Spindown

Spindown
Author: George Wright Padgett
Publisher: Grey Gecko Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1938821289

For over a hundred and fifty years, the rarest and most valuable substance in the solar system has been mined from the only location where it exists in significant quantity: Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. For all of this time, the remote mining outpost has been serviced by clone slaves who are drugged into mindlessness, and all of it has been monitored, controlled, and administered by the artificial intelligence known as Prinox. But what happens when a failed rescue mission causes a small band of escaped clones to begin questioning their lives, their society, and their very existence? Hunted by deadly killing machines, confused and scared, these renegade slaves are about to find out--for better or worse--just what it means to be human.

Rotation and Accretion Powered Pulsars

Rotation and Accretion Powered Pulsars
Author: Pranab Ghosh
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 793
Release: 2007
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9810247443

This book is an introduction to pulsars, a key area in high energy astrophysics with continuing potential for fundamental discoveries. Throughout the book runs the unifying thread of the evolutionary link between rotation-powered pulsars and accretion-powered pulsars ? a milestone of modern astrophysics. Early textbooks on pulsars dealt almost entirely with rotation-powered ones, while accounts of pulsars in volumes on X-ray binaries focused almost exclusively on accretion-powered ones. This is the first textbook to treat these two kinds of pulsars simultaneously with equal importance, stressing the fact that both are rotating, magnetic neutron stars, operating under different conditions during different parts of their lives. It describes the observational properties of both kinds of pulsars, summarizes our physical understanding of these properties, and pays detailed attention to the physics of superdense matter which neutron stars are composed of, as well as to the superfluidity which is expected to occur in neutron stars. Evolution from rotation-power to accretion-power, and vice versa, are carefully described. The effects of the strong magnetic fields of neutron stars on themselves, their emission properties, and their environments are discussed, as are the origin and evolution of such magnetic fields. Also treated is the superbly accurate verification of Einstein's theory of general relativity through timing studies of binary pulsars, which led to the award of the Nobel Prize to Hulse and Taylor in 1993. On each topic, the book starts with simple, basic physical concepts, and builds up the exposition to the point where the latest and most exciting developments become accessible to the reader.

Storage Systems

Storage Systems
Author: Alexander Thomasian
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 748
Release: 2021-10-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0323908098

Storage Systems: Organization, Performance, Coding, Reliability and Their Data Processing was motivated by the 1988 Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks proposal to replace large form factor mainframe disks with an array of commodity disks. Disk loads are balanced by striping data into strips—with one strip per disk— and storage reliability is enhanced via replication or erasure coding, which at best dedicates k strips per stripe to tolerate k disk failures. Flash memories have resulted in a paradigm shift with Solid State Drives (SSDs) replacing Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) for high performance applications. RAID and Flash have resulted in the emergence of new storage companies, namely EMC, NetApp, SanDisk, and Purestorage, and a multibillion-dollar storage market. Key new conferences and publications are reviewed in this book.The goal of the book is to expose students, researchers, and IT professionals to the more important developments in storage systems, while covering the evolution of storage technologies, traditional and novel databases, and novel sources of data. We describe several prototypes: FAWN at CMU, RAMCloud at Stanford, and Lightstore at MIT; Oracle's Exadata, AWS' Aurora, Alibaba's PolarDB, Fungible Data Center; and author's paper designs for cloud storage, namely heterogeneous disk arrays and hierarchical RAID. - Surveys storage technologies and lists sources of data: measurements, text, audio, images, and video - Familiarizes with paradigms to improve performance: caching, prefetching, log-structured file systems, and merge-trees (LSMs) - Describes RAID organizations and analyzes their performance and reliability - Conserves storage via data compression, deduplication, compaction, and secures data via encryption - Specifies implications of storage technologies on performance and power consumption - Exemplifies database parallelism for big data, analytics, deep learning via multicore CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs, e.g., Google's Tensor Processing Units

Isolated Pulsars

Isolated Pulsars
Author: K. A. van Riper
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1993-03-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780521434294

The extreme properties of pulsars demand a broad range of physics. From The Los Alamos Workshop on Isolated Pulsars contributions have been selected to encompass all aspects of pulsar detection and understanding. Recent observational highlights include results from the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, ROSAT and GINGA and the Hubble Space Telescope. Well-illustrated theoretical contributions cover a wide range of topics. This volume forms a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to the observation and theory of solitary neutron stars.

The Physics of Gamma-Ray Bursts

The Physics of Gamma-Ray Bursts
Author: Bing Zhang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 617
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107027616

A complete text on the physics of gamma-ray bursts, the most brilliant explosions since the Big Bang.

The Neutron Star-Black Hole Connection

The Neutron Star-Black Hole Connection
Author: Chryssa Kouveliotou
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2001-12-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781402002052

The foremost observers and theorists discuss the latest developments in the astrophysics of neutron stars, black holes and their interaction in the universe. Often found in compact, interacting binaries, these objects exhibit broadly similar behaviour. The determination of observational signatures that distinguish between these two types of objects is systematically explored. Supernovae and evolutionary scenarios leading to neutron stars and black holes, single or in binaries, are also discussed in detail. There is also a discussion of the decades old mystery of cosmic gamma ray bursts, currently thought to represent enormous stellar explosions at cosmological distances. These could be the result of mergers of a neutron star and its compact binary companion: a literal neutron star-black hole connection. A lucid series of lectures for the advanced graduate student. A unifying text that will appeal to the research astrophysicist and space physicist.

The Strongest Magnetic Fields in the Universe

The Strongest Magnetic Fields in the Universe
Author: Vasily S. Beskin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 579
Release: 2016-01-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 149393550X

This volume extends the ISSI series on magnetic fields in the Universe into the domain of what are by far the strongest fields in the Universe, and stronger than any field that could be produced on Earth. The chapters describe the magnetic fields in non-degenerate strongly magnetized stars, in degenerate stars (such as white dwarfs and neutron stars), exotic members called magnetars, and in their environments, as well as magnetic fields in the environments of black holes. These strong fields have a profound effect on the behavior of matter, visible in particular in highly variable processes like radiation in all known wavelengths, including Gamma-Ray bursts. The generation and structure of such strong magnetic fields and effects on the environment are also described.

Fundamentals of Two-Fluid Dynamics

Fundamentals of Two-Fluid Dynamics
Author: Daniel D. Joseph
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2013-11-21
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1461392934

Two-fluid dynamics is a challenging subject rich in physics and prac tical applications. Many of the most interesting problems are tied to the loss of stability which is realized in preferential positioning and shaping of the interface, so that interfacial stability is a major player in this drama. Typically, solutions of equations governing the dynamics of two fluids are not uniquely determined by the boundary data and different configurations of flow are compatible with the same data. This is one reason why stability studies are important; we need to know which of the possible solutions are stable to predict what might be observed. When we started our studies in the early 1980's, it was not at all evident that stability theory could actu ally work in the hostile environment of pervasive nonuniqueness. We were pleasantly surprised, even astounded, by the extent to which it does work. There are many simple solutions, called basic flows, which are never stable, but we may always compute growth rates and determine the wavelength and frequency of the unstable mode which grows the fastest. This proce dure appears to work well even in deeply nonlinear regimes where linear theory is not strictly valid, just as Lord Rayleigh showed long ago in his calculation of the size of drops resulting from capillary-induced pinch-off of an inviscid jet.