By providing instruction-grained access to vast amounts of persistent data with ordinary loads and stores, byte-addressable storage class memory (SCM) has the potential to revolutionize system architecture. We describe a non-intrusive SCM controller for achieving light-weight failure atomicity through back-end operations. Our solution avoids costly software intervention by decoupling isolation …
This letter describes the architecture of an inter-domain message passing hardware sub-system targeting the embedded virtualization field. Embedded virtualization is characterized by application-specific solutions, where functionality is partitioned into a small, fixed number of Virtual Machines, typically under real-time constraints, which must communicate for synchronization and status signal…
Hardware prefetching on IBM’s latest POWER8 processor is able to improve performance of many applications significantly, but it can also cause performance loss for others. The IBM POWER8 processor provides one of the most sophisticated hardware prefetching designs which supports 225 different configurations. Obviously, it is a big challenge to find the optimal or near-optimal hardware prefetc…
Web applications are getting closer to the performance of native applications taking advantage of new standard–based technologies.The recent HTML5 standard includes, among others, the Web Workers API that allows executing JavaScript applications on multiple threads, or workers. However, the internals of the browser’s JavaScript virtual machine does not expose direct relation between worker…
Applications of neural networks in various fields of research and technology have expanded widely in recent years. In particular, applications with inherent tolerance to accuracy loss, such as signal processing and multimedia applications, are highly suited to the approximation property of neural networks. This approximation property has been exploited in many existing neural network accelerato…
Recently, both industry and academia have proposed many different roadmaps for the future of DRAM. Consequently, there is a growing need for an extensible DRAM simulator, which can be easily modified to judge the merits of today’s DRAM standards as well as those of tomorrow. In this paper, we present Ramulator, a fast and cycle-accurate DRAM simulator that is built from the ground up for exte…
Programmer-managed GPU memory is a major challenge in writing GPU applications. Programmers must rewrite and optimize an existing code for a different GPU memory size for both portability and performance. Alternatively, they can achieve only portability by disabling GPU memory at the cost of significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose ScaleGPU, a novel GPU architecture to ena…
Third-party accelerators offer system designers high performance and low energy without the market delay of in-house development. However, complex third-party accelerators may include vulnerabilities due to design flaws or malicious intent that are hard to expose during verification. Rather than react to each new vulnerability, it is better to proactively build defenses for classes of attacks. …
Cloud providers host an increasing number of popular applications, on the premise of resource flexibility and cost efficiency. Most of these systems expose virtualized resources of different types and sizes. As instances share the same physical host to increase utilization, they contend on hardware resources, e.g., last-level cache, making them vulnerable to side-channel attacks from co-schedul…
1. Plants use light as a source of both energy and information. Plant physiological responses to light, and interactions between plants and animals (such as herbivory and pollination), have evolved under a more or less stable regime of 24-h cycles of light and darkness, and, outside of the tropics, seasonal variation in day length. 2. The rapid spread of outdoor electric lighting across t…
1. Understanding how soil microbial communities influence plant interactions with other organisms, and how this varies with characteristics of the interacting organisms, is important for multiple systems. Solanum spp. are a suitable model for trophic interactions in studies of agricultural and natural systems and can also provide useful corollaries in invaded systems. This study examined the…
1. Plant–fungal interactions can have strong effects on plant abundances, both through direct effects on plant performance and indirect effects on competition and facilitation. Most evidence linking fungi to plant abundances derives from direct fungal effects on initial growth, with little evidence linking fungal effects on plant–plant interactions in intact communities to plant abundanc…
1. Trait differences among plants are expected to influence the outcome of competition; competition should be strongest between similar species (or individuals) under limiting similarity, and between dissimilar species within competitive hierarchies. These hypotheses are often used to infer competitive dynamics from trait patterns within communities. However, plant traits are frequently plas…
1. Invasive herbivores can strongly affect ecosystems by reducing or removing native plant species, and early in primary successions they could have enduring consequences for plant community assembly and ecosystem functioning, although this has seldom been explored. Invasive brushtail possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) browse from ground levels to forest canopies in New Zealand, including on p…
1. In forest communities, the Janzen–Connell (J-C) hypothesis proposes that species diversity is maintained by non-competitive distance- and/or density-dependent seedling mortality caused by host-specific natural enemies. However, the effects of pathogen associations from nearby conspecifics versus heterospecifics remain unknown in spatially heterogeneous light environments. 2. Seeds o…
1. Metapopulation dynamics have been used to explain bryophyte dispersal patterns and they predict that population abundances vary with the spatial distribution of habitat and with species traits. However, results from stand and landscape studies are contradictory as both distance-dependent and distance- independent patterns have been found. These studies have typically included only a few …
1. Understanding the mechanisms by which invasive species affect native plants is a central challenge. Invasive plants have been shown to reduce pollinator visitation to natives and increase pollen quantity limitation. However, visitation and conspecific pollen delivery are the only two components of the pollination process; post-pollination interactions on the stigma (heterospecific pollen …
1. An increase in tree mortality rates has been recently detected in forests world-wide. However, few works have focused on the potential consequences of forest dieback for ecosystem functioning. 2. Here we assessed the effect of Quercus suber dieback on carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles in two types of Mediterranean forests (woodlands and closed forests) affected by the aggressive p…
1. Land-use change can modify the functional composition of tree communities, which is an essential determinant of the ecosystem functions. The lack of consensus about the functional responses of tree communities to land-use change is a major uncertainty in the assessments of human impacts on terrestrial ecosystem functions. 2. In this study, we applied a machine-learning method to a larg…
The run-time virtual address (VA) stack has some unique properties,which have garnered the attention of researchers. The stack ne-dimensionally grows and shrinks at its top, and contains data that is seemingly local/private to one thread, or process. Most prior related research has focused on these properties. However, this article aims to demonstrate how conventional wisdom pertaining to the r…
Plasma physics has matured rapidly as a scientific and technological discipline with a vast span of relevant application in many different fields. As a consequence, no single textbook is able to address all aspects of plasma physics relevant to such a burgeoning community. With this reference text I have attempted to bridge the gap between the excellent variety of traditional, broadly-ba…
The last level cache (LLC) in private configurations offer lower latency and isolation but extinguishes the possibility of sharing underutilized cache resources. Cooperative Caching (CC) provides capacity sharing by spilling a line evicted from one cache to another. Current studies focus on efficient capacity sharing, while the adaptability of CC to manycore environment deserves more attentions…
A major problem in managing large-scale datacenters is diagnosing and fixing machine failures. Most large datacenter deployments have a management infrastructure that can help diagnose failure causes, and manage assets that were fixed as part of the repair process. Previous studies identify only actual hardware replacements to calculate Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) and component Reliability. I…
This letter quantitatively studies the benefits of inter-warp divergence aware execution on GPUs. To that end, the letter first proposes a novel approach to quantify the inter-warp divergence by measuring the temporal similarity in execution progress of concurrent warps, which we call Warp Progression Similarity (WPS). Based on the WPS metric, this letter proposes a WPS-aware Scheduler (WPSaS) …
Solid-state drives (SSD) offer a significant performance improvement over the hard disk drives (HDD), however, it can exhibit a significant variance in latency and throughput due to internal garbage collection (GC) process on the SSD. When the SSDs are configured in a RAID,the Performance variance of individual SSDs could significantly degrade the overall performance of the RAID of SSDs. The in…
The internal architecture of a SSD provides channel-, chip-, die- and plane-level parallelism Levels, to concurrently perform multiple data accesses and compensate for the performance gap between a single flash chip and host interface. Although a good strategy can effectively exploit the first 3 levels, parallel I/O accesses at plane-level can be performed only for operations of the same types …
We present a system architecture that uses high-efficiency processors as opposed to high-performance processors, NAND flash as byte-addressable main memory, and high-speed DRAM as a cache front-end for the flash. The main memory system is interconnected and presents a unified global address space to the client microprocessors. A single cabinet contains 2550 nodes,networked in a highly redundant…
Current ultra-high-performance computers execute instructions at the rate of roughly 10 PFLOPS (10 quadrillion floating-point operations per second) and dissipate power in the range of 10 MW. The next generation will need to execute instructions at EFLOPS rates—100 as fast as today’s—but without dissipating any more power. To achieve this challenging goal, the emphasis is on power-effici…
A compelling confluence of technology and application trends in which the cost, execution time, and energy of applications are being dominated by the memory system is driving the industry to 3D packages for future microarchitectures. However, these packages result in high heat fluxes and increased thermal coupling challenging current thermal solutions. Conventional design approaches utilize des…
As thread level parallelism in applications has continued to expand, so has research in chip multi-core processors. As more and more applications become multi-threaded we expect to find a growing number of threads executing on a machine. As a consequence, the operating system will require increasingly larger amounts of CPU time to schedule these threads efficiently. Instead of perpetuating the…
Chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) have become the mainstream parallel architecture in recent years; for scalability reasons, designs with high core counts tend towards tiled CMPs with physically distributed shared caches. This naturally leads to a Non-Uniform Cache Access (NUCA) design, where on-chip access latencies depend on the physical distances between requesting cores and home cores where the …
Modern processors spend significant amount of time and energy moving data. With the increase in core count, the relative importance of such latency and energy expenditure will only increase with time. Inter-core communication traffic when executing a multithreaded application is one such source of latency and energy expenditure. This traffic is influenced by the mapping of threads and data onto…
Memory bandwidth compression can be an effective way to achieve higher system performance and energy efficiency in modern data-intensive applications by exploiting redundancy in data. Prior works studied various data compression techniques to improve both capacity (e.g., of caches and main memory) and bandwidth utilization (e.g., of the on-chip and off-chip interconnects). These works addresse…
The common practice for quantifying the benefit(s) of design-time architectural choices of server processors is often limited to the chip- or server-level. This quantification process invariably entails the use of salient metrics, such as performance, power, and reliability, which capture - in a tangible manner - a designs overall ramifications. This paper argues for the necessity of a more hol…
In the many-core era, the network on-chip (NoC) is playing a larger role in meeting performance, area and power goals, as router buffers contribute greatly to NoC area and power usage. Proposals have advocated bufferless NoCs, however a performance wall has been reached such that high throughput performance has not been extracted. We present SCEPTER, a high-performance bufferless mesh NoC that …
There has been great debate about the potential labor market impact of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA” or “Obamacare”). Some have pointed to Massachusetts as the harbinger of what is to come nationally,1 while others have predicted massive dumping of employer-based insurance.2 An extension of this labor market debate was on full display during the summer of 2012.3 Critics seized on a McK…
This Note focuses on the medical loss ratio provision (“MLR Provision”) of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).1 The MLR Provision states that health insurance companies must spend at least a certain percentage of their premium revenue on “activities that improve healthcare quality” (in other words, meet a minimum threshold medical loss ratio) and comply with reporting …
Today, health insurance is no longer simply a class of insurance that covers risks to health, and it has not been so for many years.argues that health insurance has become a unique form of insurance—a mechanism to pay for healthcare that uses risk spreading as one of several pricing methods.explains how the ACA builds on this important payment function to create a complex social insurance sys…
In a symposium1 focused on healthcare cost control, most of our authors have unsur prisingly highlighted and assessed Obamacare’s payment and delivery reforms—the supply-side efforts to decrease costs of medical treatment.2 But there is another party in healthcare decision-making who is equally or even more important: the patient. The question we will tackle here is whether the individual m…
Regenerative Sciences, LLC, a Colorado company run by physicians, created the Regenexx-C (Cultured) (“Regenexx-C”) procedure to treat bone pain. The procedure involves harvesting a patient’s own mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), expanding the cells ex vivo, and then injecting the resulting cellular product into the site of injury, usually an injured joint. 2 The MSCs then repair the damaged …
Wave observation represented water surface elevation at a reference point is basic and essential data for ocean and coastal engineering that is mostly measured with traditional wave gauges, for instance capacitance, resistance and conductivity types. Therefore, accuracy and exactness are the most important aspects of data acquisition systems. In this study, we focus on the development of image …
Wave observation represented water surface elevation at a reference point is basic and essential data for ocean and coastal engineering that is mostly measured with traditional wave gauges, for instance capacitance, resistance and conductivity types. Therefore, accuracy and exactness are the most important aspects of data acquisition systems. In this study, we focus on the development of image …
This numerical study discusses the preliminary design of a three-legged articulated supporting structure for 5 MW Offshore Wind Turbine.Although articulated tower has many advantages as deep water platform, studies on wind turbine installed over articulated supports are scarce.First stable configuration of a Multi-legged articulated support, the three legged articulated structure is selected fo…
This study examined how race, gender, and age interact to affect defendants’sentences using a trichotomized dependent variable. The findings indicate that the racial and gender disparity found in sentencing decisions was largely due to Black men’s increased likelihood of receiving jail as opposed to probation. The results also show that being young resulted in increased odds of receiving pr…
As offshore industry progressively moves towards deeper water, coupled dynamic analysis of such structures with mooring lines and risers becomes increasingly important because of the growing influence of mooring lines on the response of these structures. Experimental studies for such deepwater structures with mooring lines face serious problems due to the involved scaling and modeling issues. F…
Beginning in fiscal year 1994, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention included, as a requirement for a state to receive Federal Formula Grants, the determination of whetherD isproportionate minority confinement existed in its juvenile justice system, the identification of its causes, and the development and implementation of corrective strategies. The current study examined t…
As enacted, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) directed states to provide Medicaid coverage to most nonelderly adults with incomes up to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level (the “Medicaid expansion group”) beginning in 2014. 1 The Medicaid expansion provision of the ACA is an integral mponent of fulfilling the ACA’s primary objective to achieve near-universal health insurance coverage rates acr…
Kerala has a rich maritime tradition dating back to several centuries. Snake boats, locally called Chundan vallams, are one of the icons of Kerala. Different types of snake boats take part in Vallamkali, the local name for traditional boat races. This paper presents the preliminary results of a study on a typical ChundanVallam. Data were collected at site using a total station and three dimensi…
There has been a recent growth in interest within planning theory in Actor–Network Theory. This article explores the potential for Actor–Network Theory to deliver a distinctive perspective on planning practice. Using a case study of commercial office development and the discussion of its carbon performance within the regulatory planning process, an Actor–Network Theory– based analys…
Teleworking is the most common alternative work schedule used in public organizations. Despite the adoption of teleworking in government agencies, no studies were found that empirically examined the effect it has on retention in these agencies. This article therefore extends the literature by examining the impact of teleworking on turnover intentions in U.S. federal agencies. In so doing, the f…