We present a distributed protocol for achieving totally unbiased global coin flipping in the presence of an adversary. We consider a synchronous system of n processors at most t of which may be corrupted and manipulated by a malicious adversary, and assume a complete network where every two processors are connected via a private channel. Our protocol is deterministic and assumes a very powerful adversary. Although the adversary cannot eavesdrop, it is computationally unbounded, capable of rushing and dynamic. This is the same model that is adopted in Yao's global coin flipping protocol, which we use as the base of our protocol. Our protocol tolerates almost n/3 processor failures and terminates in t+4 rounds. The resilience of our protocol is greatly improved from that of Yao's protocol at the slight expense of running time, which is only added just two rounds.

Volume Graphics Clusters (VG Clusters) have proven to be efficient in a wide range of visualization applications and have also shown promise in some other applications where the image composition device could be fully utilized. The main differentiating feature from other graphics clusters is a specialized image composition device, commercially available as the MPC Image Compositor, which enables the building of do-it-yourself VG Clusters. Although this device is highly scalable, the unidirectional composition flow limits the data subdivision to the quantity of physically available rendering nodes. In addition, the limited buffer memory limits the maximum capable image composition size, therefore limiting its use in large-scale data visualization and high-resolution visualization. To overcome these limitations, we propose and evaluate an image composition mechanism in which additional hardware is used for assisting the image composition process. Because of the synergistic use of two distinct image composition hardware devices we named it "Hybrid Image Composition". Some encouraging results were obtained showing the effectiveness of this solution in improving the VG Cluster 's potential. A low-cost parallel port based hardware barrier is also presented as an efficient method for further enhancing this kind of small-scale VG Cluster. Moreover, this solution has proven to be especially useful in clusters built using low-speed networks, such as Fast Ethernet, which are still in common use.