Emulating and evaluating hybrid memory for managed languages on NUMA hardware

Non-volatile memory (NVM) has the potential to become a mainstream memory technology and challenge DRAM. Researchers evaluating the speed, endurance, and abstractions of hybrid memories with DRAM and NVM typically use simulation, making it easy to evaluate the impact of different hardware technologies and parameters. Simulation is, however, extremely slow, limiting the applications and datasets in the evaluation. Simulation also precludes critical workloads, especially those written in managed languages such as Java and C#. Good methodology embraces a variety of techniques for evaluating new ideas, expanding the experimental scope, and uncovering new insights. This paper introduces a platform to emulate hybrid memory for managed languages using commodity NUMA servers. Emulation complements simulation but offers richer software experimentation. We use a thread-local socket to emulate DRAM and a remote socket to emulate NVM. We use standard C library routines to allocate heap memory on the DRAM and NVM sockets for use with explicit memory management or garbage collection. We evaluate the emulator using various configurations of write-rationing garbage collectors that improve NVM lifetimes by limiting writes to NVM, using 15 applications and various datasets and workload configurations. We show emulation and simulation confirm each other's trends in terms of writes to NVM for different software configurations, increasing our confidence in predicting future system effects. Emulation brings novel insights, such as the non-linear effects of multi-programmed workloads on NVM writes, and that Java applications write significantly more than their C++ equivalents. We make our software infrastructure publicly available to advance the evaluation of novel memory management schemes on hybrid memories

Project knowledge into project practice: generational issues in the knowledge management process

This paper considers Learning and Knowledge Transfer within the project domain. Knowledge can be a tenuous and elusive concept, and is challenging to transfer within organizations and projects. This challenge is compounded when we consider generational differences in the project and the workplace. This paper looks at learning, and the transfer of that generated knowledge. A number of tools and frameworks have been considered, together with accumulated extant literature. These issues have been deliberated through the lens of different generational types, focusing on the issues and differences in knowledge engagement and absorption between Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y/Millennials. Generation Z/Centennials have also been included where appropriate. This is a significant issue in modern project and organizational structures. Some recommendations are offered to assist in effective knowledge transfer across generational types.Accepted manuscrip

ILR Faculty Research in Progress, 2016-2017

The production of scholarly research continues to be one of the primary missions of the ILR School. During a typical academic year, ILR faculty members published or had accepted for publication over 25 books, edited volumes, and monographs, 170 articles and chapters in edited volumes, numerous book reviews. In addition, a large number of manuscripts were submitted for publication, presented at professional association meetings, or circulated in working paper form. Our faculty's research continues to find its way into the very best industrial relations, social science and statistics journals.ResearchinProgress_2016_17.pdf: 38 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

IDENTIFYING POLICY RELEVANT VARIABLES FOR REDUCING CHILDHOOD MALNUTRITION IN RURAL MALI

The paper uses OLS and Logit analyses of household survey data to identify and compare determinants of the health and nutritional status of Malian children living in three distinct agricultural production zones (cotton, millet/sorghum, and irrigated rice). These preliminary results suggest that improvements in health center coverage (e.g., reducing the average distance to a health center from 20 to 10 kilometers) and more diversity in complementary foods after six months of age (two or more different foods during a 24 hour period) have the potential to significantly improve standardized height for age scores. Other factors of importance are mother's incomes, prenatal visits, and parents' standardized heights (reflecting either genetic traits or generations of poor nutrition). Recommendations for reducing Mali's high prevalence of malnutrition include the need to raise awareness of the problem among rural populations. Because rural health workers, local administrators, and parents do not recognize malnutrition as a problem, newly empowered decentralized governments will need some external assistance to get the issue on local agendas and identify potential solutions.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

2014 Silicon Valley Index

The Silicon Valley Index has been telling the Silicon Valley story since 1995. Released early every year, the Index is based on indicators that measure the strength of the economy and the health of the community -- highlighting challenges and providing an analytical foundation for leadership and decision making

Intergenerational knowledge transfer in the academic environment of knowledge-based economy

In the immediate future, intergenerational knowledge transfer is one of the knowledge-based economy’s main challenges since an inner motivational force powers knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer from individuals to groups and organization must follow knowledge creation in order to transform individual into organizational knowledge, along the epistemological dimension of the Nonaka’s knowledge dynamics model. Moreover, the knowledge intensive organizations increase their fluxes of knowledge across different age layers and different departments, reducing in the same time the company knowledge loss. The academic environment is, by nature, an age layered field or a nested functional structure. Intergenerational knowledge transfer becomes any university main driving force, while understanding its dynamics is important for academic life improvement. The purpose of the paper is to present some of our research results in the field of intergenerational knowledge transfer in the academic environment of the knowledge-based economy. We performed a qualitative and quantitative research of the knowledge transfer process in the academic environment, using the Analytic Hierarchy Processes (AHP). We analyzed the faculty staff attitudes toward cooperation, competition, and innovation as main priorities in performing research, writing books and publishing scientific papers. The above-mentioned activities are based on intergenerational knowledge transfer and lead to learning processes at individual and organizational levels. Respondents are members of the academic staff of economics and business faculties from the main Romanian universities.knowledge, knowledge-based economy, knowledge transfer, university

Formal Derivation of Concurrent Garbage Collectors

Concurrent garbage collectors are notoriously difficult to implement correctly. Previous approaches to the issue of producing correct collectors have mainly been based on posit-and-prove verification or on the application of domain-specific templates and transformations. We show how to derive the upper reaches of a family of concurrent garbage collectors by refinement from a formal specification, emphasizing the application of domain-independent design theories and transformations. A key contribution is an extension to the classical lattice-theoretic fixpoint theorems to account for the dynamics of concurrent mutation and collection.Comment: 38 pages, 21 figures. The short version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of MPC 201