Until relatively recently cluster studies have been confined to the region encompassing the line of beta stability. As clustering is expected to manifest itself most strongly near thresholds, exotic structures might be expected to form in the more weakly bound systems found in the vicinity of the driplines. Perhaps the most striking example of this are the halo nuclei. In the present paper two ...

This paper reviews the available information on the central density distribution and shape of the Milky Way’s halo. At present, there is no strong evidence that the Milky Way’s halo properties conflict with the predictions of cold dark matter (CDM): a primordial central power law cusp can be accommodated by the observations, and the current constraints on flattening are also consistent with the...

One of the challenges in engineering design is responding to a change of design requirements. Previously we presented a four-arm symmetric evolved antenna for NASA’s Space Technology 5 mission. However, the mission’s orbital vehicle was changed, putting it into a much lower earth orbit, changing the specifications for the mission. With minimal changes to our evolutionary system, mostly in the f...

This paper addresses the design of an application-specific processor with emphasis on packet processing applications. In this domain, demands for increasing the performance and the ongoing development of network protocols both call for flexible and performance-optimized engines. We present a flexible engine that is optimized for packet switching operations. The architecture and instruction set ...

As the Internet traffic continues growing rapidly, parallel packet forwarding becomes a necessity in Internet infrastructure to meet the throughput requirement. On the other hand, energy/ power consumption has been a critical challenge for Internet infrastructure. It has been shown that two thirds of power dissipation inside a core router is due to packet forwarding. This chapter studies the pr...

This paper presents the design and implementation of the InfiniBand link layer with special efforts made for packet latency reduction and buffer space optimization. The link layer is designed to avoid any architectural conflict while its components are executed in parallel as far as possible. For highspeed packet processing with the various quality of service supports required by InfiniBand, th...

Packet scheduling constitutes the core problem in efficient fair allocation of bandwidth to competing flows. To date, numerous algorithms for packet scheduling have been suggested and tested. However, only a few of them are currently deployed. One of the key reasons for rarity of applied packet scheduling methods lies in the complexity of their implementation. This paper describes a family of r...

As the focus of networking research shifts from raw performance to the delivery of advanced network services, there is a growing need for open-platform systems for extensible networking research. The Applied Research Laboratory at Washington University in Saint Louis has developed a flexible Network Services Platform (NSP) to meet this need. The NSP provides an extensible platform for prototypi...