The passeist, modernist and futurist features of some social housing ensembles built during the transitional period of 1960-1970 (case of “Maurelette” in Marseille)

The history of architecture and urbanism is classically represented as a sequence of major movements and doctrines. However, the factual evolution does not have this kind of linear character. The well-known architectural “isms” are chained together with productions of the so called “transitional” periods, the legacy of which deserves special scientific interest. Thanks to its unique mix of previous and present tendencies, as well as techniques and compositional approaches these architectural layers form a base for the future movement. A significant number of this kind of interesting “in-between produce" in the field of social housing has been built during the 60th and the 70th. These ensembles were constructed between the periods of Modernism and Postmodernism, when the postulates of modernism (particularly the ones embodied in the social housing groups) were severely criticized for having poor urban and architectural design. Since the end of 1980 in many European countries, particularly in France, massive renovation processes started and continue to this day. Due to political, social and aesthetic changes, a great part of post-war residential heritage has been radically reconstructed or demolished. This process touches not only ordinary residential groups (so-called “grand ensembles”) realized right after the Second World War with very limited means and techniques, but also harms some of the interesting ensembles. Many of them are undervalued, not rehabilitated since their creation and are often doomed to disappear. The current paper is an attempt to analyze the historical, urban and morphological aspects of “Maurelette” residential complex, built in the northern suburbs of Marseilles during 1963-1965. The interpretation of the landscape, as well as the particularities of space organization, proportions and choice of materials in "Maurelette" complex demonstrates the ambition to create the “non-ordinary” ensemble by ordinary inexpensive constructive means and elements. As opposed to the great number of post-war primitive “cité” built on “tabula rasa” with no former architectural remains, the authors of “Maurelette” respectfully included the main elements (House of Maitre, the sycamore tree lane, etc.) in the new structure of the ancient bourgeois property and kept their important role. Here we can see the original interpretation of traditional “square”, “street” and “rampart”, that could be considered as early application of Postmodernist ideas of decontexutualisation and free “quotation” of historical urban forms. Thus, the “Maurelette” appears as a “cultural bridge” connecting the past, the present and the future. Fortunately, until the present day this ensemble remains almost intact, and in 2006, it has even received the "Heritage of the twentieth century" label, as “Maurelette Parque”. However, today its “survival” could be considered a rather extraordinary phenomenon than a usual case.This case study intends to raise awareness towards the heritage constructed between the major architectural movements (for example: Modernism and Postmodernism), as it represents an interesting architectural symbiosis, has hidden values and deserves to be included in the contemporary urban structure without negating or altering their authentic concept. Their existence will contribute to the continued, uninterrupted urban environment and thus, making the modern city more resilient

Multidimensional analysis of data obtained in experiments with X-ray emulsion chambers and extensive air showers

Nonparametric statistical methods are used to carry out the quantitative comparison of the model and the experimental data. The same methods enable one to select the events initiated by the heavy nuclei and to calculate the portion of the corresponding events. For this purpose it is necessary to have the data on artificial events describing the experiment sufficiently well established. At present, the model with the small scaling violation in the fragmentation region is the closest to the experiments. Therefore, the treatment of gamma families obtained in the Pamir' experiment is being carried out at present with the application of these models

SciTS: A Benchmark for Time-Series Databases in Scientific Experiments and Industrial Internet of Things

Time-series data has an increasingly growing usage in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and large-scale scientific experiments. Managing time-series data needs a storage engine that can keep up with their constantly growing volumes while providing an acceptable query latency. While traditional ACID databases favor consistency over performance, many time-series databases with novel storage engines have been developed to provide better ingestion performance and lower query latency. To understand how the unique design of a time-series database affects its performance, we design SciTS, a highly extensible and parameterizable benchmark for time-series data. The benchmark studies the data ingestion capabilities of time-series databases especially as they grow larger in size. It also studies the latencies of 5 practical queries from the scientific experiments use case. We use SciTS to evaluate the performance of 4 databases of 4 distinct storage engines: ClickHouse, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, and PostgreSQL

Reviewing GPU architectures to build efficient back projection for parallel geometries

Back-Projection is the major algorithm in Computed Tomography to reconstruct images from a set of recorded projections. It is used for both fast analytical methods and high-quality iterative techniques. X-ray imaging facilities rely on Back-Projection to reconstruct internal structures in material samples and living organisms with high spatial and temporal resolution. Fast image reconstruction is also essential to track and control processes under study in real-time. In this article, we present efficient implementations of the Back-Projection algorithm for parallel hardware. We survey a range of parallel architectures presented by the major hardware vendors during the last 10 years. Similarities and differences between these architectures are analyzed and we highlight how specific features can be used to enhance the reconstruction performance. In particular, we build a performance model to find hardware hotspots and propose several optimizations to balance the load between texture engine, computational and special function units, as well as different types of memory maximizing the utilization of all GPU subsystems in parallel. We further show that targeting architecture-specific features allows one to boost the performance 2–7 times compared to the current state-of-the-art algorithms used in standard reconstructions codes. The suggested load-balancing approach is not limited to the back-projection but can be used as a general optimization strategy for implementing parallel algorithms