Accelerator Memory Reuse in the Dark Silicon Era

Accelerators integrated on-die with General-Purpose CPUs (GP-CPUs) can yield significant performance and power improvements. Their extensive use, however, is ultimately limited by their area overhead; due to their high degree of specialization, the opportunity cost of investing die real estate on accelerators can become prohibitive, especially for general-purpose architectures. In this paper we present a novel technique aimed at mitigating this opportunity cost by allowing GP-CPU cores to reuse accelerator memory as a non-uniform cache architecture (NUCA) substrate. On a system with a last level-2 cache of 128kB, our technique achieves on average a 25% performance improvement when reusing four 512 kB accelerator memory blocks to form a level-3 cache. Making these blocks reusable as NUCA slices incurs on average in a 1.89% area overhead with respect to equally-sized ad hoc cache slice

Cosmological dynamics of Scalar--Tensor Gravity

We study the phase--space of FLRW models derived from Scalar--Tensor Gravity where the non--minimal coupling is $F(\phi)=\xi\phi^2$ and the effective potential is $V(\phi)=\lambda \phi^n$. Our analysis allows to unfold many feature of the cosmology of this class of theories. For example, the evolution mechanism towards states indistinguishable from GR is recovered and proved to depend critically on the form of the potential $V(\phi)$. Also, transient almost--Friedmann phases evolving towards accelerated expansion and unstable inflationary phases evolving towards stable ones are found. Some of our results are shown to hold also for the String-Dilaton action.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, 12 tables, submitted to CQ

Cosmological solutions in generalized hybrid metric-Palatini gravity

We construct exact solutions representing a Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robsertson-Walker (FLRW) universe in a generalized hybrid metric-Palatini theory. By writing the gravitational action in a scalar-tensor representation, the new solutions are obtained by either making an ansatz on the scale factor or on the effective potential. Among other relevant results, we show that it is possible to obtain exponentially expanding solutions for flat universes even when the cosmology is not purely vacuum. We then derive the classes of actions for the original theory which generate these solutions.Comment: 14 pages, 17 figure

Electronic structure of wet DNA.

The electronic properties of a Z-DNA crystal synthesized in the laboratory are investigated by means of density-functional theory Car-Parrinello calculations. The electronic structure has a gap of only 1.28 eV. This separates a manifold of 12 occupied states which came from the pi guanine orbitals from the lowest empty states in which the electron is transferred to the Na+ from PO-4 groups and water molecules. We have evaluated the anisotropic optical conductivity. At low frequency the conductivity is dominated by the pi-->Na+ transitions. Our calculation demonstrates that the cost of introducing electron holes in wet DNA strands could be lower than previously anticipated

Curvature driven acceleration : a utopia or a reality ?

The present work shows that a combination of nonlinear contribution from the Ricci curvature in Einstein field equations can drive a late time acceleration of expansion of the universe. The transit from the decelerated to the accelerated phase of expansion takes place smoothly without having to resort to a study of asymptotic behaviour. This result emphasizes the need for thorough and critical examination of models with nonlinear contribution from the curvature.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Cosmological dynamics of exponential gravity

We present a detailed investigation of the cosmological dynamics based on $\exp (-R/{\Lambda})$ gravity. We apply the dynamical system approach to both the vacuum and matter cases and obtain exact solutions and their stability in the finite and asymptotic regimes. The results show that cosmic histories exist which admit a double de-Sitter phase which could be useful for describing the early and the late-time accelerating universe.Comment: 17 pages LaTeX, 3 figure