A new AXT format for an efficient SpMV product using AVX-512 instructions and CUDA

The Sparse Matrix-Vector (SpMV) product is a key operation used in many scientific applications. This work proposes a new sparse matrix storage scheme, the AXT format, that improves the SpMV performance on vector capability platforms. AXT can be adapted to different platforms, improving the storage efficiency for matrices with different sparsity patterns. Intel AVX-512 instructions and CUDA are used to optimise the performances of the four different AXT subvariants. Performance comparisons are made with the Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) and AXC formats on an Intel Xeon Gold 6148 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla V100 Graphics Processing Units using 26 matrices. On the Intel platform the overall AXT performance is 18% and 44.3% higher than the AXC and CSR respectively, reaching speed-up factors of up to x7.33. On the NVIDIA platform the AXT performance is 44% and 8% higher than the AXC and CSR performances respectively, reaching speed-up factors of up to x378.5S

Collusive agreements in the international copper market

The study deals with the collusive agreements in the international copper market to determine the possibility of success of a producers' stabilization scheme from a historical perspective. The research relies on the assumption that the operational conditions, the structure, behaviour and performance of an industry are in continuous interaction and by examining the relevant variables included in those concepts it is possible to make a general assessment. The study analyses fourteen policies orientated to influence the prices of copper; six of them carried out before the First World War; three undertaken in the inter-war period, and five after the Second World War (among which a successful action organised by the major importing nations is included). However, the emphasis of the study is given to the analysis of the period 1950-77. The word collusion has been used without any ethical, legal or moral connotation. It only refers to the ability of the producers to coordinate their decisions in those markets in which sales are highly concentrated in few producers, determining that the actions of the sellers are interdependent since the decisions of each of them have considerable repercussions on the rivals. The general conclusion is that the structure of the international copper market has become less concentrated and increasingly complex making more difficult the operation of any producers' collusive agreement. The current policies implemented by the governments of the major exporting nations have been creating the conditions for a more competitive and complex structure of the industry, reducing the possibility that concerted action can succeed

Data access and integration in the ISPIDER proteomics grid

Grid computing has great potential for supporting the integration of complex, fast changing biological data repositories to enable distributed data analysis. One scenario where Grid computing has such potential is provided by proteomics resources which are rapidly being developed with the emergence of affordable, reliable methods to study the proteome. The protein identifications arising from these methods derive from multiple repositories which need to be integrated to enable uniform access to them. A number of technologies exist which enable these resources to be accessed in a Grid environment, but the independent development of these resources means that significant data integration challenges, such as heterogeneity and schema evolution, have to be met. This paper presents an architecture which supports the combined use of Grid data access (OGSA-DAI), Grid distributed querying (OGSA-DQP) and data integration (AutoMed) software tools to support distributed data analysis. We discuss the application of this architecture for the integration of several autonomous proteomics data resources

Pobreza e transferências de renda no Brazil, à luz de K. Niemietz

Mestrado em Governação, Competitividade e Políticas PúblicasTrabalho que se volta para o campo das políticas públicas de combate à pobreza e propõe-se a analisar, no contexto brasileiro, três questões suscitadas por Kristian Niemietz em sua obra A New Understanding of poverty. A primeira diz respeito ao exame das falhas identificadas pelo autor nas medidas relativas. A segunda se relaciona com o papel desempenhado pelo crescimento econômico e a ênfase em medidas redistributivas no combate à pobreza. A terceira se prende com os grandes custos que as políticas públicas de transferência de renda, implementadas atualmente, podem ter. Para contemplar essas questões, este estudo foi estruturado em três capítulos. O primeiro teve o condão de apresentar enquadramento teórico de K. Niemietz. O segundo capítulo teve como intuito expor a narrativa da pobreza brasileira nas décadas de 1970 a 1990 e, assim, revelar a influência das medidas relativas sobre ela. O terceiro capítulo apresentou a evolução das medidas de combate à pobreza no Brasil, conferindo destaque às transferências de renda, assim como realizou as análises propostas pelo trabalho. Entre outras conclusões, o presente estudo revelou a influência das medidas relativas sobre a narrativa da pobreza brasileira e sobre a concepção e implementação das atuais políticas públicas de combate à pobreza no Brasil, nomeadamente as transferências de renda promovidas desde meados da década de 1990. Demonstrou-se também o papel coadjuvante que é relegado ao crescimento econômico no combate à pobreza. Revelou-se ainda que os custos dos programas de transferência de renda, se comparados com os resultados obtidos na última década em termos de redução dos percentuais de pobreza absoluta e desigualdade, são proporcionais aos gastos monetários de sua implementação. Ponderou-se, porém, a possibilidade de esses resultados não serem sustentáveis a longo prazo.Work developed in the field of public policies to combat poverty and proposes to examine, in the Brazilian context, three issues raised by Kristian Niemietz in his work A New Understanding of poverty. The first one addresses an examination of the flaws identified by the author in the relative measures. The second issue relates to the role played by the economic growth and the emphasis on redistributive measures in combating poverty. The third relates to the large costs involved in the current public policy of income redistribution. To address these questions, this study was divided into three chapters. The first presented the theoretical framework of Kristian Niemietz. The second chapter exposed the narrative of Brazilian poverty from 1970s to 1990s, trying to demonstrate the influence of the relative measures on this narrative. The third chapter presented the development of measures to combat poverty in Brazil, featuring income redistribution, as well as conducted the proposed analysis of the work. Among other findings, the present study revealed the influence of relative measures on the narrative of Brazilian poverty. These measures also have effect in the design and implementation of current public policies to combat poverty in Brazil, including income redistribution promoted since the 1990s. It was also evident that economic growth has a minor role in poverty combat. Besides, the discussion also revealed that the cost of income redistribution programs are proportional to the monetary expenses of their implementation, when they are compared with the results translated in percentage reduction of inequality and absolute poverty in the last decade. It was considered, however, the possibility that these results are not sustainable in long-term prospects

Accessing Big (Commercial) Data across a Global Research Infrastructure - Modelling Consumer Behaviour in China

(1) Business School (2) EPCCThe use of globally distributed computing systems and globally distributed data to understand and manage global organisations is a well-established vision. It can be found in patents awarded for electrical communications systems that are integrated with electro-mechanical computing devices as far back as 1927. Use of electrical communications to reproduce images goes back even further to the first fax patent awarded to Scottish inventor Alexander Bain in 1843, preceding Alexander Graham Bell's patent for the telephone by over 30 years. Like many other company assets, data has value, however it has two additional characteristics that establish tensions with a globally distributed vision: (i) its value cannot be assessed until after it has been analysed, and (ii) that analysis may prove to be of more value to a competitor than the company itself. This type of concern is not typical of the global scientific collaborations that have driven the development of global network infrastructure, a distinction Jim Gray of Microsoft highlighted by describing data exchanged in radio-astronomy collaborations as “completely worthless”, by which he meant that it had all the dimensionality and scale of the most complex problems in business or medicine, but none of the sensitivities that impede how and with whom you share that data, or what analyses you attempt. Since the Economic and Social Research Council defines social science as “the study of society and the manner in which people behave and influence the world around us” it is clear that the sensitivities of exposing commercial data on behaviour in global markets to globally distributed computational environments presents a major challenge for (Social) Data Scientists. This paper describes some of the challenges of building the first Global Computing Grid to connect collaborating sites in three continents and installing an embedded analytical facility within a Chinese commercial organisation that has enabled collaborative analysis of millions of consumers. We report how this access has provided new insights into consumer behaviour within China ranging from testing strategic models of economic development to exploring ‘digital exclusion’ and the impact of migration on technology adoption

BeatBox - HPC simulation environment for biophysically and anatomically realistic cardiac electrophysiology

The BeatBox simulation environment combines flexible script language user interface with the robust computational tools, in order to setup cardiac electrophysiology in-silico experiments without re-coding at low-level, so that cell excitation, tissue/anatomy models, stimulation protocols may be included into a BeatBox script, and simulation run either sequentially or in parallel (MPI) without re-compilation. BeatBox is a free software written in C language to be run on a Unix-based platform. It provides the whole spectrum of multi scale tissue modelling from 0-dimensional individual cell simulation, 1-dimensional fibre, 2-dimensional sheet and 3-dimensional slab of tissue, up to anatomically realistic whole heart simulations, with run time measurements including cardiac re-entry tip/filament tracing, ECG, local/global samples of any variables, etc. BeatBox solvers, cell, and tissue/anatomy models repositories are extended via robust and flexible interfaces, thus providing an open framework for new developments in the field. In this paper we give an overview of the BeatBox current state, together with a description of the main computational methods and MPI parallelisation approaches.Comment: 37 pages, 10 figures, last version submitted to PLOS ON

Non-standard Abilities of PostgreSQL

Import 22/07/2015Cílem bakalářské práce je prozkoumat nadstandardní vlastnosti databázového systému PostgreSQL nad rámec standardu SQL, respektive konkurečních databázových systémů a následně pro ně najít situace, ve kterých se dají vhodně uplatnit. V práci jsou nejprve postupně vyčteny možnosti uživatelské rozšířitelnosti PostgreSQL databáze a následně vybrány, zdokumentovány a zdůvodněny právě ty, které jsou jen obtížně nahraditelné vlastnostmi standardu SQL. Další část práce se soustředí na postup vytvoření jednoho praktického uživatelského rozšíření datábaze. Tato část podrobně popisuje, co všechno bylo při implementaci tohoto rozšíření nutno provést. Závěrečná část práce se pak stručně zabývá srovnáním dvou konkurečních SŘBD z hlediska rozšířitelnosti.The goal of this bachelor thesis is to explore non-standard abilities of PostgreSQL database system beyond the SQL standard respectively beyond other competitive database systems and to find situations of practical applications for these non-standard abilities subsenquently. As first there are listed user-defined extensibility options of the PostgreSQL database and then there are picked those that are difficult to replace with abilities of SQL standard. Next part of the thesis is focused on process of creating one practical user-defined extension of the database system. This part in detail describes what was needed for the implementation of that user-defined extension. Final part then briefly compares PostgreSQL database with two other database managements systems from the point of extensibility.460 - Katedra informatikyvelmi dobř