Healthcare and Social Care are unique domains in terms of cultural importance, economic magnitude and complexity. On a cultural level, the level of advancement of a society is often measured in terms of protection of the less able. In economic terms, for 2009, total expenditure on healthcare in the United States was 2.6 trillion USD or 17.4% of the GDP1. Total expenditure on social care was 2.98 trillion USD or 19.90% of the GDP2. In terms of US Federal government expenditure, social security, medicare and medicaid amount to 45% of total spending. In terms of complexity, organizations that are involved in providing social and medical care are numerous and span a very wide domain. For example, AHIP, the trade association of health insurers numbers some 1300 members3; the number of hospitals registered with the American Hospital Association is 57244 and the number of homeless shelters surpasses 40005. In addition, medical information is vastly complex: Nuance reports that LinkBase R ©6 contains more than 1 million concepts. Social care depends on information from a very broad domain, ranging from criminal records to housing. Coordinating social care and health care has been identified both as a major pain point and a significant opportunity in modern health and social systems [1]. Several studies have shown that costs can be contained and outcomes improved with a more holistic approach to care [2]. As a simple motivating example, consider an individual quartered in inappropriate housing while suffering from a relatively minor health issue, aggravated by the housing condition. As a result, the given individual frequently resorts to visiting emergency rooms, resulting in significant cost to the healthcare system and a less effective treatment. By itself, the housing situation does not warrant state intervention. Nevertheless, resolving it would dramatically improve the health situation, resulting in a better quality-of-life for the individual and lower costs for the health system.

We present a semantic infrastructure to augment existing enterprise applications with context coming from external systems. We showcase our infrastructure using a use-case around Care Coordination, based on a set of IBM solutions. An up-to-date version of this document, with additional media, can be found at http://ibm.co/14nUY3i.

With many disparate information systems distributed among social and medical care facilities, achieving an integrated social and medical view of people is a huge challenge. We propose a system based on semantic integration that addresses this challenge. It achieves light-weight data integration and navigation via a three-layer architecture: a virtual RDF view layer, a distributed query processing layer and a unified context view layer. This integrates information from disparate systems without cloning data, and also supports data exploration through a novel visualization.

The architecture of the Data Explorer, a scientific visualization system, is described. Data Explorer supports the visualization of a wide variety of data by means of a flexible set of visualization modules. A single powerful data model common to all modules allows a wide range of data types to be imported and passed between modules. There is integral support for parallelism, affecting the data model and the execution model. The visualization modules are highly interoperable, due in part to the common data model, and exemplified by the renderer. An execution model facilitates parallelization of modules and incorporates optimizations such as caching. The two-process client-server system structure consists of a user interface that communicates with an executive via a dataflow language

To understand the system interdependencies of a multiprocessor and the effects of these interdependencies on parallel applications, it is necessary to include a performance monitoring facility in the multiprocessor system. Such a monitoring facility can be either transparent (i.e. requiring no user initiated intervention) or non-transparent. In this paper we describe the performance monitoring facilities that are available to the user of the RP3 system. We will also describe our initial experience using these facilities and demonstrate their functionality.

We present the design for the NYU Ultracomputer, a shared-memory MIMD parallel machine composed of thousands of autonomous processing elements. This machine uses an enhanced message switching network with the geometry of an Omega-network to approximate the ideal behavior of Schwartz's paracomputer model of computation and to implement efficiently the important fetch-and-add synchronization primitive. We outline the hardware that would be required to build a 4096 processor system using 1990's technology. We also discuss system software issues, and present analytic studies of the network performance. Finally, we include a sample of our effort to implement and simulate parallel variants of important scientific programs.