A method for accelerating hardware simulation is presented wherein cycle based simulations of digital system designs are generated by raising the level of abstraction in a hardware simulation environment. The automatic document type discrimination section is capable of detecting whether each of plural types of halftone dot areas exists or not in the image data, and the automatic document type discrimination section estimates the type of the image data. The composition of the suspension or solution can selectively include at least one kind of transition metal oxide ions or a precursor of transition metal oxide. The determined relationships include, at least in part, relations of one or more entities included in the one or more snapshots to additional one or more entities in the one or more snapshots of the storage infrastructure.