We first focus on the colocation of open-source in-memory interactive services, and conduct a thorough investigation on how they are impacted by batch jobs. We find that existing isolation techniques do not prevent performance degradation, and explain in detail why they are insufficient. Second, we study the behavior of a large commercial-scale service (i.e., a component of a web search platform), finding that it is highly bursty. We show that, by keeping a headroom of idle cores available at all times, the serviceâs response tail-latency is maintained within its SLO even under heavy load. Third, we address the impact of limited memory availability on data-parallel applications by identifying an intrinsic property of their tasks: memory elasticity â the ability to handle memory pressure by writing intermediate data to external storage, incurring only moderate performance penalties when memory-constrained. We further show that memory elasticity is prevalent across various data-parallel application frameworks. We implement a scheduler that leverages memory elasticity and achieves reduced job completion times and increased memory utilization. We conclude that these techniques make it possible to colocate even highly-bursty latency-sensitive services with batch jobs, significantly increasing resource utilization.

EPFL2019

The elastic surface layer model for animated character construction

Daniel Thalmann

A model is described for creating three-dimensional animated characters. In this new type of layered construction technique, called the elastic surface layer model, a simulated elastically deformable skin surface is wrapped around a traditional kinematic articulated figure. Unlike previous layered models, the skin is free to slide along the underlying surface layers constrained by reaction forces which push the surface out and spring forces which pull the surface in to the underlying layers. By tuning the parameters of the physically-based model, a variety of surface shapes and behaviors can be obtained such as more realistic-looking skin deformation at the joints, skin sliding over muscles, and dynamic effects such as squash-and-stretch and follow-through. Since the elastic model derives all of its input forces from the underlying articulated figure, the animator may specify all of the physical properties of the character once, during the initial character design process, after which a complete animation sequence can be created using a traditional skeleton animation technique. A reasonably complex character at low surface resolution can be simulated at interactive speeds so than an animator can both design the character and animate it in a completely interactive, direct-manipulation environment. Once a motion sequence has been specified, the entire simulation can be recalculated at a higher surface resolution for better visual results. An implementation on a Silicon Graphics Iris workstation is described

1993

Efficient Workload Colocation in Modern Data Centers

Calin Iorgulescu

EPFL2019