348,047 research outputs found
Setting an integrated soil monitoring system for Malta : strategy, feasibility and recommendations
Chapter 6Since 2010, MEPA has embarked on a project (which attracted co-funded ERDF
assistance) (1) to develop a multi-thematic environment strategy that would lead to
updating of its data/ information monitoring capabilities for a number of environmental
sectors. The monitoring and continuous evaluation of soil properties is one important
sector within this project. Essentially, a multi-criterion assessment of existing available
information has been carried out with a view to objectively chart the most appropriate
process to carry out a pilot field sampling by testing a pre-agreed set of indicators. The
latter were established after taking into consideration all degradation pressures threatening
the continued sustainability of this resource.
Multi-criterion analysis was carried out by means of a limited set of soil-related
datasets published in past editions of Malta’s State of the Environment Report in order
to support a number of objectives stipulated within the Project’s ambitious Terms of
Reference. Information was derived from earlier attempts to establish a soil information
system for Malta.
All soil degradation threats, officially determined by the European Commission’s
Technical Working Groups, have been taken into consideration within the aforementioned
project and its research methodology with a view of establishing a shared GIS environment
in accordance with state-of-the-art information dissemination standards.peer-reviewe
An efficient multi-core implementation of a novel HSS-structured multifrontal solver using randomized sampling
We present a sparse linear system solver that is based on a multifrontal
variant of Gaussian elimination, and exploits low-rank approximation of the
resulting dense frontal matrices. We use hierarchically semiseparable (HSS)
matrices, which have low-rank off-diagonal blocks, to approximate the frontal
matrices. For HSS matrix construction, a randomized sampling algorithm is used
together with interpolative decompositions. The combination of the randomized
compression with a fast ULV HSS factorization leads to a solver with lower
computational complexity than the standard multifrontal method for many
applications, resulting in speedups up to 7 fold for problems in our test
suite. The implementation targets many-core systems by using task parallelism
with dynamic runtime scheduling. Numerical experiments show performance
improvements over state-of-the-art sparse direct solvers. The implementation
achieves high performance and good scalability on a range of modern shared
memory parallel systems, including the Intel Xeon Phi (MIC). The code is part
of a software package called STRUMPACK -- STRUctured Matrices PACKage, which
also has a distributed memory component for dense rank-structured matrices
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