The Journal of ERW and Mine Action Issue 11.2 (2008)

Focus: The Middle East and North Africa } Feature: The Environmental Impact of Demining | Notes from the Field | Research and Developmen

The Journal of Conventional Weapons Destruction, Issue 24.2 (2020)

Editorial: HMA and COVID-19: A Donor\u27s Perspective Editorial: Time To Focus on Real Minefield Data Mine Action Information Management in Iraq and Northeast Syria IMAS 10.60 Update: Investigation and Reporting of Accidents and Incidents The Mine Free Sarajevo Project SALW in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the DRC Gender and Diversity in Mine Action Victim Assistance in Ukraine Landmines in the American Civil War Risk Education in Colombia R&D: The Odyssey2025 Projec

GPU 에러 안정성 보장을 위한 컴파일러 기법

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2020. 8. 이재진.Due to semiconductor technology scaling and near-threshold voltage computing, soft error resilience has become more important. Nowadays, GPUs are widely used in high performance computing (HPC) because of its efficient parallel processing and modern GPUs designed for HPC use error correction code (ECC) to protect their storage including register files. However, adopting ECC in the register file imposes high area and energy overhead. To replace the expensive hardware cost of ECC, we propose Penny, a lightweight compiler-directed resilience scheme for GPU register file protection. We combine recent advances in idempotent recovery with low-cost error detection code. Our approach focuses on solving two important problems: 1. Can we guarantee correct error recovery using idempotent execution with error detection code? We show that when an error detection code is used with idempotence recovery, certain restrictions required by previous idempotent recovery schemes are no longer needed. We also propose a software-based scheme to prevent the checkpoint value from being overwritten before the end of the region where the value is required for correct recovery. 2. How do we reduce the execution overhead caused by checkpointing? In GPUs additional checkpointing store instructions inflicts considerably higher overhead compared to CPUs, due to its architectural characteristics, such as lack of store buffers. We propose a number of compiler optimizations techniques that significantly reduce the overhead.반도체 미세공정 기술이 발전하고 문턱전압 근처 컴퓨팅(near-threashold voltage computing)이 도입됨에 따라서 소프트 에러로부터의 복원이 중요한 과제가 되었다. 강력한 병렬 계산 성능을 지닌 GPU는 고성능 컴퓨팅에서 중요한 위치를 차지하게 되었고, 슈퍼 컴퓨터에서 쓰이는 GPU들은 에러 복원 코드인 ECC를 사용하여 레지스터 파일 및 메모리 등에 저장된 데이터를 보호하게 되었다. 하지만 레지스터 파일에 ECC를 사용하는 것은 큰 하드웨어나 에너지 비용을 필요로 한다. 이런 값비싼 ECC의 하드웨어 비용을 줄이기 위해 본 논문에서는 컴파일러 기반의 저비용 GPU 레지스터 파일 복원 기법인 Penny를 제안한다. 이는 최신의 멱등성(idempotency) 기반 에러 복원 기법을 저비용의 에러 검출 코드(EDC)와 결합한 것이다. 본 논문은 다음 두가지 문제를 해결하는 데에 집중한다. 1. 에러 검출 코드 기반으로 멱등성 기반 에러 복원을 사용시 소프트 에러로부터의 안전한 복원을 보장할 수 있는가?} 본 논문에서는 에러 검출 코드가 멱등성 기반 복원 기술과 같이 사용되었을 경우 기존의 복원 기법에서 필요로 했던 조건들 없이도 안전하게 에러로부터 복원할 수 있음을 보인다. 2. 체크포인팅에드는 비용을 어떻게 절감할 수 있는가?} GPU는 스토어 버퍼가 없는 등 아키텍쳐적인 특성으로 인해서 CPU와 비교하여 체크포인트 값을 저장하는 데에 큰 오버헤드가 든다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위해 본 논문에서는 다양한 컴파일러 최적화 기법을 통하여 오버헤드를 줄인다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Why is Soft Error Resilience Important in GPUs 1 1.2 How can the ECC Overhead be Reduced 3 1.3 What are the Challenges 4 1.4 How do We Solve the Challenges 5 2 Comparison of Error Detection and Correction Coding Schemes for Register File Protection 7 2.1 Error Correction Codes and Error Detection Codes 8 2.2 Cost of Coding Schemes 9 2.3 Soft Error Frequency of GPUs 11 3 Idempotent Recovery and Challenges 13 3.1 Idempotent Execution 13 3.2 Previous Idempotent Schemes 13 3.2.1 De Kruijf's Idempotent Translation 14 3.2.2 Bolts's Idempotent Recovery 15 3.2.3 Comparison between Idempotent Schemes 15 3.3 Idempotent Recovery Process 17 3.4 Idempotent Recovery Challenges for GPUs 18 3.4.1 Checkpoint Overwriting 20 3.4.2 Performance Overhead 20 4 Correctness of Recovery 22 4.1 Proof of Safe Recovery 23 4.1.1 Prevention of Error Propagation 23 4.1.2 Proof of Correct State Recovery 24 4.1.3 Correctness in Multi-Threaded Execution 28 4.2 Preventing Checkpoint Overwriting 30 4.2.1 Register renaming 31 4.2.2 Storage Alternation by Checkpoint Coloring 33 4.2.3 Automatic Algorithm Selection 38 4.2.4 Future Works 38 5 Performance Optimizations 40 5.1 Compilation Phases of Penny 40 5.1.1 Region Formation 41 5.1.2 Bimodal Checkpoint Placement 41 5.1.3 Storage Alternation 42 5.1.4 Checkpoint Pruning 43 5.1.5 Storage Assignment 44 5.1.6 Code Generation and Low-level Optimizations 45 5.2 Cost Estimation Model 45 5.3 Region Formation 46 5.3.1 De Kruijf's Heuristic Region Formation 46 5.3.2 Region splitting and Region Stitching 47 5.3.3 Checkpoint-Cost Aware Optimal Region Formation 48 5.4 Bimodal Checkpoint Placement 52 5.5 Optimal Checkpoint Pruning 55 5.5.1 Bolt's Naive Pruning Algorithm and Overview of Penny's Optimal Pruning Algorithm 55 5.5.2 Phase 1: Collecting Global-Decision Independent Status 56 5.5.3 Phase2: Ordering and Finalizing Renaming Decisions 60 5.5.4 Effectiveness of Eliminating the Checkpoints 63 5.6 Automatic Checkpoint Storage Assignment 69 5.7 Low-Level Optimizations and Code Generation 70 6 Evaluation 74 6.1 Test Environment 74 6.1.1 GPU Architecture and Simulation Setup 74 6.1.2 Tested Applications 75 6.1.3 Register Assignment 76 6.2 Performance Evaluation 77 6.2.1 Overall Performance Overheads 77 6.2.2 Impact of Penny's Optimizations 78 6.2.3 Assigning Checkpoint Storage and Its Integrity 79 6.2.4 Impact of Optimal Checkpoint Pruning 80 6.2.5 Impact of Alias Analysis 81 6.3 Repurposing the Saved ECC Area 82 6.4 Energy Impact on Execution 83 6.5 Performance Overhead on Volta Architecture 85 6.6 Compilation Time 85 7 RelatedWorks 87 8 Conclusion and Future Works 89 8.1 Limitation and Future Work 90Docto

EU-Raw Materials Intelligence Capacity Platform (EU-RMCP) – Technical system specification

EU-Raw Materials Intelligence Capacity Platform (or EU-RMICP) integrates metadata on data sources related to primary and secondary mineral resources and brings the end users an expertise on the methods and tools used in mineral intelligence. The system is capable of bringing relevant user ‘answers’ of the type 'how to proceed for …' on almost any question related to mineral resources, on the whole supply chain, from prospecting to recycling, taking into account the environmental, political and social dimensions. EU-RMICP is based on an ontology of the domain of mineral resources (coupled with more generic cross-functional ontologies, relative to commodities, time and space), which represents the domain of the questions of the users (experts and non-experts). The user navigates in the ontology by using a Dynamic Graph of Decision (DDG), which allows him/her to discover the solutions which he/she is looking for without having to formulate any question. The system is coupled with a 'RDF Triple Store' (a database storing the ontologies), factSheets, doc-Sheets and flowSheets (i.e., specific formatted forms) related to methods and documentation, scenarios and metadata.JRC.B.6-Digital Econom

Summary of Research 2000, Department of Mechanical Engineering

The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or U.S. Government.This report contains project summaries of the research projects in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. A list of recent publications is also included, which consists of conference presentations and publications, books, contributions to books, published journal papers, and technical reports. Thesis abstracts of students advised by faculty in the Department are also included

SCALABLE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT SIMULATION ALGORITHMS FOR ENERGY-EFFICIENT TERAFLOP HETEROGENEOUS PARALLEL COMPUTING PLATFORMS

Integrated circuit technology has gone through several decades of aggressive scaling.It is increasingly challenging to analyze growing design complexity. Post-layout SPICE simulation can be computationally prohibitive due to the huge amount of parasitic elements, which can easily boost the computation and memory cost. As the decrease in device size, the circuits become more vulnerable to process variations. Designers need to statistically simulate the probability that a circuit does not meet the performance metric, which requires millions times of simulations to capture rare failure events. Recent, multiprocessors with heterogeneous architecture have emerged as mainstream computing platforms. The heterogeneous computing platform can achieve highthroughput energy efficient computing. However, the application of such platform is not trivial and needs to reinvent existing algorithms to fully utilize the computing resources. This dissertation presents several new algorithms to address those aforementioned two significant and challenging issues on the heterogeneous platform. Harmonic Balance (HB) analysis is essential for efficient verification of large postlayout RF and microwave integrated circuits (ICs). However, existing methods either suffer from excessively long simulation time and prohibitively large memory consumption or exhibit poor stability. This dissertation introduces a novel transient-simulation guided graph sparsification technique, as well as an efficient runtime performance modeling approach tailored for heterogeneous manycore CPU-GPU computing system to build nearly-optimal subgraph preconditioners that can lead to minimum HB simulation runtime. Additionally, we propose a novel heterogeneous parallel sparse block matrix algorithm by taking advantages of the structure of HB Jacobian matrices as well as GPU’s streaming multiprocessors to achieve optimal workload balancing during the preconditioning phase of HB analysis. We also show how the proposed preconditioned iterative algorithm can efficiently adapt to heterogeneous computing systems with different CPU and GPU computing capabilities. Extensive experimental results show that our HB solver can achieve up to 20X speedups and 5X memory reduction when compared with the state-of-the-art direct solver highly optimized for twelve-core CPUs. In nowadays variation-aware IC designs, cell characterizations and SRAM memory yield analysis require many thousands or even millions of repeated SPICE simulations for relatively small nonlinear circuits. In this dissertation, for the first time, we present a massively parallel SPICE simulator on GPU, TinySPICE, for efficiently analyzing small nonlinear circuits. TinySPICE integrates a highly-optimized shared-memory based matrix solver and fast parametric three-dimensional (3D) LUTs based device evaluation method. A novel circuit clustering method is also proposed to improve the stability and efficiency of the matrix solver. Compared with CPU-based SPICE simulator, TinySPICE achieves up to 264X speedups for parametric SRAM yield analysis without loss of accuracy

Business rules based legacy system evolution towards service-oriented architecture.

Enterprises can be empowered to live up to the potential of becoming dynamic, agile and real-time. Service orientation is emerging from the amalgamation of a number of key business, technology and cultural developments. Three essential trends in particular are coming together to create a new revolutionary breed of enterprise, the service-oriented enterprise (SOE): (1) the continuous performance management of the enterprise; (2) the emergence of business process management; and (3) advances in the standards-based service-oriented infrastructures. This thesis focuses on this emerging three-layered architecture that builds on a service-oriented architecture framework, with a process layer that brings technology and business together, and a corporate performance layer that continually monitors and improves the performance indicators of global enterprises provides a novel framework for the business context in which to apply the important technical idea of service orientation and moves it from being an interesting tool for engineers to a vehicle for business managers to fundamentally improve their businesses

Next generation mine countermeasures for the very shallow water zone in support of amphibious operations

This report describes system engineering efforts exploring next generation mine countermeasure (MCM) systems to satisfy high priority capability gaps in the Very Shallow Water (VSW) zone in support of amphibious operations. A thorough exploration of the problem space was conducted, including stakeholder analysis, MCM threat analysis, and current and future MCM capability research. Solution-neutral requirements and functions were developed for a bounded next generation system. Several alternative architecture solutions were developed that included a critical evaluation that compared performance and cost. The resulting MCM system effectively removes the man from the minefield through employment of autonomous capability, reduces operator burden with sensor data fusion and processing, and provides a real-time communication for command and control (C2) support to reduce or eliminate post mission analysis.http://archive.org/details/nextgenerationmi109456968N

Deciphering the mechanisms underlying the role of interleukin-10 in cognitive function

Dissertação de mestrado em Ciências da SaúdeA função cognitiva refere-se aos processos mentais internos críticos para as atividades quotidianas, como a memória. A imunovigilância do cérebro é crucial para a cognição. A ausência de células T e níveis aumentados de citocinas pró-inflamatórias têm sido associados a comprometimentos cognitivos. No entanto, o papel das citocinas anti-inflamatórias, como a interleucina-10 (IL-10), tem sido pouco estudado. Aqui, o efeito da ausência de IL-10 na função cognitiva foi investigado em murganhos fêmeas BALB/c jovens-adultas IL-10 knockout (KO) e irmãs de tipo selvagem (WT). A ausência de IL-10 prejudicou a memória de referência espacial dependente do hipocampo no Barnes-maze test. Curiosamemente, neste teste, os murganhos IL-10 KO mostraram uma redução nas estratégias dependentes do hipocampo principalmente durante as fases de metestro e diestro do ciclo estríco. Não foram observados problemas locomotores nos murganhos IL-10 KO, no entanto, a deficiência de IL-10 comprometeu a exploração no open-field test. Embora a ausência de IL-10 tivesse aumentado os níveis basais de corticosterona e de expressão genética de marcadores pró-inflamatórios no cólon, estes parâmetros não se correlacionaram com o desempenho comportamental. Usando as variáveis comportamentais analisadas, o genótipo (WT vs IL-10 KO) foi classificado por support vector machine models com uma precisão de até 89,3%. Adicionalmente, a ausência de IL-10 diminui o número de neurónios e volume do hipocampo dorsal, mas não do ventral. Além disso, no hipocampo, a deficiênciade IL-10 modulou negativamente a dinâmica das espinhas dendríticas e diminuiu a arborização dendrítica dos neurónios granulares do giro dentado dorsal e ventral e piramidais do cornu ammonis-1 e -3, que são conhecidos por suportar a aprendizagem e memória. Ademais, análises por citometria de fluxo mostraram que a ausência de IL-10 influenciou o perfil leucocitário no sangue pelo aumento do número total de neutrófilos e da sua percentagem dentro dos leucócitos e diminuição da percentagem dentro dos leucócitos de eosinófilos, células natural-killer, células B e células T. Além disso, no sangue, a deficiência de IL-10 aumentou a percentagem de células T CD4+ efetoras de memória, que foram previamente associadas a uma pior função cognitiva em idosos saudáveis. A ausência de IL-10 também aumentou o número total de leucócitos nos nódulos linfáticos cervicais profundos, sugerindo um aumento do recrutamento de células para o sistema linfático do cérebro. Por fim, através de um tratamento antibiótico, um protocolo para a depleção do microbioma intestinal de murganhos IL-10 KO foi otimizado. Após 3 dias de tratamento, os antibióticos reduziram os níveis de expressão genética de16s nas fezessem proliferação fúngica, proporcionando uma etapa inicial para explorar o papel do microbioma intestinal na função cognitiva de murganhos IL-10 KO. No geral, estes resultados não só suportaram que a ausência de IL-10 impactou as habilidades cognitivas, mas também destacaram potenciais mecanismos subjacentes à ação dessa citocina anti-inflamatória, que podem ser contribuintes importantes para o desenvolvimento de novas terapias para comprometimentos cognitivas baseadas em IL-10.Cognitive function refers to internal mental processes critical for daily life activities, such as memory. Brain immune surveillance has proven to be crucial for cognitive function. T cell absence and increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines have been associated with impaired cognition. However, the role of anti-inflammatory cytokines, such as interleukin-10 (IL-10), has been poorly studied. Here, the effect of IL-10 absence in cognitive function was investigated in young-adult female BALB/c IL-10 knockout (KO) and wild-type (WT) littermate mice. IL-10 absence impaired the hippocampal-dependent spatial reference memory in the Barnes-maze test. Interestingly, in this test, IL-10 KO mice showed a reduction in hippocampal-dependent strategies mainly during the metestrus and diestrus phases of the estrous cycle. No locomotor disabilities were observed in IL-10 KO mice however IL-10 deficiency impaired exploration in the open-field test. Although IL-10 absence has led to higher basal levels of corticosterone and increased gene expression levels of pro-inflammatory markers in the colon, these parameters did not correlate with the behavioral performance. Using the behavioral variables analyzed, the genotype (WT vsIL-10 KO) was classified by support vector machine models with an accuracy of up to 89.3%. Moreover, IL-10 absence led to a decreased number of neurons and volumetric atrophy of the dorsal, but not of the ventral hippocampus. Additionally, in the hippocampus, IL-10 deficiency negatively modulated the dendritic spine dynamics and decreased the dendritic arborization of dorsal and ventral dentate gyrus granule neurons and cornu ammonis-1 and -3 pyramidal neurons, which are known to support learning and memory. Furthermore, flow cytometry analysis showed that IL-10 absence impacted the leukocyte profile in the blood by increasing the total number of neutrophils and its percentage within leukocytes and decreasing the percentage of eosinophils, natural-killer cells, B cells, and T cells within leukocytes. Also, in the blood, IL-10 deficiency increased the percentage of effector memory CD4+ T cells, which were previously associated with a worst cognitive function of healthy aged individuals. IL-10 absence also increased the total number of leukocytes in the deep cervical lymph nodes, suggesting an increased cell recruitment to the lymphatic system of the brain. Lastly, through an antibiotic treatment, a protocol for gut microbiome depletion of IL-10 KO mice was optimized. After 3 days of treatment, antibiotics reduced the gene expression levels of 16s in the feces without fungal overgrowth, providing an initial step to explore the role of the gut microbiome in the cognitive function of IL-10 KO mice. Overall, these results not only supported that IL-10 absence impacted cognitive abilities but also highlighted the potential mechanisms underlying the action of this anti-inflammatory cytokine, which may be important contributors to the development of new IL-10-based therapies for cognitive impairments.E, por fim, ao Programa Operacional Regional do Norte de Portugal – NORTE 2020 no âmbito dos projetos NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000013 e NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000023; à Plataforma de Microscopia Científica do ICVS, membro da infraestrutura nacional da Plataforma Portuguesa de Bioimagem – PPBI no contexto do projeto PPBI-POCI-01-0145-FEDER-022122, ambos ao abrigo do Acordo de Parceria – Portugal 2020, através do Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional; e à Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia mediante fundos nacionais vinculados aos projetos UIDB/50026/2020 e UIDP/50026/2020 pelo suporte financeiro

A programming system for process coordination in virtual organisations

PhD thesisDistributed business applications are increasingly being constructed by composing them from services provided by various online businesses. Typically, this leads to trading partners coming together to form virtual organizations (VOs). Each member of a VO maintains their autonomy, except with respect to their agreed goals. The structure of the Virtual Organisation may contain one dominant organisation who dictates the method of achieving the goals or the members may be considered peers of equal importance. The goals of VOs can be defined by the shared global business processes they contain. To be able to execute these business processes, VOs require a flexible enactment model as there may be no single ‘owner’ of the business process and therefore no natural place to enact the business processes. One solution is centralised enactment using a trusted third party, but in some cases this may not be acceptable (for instance because of security reasons). This thesis will present a programming system that allows centralised as well as distributed enactment where each organisation enacts part of the business process. To achieve distributed enactment we must address the problem of specifying the business process in a manner that is amenable to distribution. The first contribution of this thesis is the presentation of the Task Model, a set of languages and notations for describing workflows that can be enacted in a centralised or decentralised manner. The business processes that we specify will coordinate the services that each organisation owns. The second contribution of this thesis is the presentation of a method of describing the observable behaviour of these services. The language we present, SSDL, provides a flexible and extensible way of describing the messaging behaviour of Web Services. We present a method for checking that a set of services described in SSDL are compatible with each other and also that a workflow interacts with a service in the desired manner. The final contribution of this thesis is the presentation of an abstract architecture and prototype implementation of a decentralised workflow engine. The prototype is able to enact workflows described in the Task Model notation in either a centralised or decentralised scenario