Bio-hythane production from food waste by dark fermentation coupled with anaerobic digestion process: A long-term pilot scale experience

In this paper are presented the results of the investigation on optimal process operational conditions of thermophilic dark fermentation and anaerobic digestion of food waste, testing a long term run, applying an organic loading rate of 16.3 kgTVS/m3d in the first phase and 4.8 kgTVS/m3d in the second phase. The hydraulic retention times were maintained at 3.3 days and 12.6 days, respectively, for the first and second phase. Recirculation of anaerobic digested sludge, after a mild solid separation, was applied to the dark fermentation reactor in order to control the pH in the optimal hydrogen production range of 5-6. It was confirmed the possibility to obtain a stable hydrogen production, without using external chemicals for pH control, in a long term test, with a specific hydrogen production of 66.7 l per kg of total volatile solid (TVS) fed and a specific biogas production in the second phase of 0.72 m3 per kgTVS fed; the produced biogas presented a typical composition with a stable presence of hydrogen and methane in the biogas mixture around 6 and 58%, respectively, carbon dioxide being the rest

A Review of Lightweight Thread Approaches for High Performance Computing

High-level, directive-based solutions are becoming the programming models (PMs) of the multi/many-core architectures. Several solutions relying on operating system (OS) threads perfectly work with a moderate number of cores. However, exascale systems will spawn hundreds of thousands of threads in order to exploit their massive parallel architectures and thus conventional OS threads are too heavy for that purpose. Several lightweight thread (LWT) libraries have recently appeared offering lighter mechanisms to tackle massive concurrency. In order to examine the suitability of LWTs in high-level runtimes, we develop a set of microbenchmarks consisting of commonly-found patterns in current parallel codes. Moreover, we study the semantics offered by some LWT libraries in order to expose the similarities between different LWT application programming interfaces. This study reveals that a reduced set of LWT functions can be sufficient to cover the common parallel code patterns andthat those LWT libraries perform better than OS threads-based solutions in cases where task and nested parallelism are becoming more popular with new architectures.The researchers from the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló were supported by project TIN2014-53495-R of the MINECO, the Generalitat Valenciana fellowship programme Vali+d 2015, and FEDER. This work was partially supported by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (SC-21), under contract DEAC02-06CH11357. We gratefully acknowledge the computing resources provided and operated by the Joint Laboratory for System Evaluation (JLSE) at Argonne National Laboratory.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On the relationship between force reduction, loading rate and energy absorption in athletics tracks

In this work, finite element simulations of typical sports surfaces were performed to evaluate parameters, such as the loading rate and the energy absorbed by the surface, in relation to its characteristics (surface structure and material properties). Hence, possible relations between these quantities and the standard parameters used to characterize the shock absorbing characteristics of the athletics track (in particular, its force reduction) were investigated. The samples selected for this study were two common athletics tracks and a sheet of natural rubber. They were first characterized by quasi-static compression tests; their mechanical properties were extrapolated to the strain rate of interest and their dependence on the level of deformation was modelled with hyperelastic constitutive equations. Numerical simulations were carried out for varying sample thicknesses to understand the influence of track geometry on force reduction, loading rate and stored energy. A very good correlation was found between force reduction and the other relevant parameters, with the exception of the loading rate at the beginning of the impact

METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK TO IMPROVE PPP PROJECTS

The Public–Private Partnership (PPP) plays a significant role in the construction industry. It is of special importance because of its weight in the global economy and the lack of funding for major projects. The PPP concept, as a procurement strategy, is successful only if the major stakeholders, namely the public sector, private consortium, and end–users are all satisfied with project outcomes. There have been reported cases of problems associated with the initial stages of the PPP process in terms of bidding costs and anticipated costs of construction and operation. The banks’ attention is currently centered on the promotors’ financial stability rather than on project quality. The key issue is to improve the efficiency for the whole building lifecycle. In this context, BIMM philosophy (not just Building Information Modeling but also Information Management) may be a powerful tool. In other words, is there room to put this concept in practice without jeopardizing service quality, innovation and efficiency? The answer to this question is explored in this paper. The use of Technical Sheets for PPP procurement like policy models may enhance systematic and integrated management of the whole building process. This technical framework allows one to collect project data, grouped into three areas: design, construction, and operation. In so doing, a Public Agency may assess project quality

Dynamic Adaptable Asynchronous Progress Model for MPI RMA Multiphase Applications

Casper is a process-based asynchronous progress model for MPI one-sided communication on multi- and many-core architectures. The one-sided communication is not truly one-sided in most MPI implementations: the target process still relies on software progress to complete incoming operations. Casper allows the user to specify an arbitrary number of cores dedicated to background ghost processes and transparently redirects the RMA operations to ghost processes by utilizing the PMPI redirection and MPI-3 shared-memory technologies. Although Casper benefits applications that suffer from lack of asynchronous progress, the operation redirection design might not support complex multiphase applications effectively, which often involve dynamically changing communication density and computing workloads. In this paper, we present an adaptive mechanism in Casper to address the limitation of static asynchronous progress in multiphase applications. We exploit two adaptive strategies, a user-guided strategy and a fully transparent and automatic strategy based on self-profiling and prediction, to dynamically reconfigure the asynchronous progress in Casper according to real-time performance characteristics during multiphase execution. We evaluate the adaptive approaches in both microbenchmarks and a real quantum chemistry application suite, NWChem, on the Cray XC30 supercomputer and an Intel Omni-Path cluster.This material was based upon work supported by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (SC-21), under contract DE-AC02- 06CH11357. The experimental resources for this paper were provided by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) on the Edison Cray XC30 supercomputer and by the Laboratory Computing Resource Center on the Bebop cluster at Argonne National Laboratory. Antonio J. Peña is co-financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva fellowship number IJCI-2015-23266.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Does the 5-strand-graft have superior biomechanical behaviour than 4-strand-graft during acl reconstruction?

Purpose. This study aimed to compare the biomechanical proprieties of 4 and 5-strand- grafts. Methods. For the present study, fresh-frozen bovine common digital extensor tendons were used. Tendon grafts were prepared and sized to have a length of almost 27 cm and a cylinder 4 strand diameter of 8 mm. In half of all samples (Group A, n=12,), the graft was formed by 2 bundles duplicated around a metallic rod creating a 4-strand-tendon construct. In the other half of samples (Group B, n= 12,) 5-strand-tendon construct was created duplicating a single tendon around the rod, and tripling the other one. The grafts were preconditioned at 50 N for 10 min, followed by 1,000 cyclic loading between 50 and 250 N. Load-to-failure test was then carried out at a rate of 1 mm/s. Results. No statistically significant differences were found between two groups concern- ing cyclic elongation at the 500th cycle and at the final cycle. An increased stiffness was observed in the Group B during cyclic loads and at pull-out (p<0.05). Significant differ- ences were noted at the ultimate load-to-failure between Group A (1533 ± 454 N) and Group B (1139 ± 276 N) (p< 0.05). Conclusion. This study showed that both graft construct appears to be biomechanical- ly effective in a bovine tendon model. 5-strand-graft showed an increased stiffness and a decreased ultimate load-to-failure comparing to the 4-strand-graft construct. Biomechan- ically, no real benefit could be observed in the clinical setting increasing the numbers of strands used for the ACL reconstructive surgery

GLTO: On the Adequacy of Lightweight Thread Approaches for OpenMP Implementations

OpenMP is the de facto standard application programming interface (API) for on-node parallelism. The most popular OpenMP runtimes rely on POSIX threads (pthreads) implementations that offer an excellent performance for coarse-grained parallelism and match perfectly with the current hardware. However, a recent trend in runtimes/applications points in the direction of leveraging massive on-node parallelism in conjunction with fine-grained and dynamic scheduling paradigms. It has been demonstrated that lightweight thread (LWT) solutions are more appropriate for these new parallel paradigms. We have developed GLTO, an OpenMP implementation over the recently-emerged Generic Lightweight Threads (GLT) API. GLT exports a common API for LWT libraries that offers the possibility of running the same application over different native LWT solutions. In this paper we use GLTO to analyze different scenarios where OpenMP implementations may benefit from the use of either LWT or pthreads. Our study reveals that none of the threading approaches obtains the best performance in all the scenarios, but that there are important gaps among them.The Researchers from the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló were supported by project TIN2014-53495-R of the MINECO and FEDER, the Generalitat Valenciana fellowship programme Vali+d 2015. Antonio J. Peña is cofinancied by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva fellowship number IJCI-2015-23266. This work was partially supported by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (SC-21), under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. We gratefully acknowledge the computing resources provided and operated by the Joint Laboratory for System Evaluation (JLSE) at Argonne National Laboratory.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Analysis of threading libraries for high performance computing

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] With the appearance of multi-/many core machines, applications and runtime systems have evolved in order to exploit the new on-node concurrency brought by new software paradigms. POSIX threads (Pthreads) was widely-adopted for that purpose and it remains as the most used threading solution in current hardware. Lightweight thread (LWT) libraries emerged as an alternative offering lighter mechanisms to tackle the massive concurrency of current hardware. In this article, we analyze in detail the most representative threading libraries including Pthread- and LWT-based solutions. In addition, to examine the suitability of LWTs for different use cases, we develop a set of microbenchmarks consisting of OpenMP patterns commonly found in current parallel codes, and we compare the results using threading libraries and OpenMP implementations. Moreover, we study the semantics offered by threading libraries in order to expose the similarities among different LWT application programming interfaces and their advantages over Pthreads. This article exposes that LWT libraries outperform solutions based on operating system threads when tasks and nested parallelism are required.The researchers from the Universitat Jaume I and Universitat Politecnica de Valencia were supported by project TIN2014-53495-R of the MINECO and FEDER, and the Generalitat Valenciana fellowship programme Vali+d 2015. Antonio J. Pena is financed by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant No. 749516. This work was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (SC-21), under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.Castelló, A.; Mayo Gual, R.; Seo, S.; Balaji, P.; Quintana Ortí, ES.; Peña, AJ. (2020). Analysis of threading libraries for high performance computing. IEEE Transactions on Computers. 69(9):1279-1292. https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2020.2970706S1279129269