N-carbamylglutamate supplementation regulates hindgut microbiota composition and short-chain fatty acid contents in Charollais and Small Tail Han crossbred sheep

IntroductionThe objective of this study was to investigate the effects of N-carbamylglutamate (NCG) supplementation on the growth performance, hindgut microbiota composition, and short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) contents in Charollais and Small Tail Han crossbred sheep.MethodsA total of 16 female crossbred mutton sheep (Charollais × Small Tail Han), aged 4 months, with an initial body weight of 30.03 ± 0.08 kg, were utilized in a 60 days experiment. The sheep were divided into two groups based on their initial body weight. Each group consisted of 8 replicates, with each individual sheep considered as a replicate. The dietary treatments comprised a basal diet supplemented with either 0.00% or 0.12% NCG.Results and discussionOur findings indicate that NCG supplementation did not have a significant effect on the growth performance of mutton sheep. However, it did lead to changes in hindgut SCFA contents. Specifically, NCG supplementation increased the content of propanoic acid while decreasing acetic acid and hexanoic acid in the hindgut. Through microbiota analysis using the 16S rRNA technique, we identified Lachnospiraceae_NK3A20_group and Parasutterella as biomarkers for the hindgut microbiota in mutton sheep fed a diet containing NCG. Further analysis of the microbiota composition revealed that NCG supplementation significantly increased the abundance of Lachnospiraceae_NK3A20_group and Parasutterella, while decreasing unclassified_f_Lachnospiraceae and Lachnoclostridium. Correlation analysis between hindgut SCFA contents and microbiota composition revealed that the abundance of Lachnoclostridium was positively correlated with the contents of acetic acid and hexanoic acid, but negatively correlated with propanoic acid. Additionally, the abundance of Lachnospiraceae_NK3A20_group and Parasutterella was positively correlated with the content of propanoic acid, while being negatively correlated with acetic acid and hexanoic acid. Based on these findings, we conclude that dietary supplementation of 0.12% NCG can modulate hindgut SCFA contents in mutton sheep by regulating the composition of the hindgut microbiota

PseudoApp: Performance Prediction for Application Migration to Cloud

Abstract-To migrate an existing application to cloud, a user needs to estimate and compare the performance and resource consumption of the application running in different clouds, in order to select the best service provider and the right virtual machine size. However, it is prohibitively expensive to install a complex application in multiple new environments solely for the purpose of performance benchmarking. Performance modeling is more practical but the accuracy is limited by system factors that are hard to model. We propose a new technique called PseudoApp to address these challenges. Our solution creates a pseudo-application to mimic the resource consumption of a real application. A pseudo-application runs the same set of distributed components and executes the same sequence of system calls as those of the real application. By benchmarking a simple and easyto-install PseudoApp in different cloud environments, a user can accurately obtain the performance and resource consumption of the real application. We apply PseudoApp to Apache and TPC-W and find that PseudoApp accurately predicts their performance with 2-8% error in throughput

Pressure-induced superconductivity in topological type II Dirac semimetal NiTe₂

Very recently, NiTe₂ has been reported to be a type II Dirac semimetal with Dirac nodes near the Fermi surface. Furthermore, it is unveiled that NiTe₂ presents the Hall Effect, which is ascribed to orbital magnetoresistance. The physical properties behavior of NiTe₂ under high pressure attracts us. In this paper, we investigate the electrical properties of polycrystalline NiTe₂ by application of pressure ranging from 3.4GPa to 54.45Gpa. Superconductivity emerges at critical pressure 12GPa with a transition temperature of 3.7K, and Tc reaches its maximum, 6.4 K, at the pressure of 52.8GPa. Comparing with the superconductivity in MoP, we purposed the possibility of topological superconductivity in NiTe₂. Two superconductivity transitions are observed with pressure increasing in single crystal

Evidences for pressure-induced two-phase superconductivity and mixed structures of NiTe₂ and NiTe in type-II Dirac semimetal NiTe_(2-x) (x = 0.38 ± 0.09) single crystals

Bulk NiTe₂ is a type-II Dirac semimetal with non-trivial Berry phases associated with the Dirac fermions. Theory suggests that monolayer NiTe₂ is a two-gap superconductor, whereas experimental investigation of bulk NiTe_(1.98) for pressures (P) up to 71.2 GPa do not reveal any superconductivity. Here we report experimental evidences for pressure-induced two-phase superconductivity as well as mixed structures of NiTe₂ and NiTe in Te-deficient NiTe_(2-x) (x = 0.38±0.09) single crystals. Hole-dominant multi-band superconductivity with the P3M1 hexagonal-symmetry structure of NiTe₂ appears at P ≥ 0.5 GPa, whereas electron-dominant single-band superconductivity with the P2/m monoclinic-symmetry structure of NiTe emerges at 14.5 GPa < P < 18.4 GPa. The coexistence of hexagonal and monoclinic structures and two-phase superconductivity is accompanied by a zero Hall coefficient up to ∼ 40 GPa, and the second superconducting phase prevails above 40 GPa, reaching a maximum T_c = 7.8 K and persisting up to 52.8 GPa. Our findings suggest the critical role of Te-vacancies in the occurrence of superconductivity and potentially nontrivial topological properties in NiTe_(2-x)

Service-mining based on knowledge and customer databases

This paper addresses a service-mining technique and applies this technique to improve the services of vehicle service centers. We propose a service-mining system and its data structure to discover the most important services required through analyzing service records, feedback records and the available products. The system can improve the quality of mining automatically by updating mining strategies regularly

Auto-Tuning Performance Of Mpi Parallel Programs Using Resource Management In Container-Based Virtual Cloud

Load imbalance problem is one of the major obstacles to achieving optimal performance of High Performance Computing applications. The approach of trying to distribute the problem pieces to each node with the hope of balancing execution time has limits since the performance depends not only on data size but also on many other dynamic factors. This paper describes an approach that uses adaptive resource management enabled by the container-based virtualization to solve the load imbalance problem of MPI programs running in the cloud. Our techniques dynamically adjust CPU resource allocation to MPI processes running as container instances according to the current program execution state and system resource status. The resource allocation among MPI processes is adjusted in two ways: the intra-host level, which dynamically adjusts resources within a host; and the inter-host level, which migrates containers together with MPI processes from one host to another host. We have implemented and evaluated our approach on Amazon EC2 platform using real-world scientific benchmarks and applications, which demonstrates that the performance can be improved up to 31% (with an average of 15%) when compared with the baseline