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The study presented in this paper highlights an important issue that was subject for discussions and research about a decade ago and now have gained new interest with the current advances of grid computing and desktop grids. New techniques are being invented on how to utilize desktop computers for computational tasks but no other study, to our knowledge, has explored the availability of the said resources. The general assumption has been that there are resources and that they are available. The study is based on a survey on the availability of resources in an ordinary office environment. The aim of the study was to determine if there are truly usable under-utilized networked desktop computers available for non-desktop tasks during the off-hours. We found that in more than 96% of the cases the computers in the current investigation was available for the formation of part-time (night and weekend) computer clusters. Finally we compare the performance of a full time and a metamorphosic cluster, based on one hypothetical linear scalable application and a real world welding simulation.

This paper reviews recent state-of-the-art H.264 sub-pixel motion estimation (SME) algorithms and architectures. First, H.264 SME is analyzed and the impact of its functionalities on coding performance is investigated. Then, design space of SME algorithms is explored representing design problems, approaches, and recent advanced algorithms. Besides, design challenges and strategies of SME hardware architectures are discussed and promising architectures are surveyed. Further perspectives and future prospects are also presented to highlight emerging trends and outlook of SME designs.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless sensor networks (WSN) are two important wireless technologies that have a wide variety of applications and provide limitless future potentials. RFID facilitates detection and identification of objects that are not easily detectable or distinguishable by using current sensor technologies. However, it does not provide information about the condition of the objects it detects. Sensors, on the other hand, provide information about the condition of the objects as well as the environment. Hence, integration of these technologies will expand their overall functionality and capacity. This chapter first presents a brief introduction on RFID and then investigates recent research works, new patents, academic products and applications that integrate RFID with sensor networks. Four types of integration are discussed: (1) integrating tags with sensors; (2) integrating tags with wireless sensor nodes and wireless devices; (3) integrating readers with wireless sensor nodes and wireless devices; and (4) mix of RFID and wireless sensor networks. New challenges and future works are discussed at the end.