Maria Therese O'Connor

We argue that developing a human ethics application is an effective method for refining the intent and design of research studies. Our study aimed to investigate the delivery of end-of-life and palliative care nursing to residents of an aged care unit in a Multi-purpose Service/centre in rural Victoria. We used the ethics application process as a strategy to focus the study, and to refine the data collection and analysis techniques. It is our contention that the process of completing the application and gaining ethics approval is laborious; however, the intellectualising that occurs provides researchers with an opportunity to reflect upon and refine their studies, thus ensuring the ultimate success and timely completion of research investigations.

Debugging is often the most time consuming part of software development. HPC applications prolong the debugging process by adding more processes interacting in dynamic ways for longer periods of time. Checkpoint/restart- enabled parallel debugging returns the developer to an intermediate state closer to the bug. This focuses the debugging process, saving developers considerable amounts of time, but requires parallel debuggers cooperating with MPI implementations and checkpointers. This paper presents a design specification for such a cooperative relationship. Additionally, this paper discusses the application of this design to the GDB and DDT debuggers, Open MPI, and BLCR projects. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.