LEGaTO: first steps towards energy-efficient toolset for heterogeneous computing

LEGaTO is a three-year EU H2020 project which started in December 2017. The LEGaTO project will leverage task-based programming models to provide a software ecosystem for Made-in-Europe heterogeneous hardware composed of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and dataflow engines. The aim is to attain one order of magnitude energy savings from the edge to the converged cloud/HPC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

HiTRACE: High-throughput robust analysis for capillary electrophoresis

Motivation: Capillary electrophoresis (CE) of nucleic acids is a workhorse technology underlying high-throughput genome analysis and large-scale chemical mapping for nucleic acid structural inference. Despite the wide availability of CE-based instruments, there remain challenges in leveraging their full power for quantitative analysis of RNA and DNA structure, thermodynamics, and kinetics. In particular, the slow rate and poor automation of available analysis tools have bottlenecked a new generation of studies involving hundreds of CE profiles per experiment. Results: We propose a computational method called high-throughput robust analysis for capillary electrophoresis (HiTRACE) to automate the key tasks in large-scale nucleic acid CE analysis, including the profile alignment that has heretofore been a rate-limiting step in the highest throughput experiments. We illustrate the application of HiTRACE on thirteen data sets representing 4 different RNAs, three chemical modification strategies, and up to 480 single mutant variants; the largest data sets each include 87,360 bands. By applying a series of robust dynamic programming algorithms, HiTRACE outperforms prior tools in terms of alignment and fitting quality, as assessed by measures including the correlation between quantified band intensities between replicate data sets. Furthermore, while the smallest of these data sets required 7 to 10 hours of manual intervention using prior approaches, HiTRACE quantitation of even the largest data sets herein was achieved in 3 to 12 minutes. The HiTRACE method therefore resolves a critical barrier to the efficient and accurate analysis of nucleic acid structure in experiments involving tens of thousands of electrophoretic bands.Comment: Revised to include Supplement. Availability: HiTRACE is freely available for download at http://hitrace.stanford.ed

Elastic circuits

Elasticity in circuits and systems provides tolerance to variations in computation and communication delays. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of elastic circuits for those designers who are mainly familiar with synchronous design. Elasticity can be implemented both synchronously and asynchronously, although it was traditionally more often associated with asynchronous circuits. This paper shows that synchronous and asynchronous elastic circuits can be designed, analyzed, and optimized using similar techniques. Thus, choices between synchronous and asynchronous implementations are localized and deferred until late in the design process.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Sport marketing in Cyprus - the dynamics of the sport sponsorship context: emergence, development and management practices in the football industry

This thesis investigates the underlying mechanisms and processes that shape sport sponsorship in Cyprus. A systematic review of the international sport sponsorship literature (1980-2009) is undertaken and used as the guide for the qualitative empirical study concentrating on football sponsorship activity undertaken in Cyprus as a developing sport sponsorship market. The systematic review reveals sponsorship management structures, practices, tendencies, and models adopted at a range of national settings, and discloses contrasts that exist in different contexts. The findings of the systematic review highlight the management practices employed by sponsors, such as their motives, decision-making practices, activation and leveraging initiatives, objectives, and evaluation processes. With regard to the empirical investigation, sponsorship activity is viewed and interpreted within the broader social and cultural context in which it takes place. The analysis of the findings is informed by critical realism paradigm, so that the underlying causal mechanisms and structures shaping (or influencing) sponsorship activity in Cyprus are identified and discussed. Specifically, the findings of study, which focused on the top division of the national professional league, revealed the existence of a sponsorship continuum involving four significantly different sponsorship approaches, ranging from purely philanthropic to heavily rational and commercial. Interestingly, the study revealed the interdependence of global and local processes within the sponsorship-related practices, suggesting that sponsorship arrangements in this specific context are marked culturally by processes of glocalisation. Such processes appeared to be vividly expressed in sponsorship-related projects in Cyprus, and involved an amalgamation of several local and cultural factors such as a strong prevalence of localism, nationalism, political clientelism, and reliance on personal relations. Community pressures seemed to have a central role in sponsorship related decision-making, whilst sponsorship activity appeared also to be influenced by the structure of the sponsors industry, the organisational structure and corporate culture, as well as by the structure and local specificity of the football market in Cyprus. More specifically, competitive imbalance of the national league, politicisation of football, the level of competition within a particular industry, and centrality of authority and control (both organisational and cultural), are additional factors that appeared to impact sponsorship activity in the specific market