In and around The Bay: water, fish, infrastructure

An important theme in current studies of environmental representation is the inadequacy of many narratological and stylistic techniques for registering ecological complexity. This article argues that, in the case of cinema, water constitutes an especially vivid example of an allusive natural subject, and it examines the means by which one film, The Bay (Barry Levinson, 2012), manages to confront that challenge. It pays particular attention to The Bay’s treatment of animal life, and its acknowledgement of water’s infrastructural currency. The article draws on the writings of ecocritical literary theorist Timothy Morton and media historian and theorist John Durham Peter

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World by Timothy Morton

Welling reviews Timothy Morton\u27s book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013)

Geologies of Finitude: The Deep Time of Twenty-First-Century Catastrophe in Don DeLillo’s Point Omegaand Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia

The twenty-first century has seen a transformation of twentieth-century narrative and historical discourse. On the one hand, the Cold War national fantasy of mutually assured destruction has multiplied, producing a diverse array of apocalyptic visions. On the other, there has been an increasing sobriety about human finitude, especially considered in the light of emerging discussions about deep time. This essay argues that Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (2010) and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008) make strong cases for the novel’s continuing ability to complicate and illuminate contemporaneity. Written in the midst of the long and disastrous U.S. incursions in the Middle East, DeLillo and Negarestani raise important political questions about the ecological realities of the War on Terror. Each novel acknowledges that though the catastrophic present cannot be divorced from the inevitable doom at the end of the world, we still desperately need to imagine something else

Parallel Programming of General-Purpose Programs Using Task-Based Programming Models

The prevalence of multicore processors is bound to drive most kinds of software development towards parallel programming. To limit the difficulty and overhead of parallel software design and maintenance, it is crucial that parallel programming models allow an easy-to-understand, concise and dense representation of parallelism. Parallel programming models such as Cilk++ and Intel TBBs attempt to offer a better, higher-level abstraction for parallel programming than threads and locking synchronization. It is not straightforward, however, to express all patterns of parallelism in these models. Pipelines are an important parallel construct, although difficult to express in Cilk and TBBs in a straightfor- ward way, not without a verbose restructuring of the code. In this paper we demonstrate that pipeline parallelism can be easily and concisely expressed in a Cilk-like language, which we extend with input, output and input/output dependency types on procedure arguments, enforced at runtime by the scheduler. We evaluate our implementation on real applications and show that our Cilk-like scheduler, extended to track and enforce these dependencies has performance comparable to Cilk++