Microdissection of Shoot Meristem Functional Domains

The shoot apical meristem (SAM) maintains a pool of indeterminate cells within the SAM proper, while lateral organs are initiated from the SAM periphery. Laser microdissection–microarray technology was used to compare transcriptional profiles within these SAM domains to identify novel maize genes that function during leaf development. Nine hundred and sixty-two differentially expressed maize genes were detected; control genes known to be upregulated in the initiating leaf (P0/P1) or in the SAM proper verified the precision of the microdissections. Genes involved in cell division/growth, cell wall biosynthesis, chromatin remodeling, RNA binding, and translation are especially upregulated in initiating leaves, whereas genes functioning during protein fate and DNA repair are more abundant in the SAM proper. In situ hybridization analyses confirmed the expression patterns of six previously uncharacterized maize genes upregulated in the P0/P1. P0/P1-upregulated genes that were also shown to be downregulated in leaf-arrested shoots treated with an auxin transport inhibitor are especially implicated to function during early events in maize leaf initiation. Reverse genetic analyses of asceapen1 (asc1), a maize D4-cyclin gene upregulated in the P0/P1, revealed novel leaf phenotypes, less genetic redundancy, and expanded D4-CYCLIN function during maize shoot development as compared to Arabidopsis. These analyses generated a unique SAM domain-specific database that provides new insight into SAM function and a useful platform for reverse genetic analyses of shoot development in maize

Adaptation of the Carrez procedure for the purification of ferulic and p-coumaric acids released from lignocellulosic biomass prior to LC/MS analysis

The objective of this study was to adapt and improve an environmentally friendly and fast routine method for the analysis of ferulic and p-coumaric acids released from grass cell-walls by alkaline hydrolysis. This methodological development was performed on maize samples selected for their contrasted contents in ferulic and p-coumaric acids as a consequence of their different maturity stages (from stage of 7th leaf with visible ligule to stage of silage harvest). We demonstrate that the Carrez method is an efficient substitute to the common solvent-consuming extraction by ethyl acetate for the preparation of samples suitable for HPLC-ESI-MS analysis. We prove that it is possible to replace methanol by ethanol in the Carrez step and at last we propose a scale reduction of this procedure that offer a first step towards high throughput determinations. The new method leads to a solvent consumption reduced by a factor 100 and only requires ethanol as organic solvent

Efficient Operating System Scheduling for Performance-Asymmetric MultiCore Architectures

Recent research advocates asymmetric multi-core architectures, where cores in the same processor can have different performance. These architectures support single-threaded performance and multithreaded throughput at lower costs (e.g., die size and power). However, they also pose unique challenges to operating systems, which traditionally assume homogeneous hardware. This paper presents AMPS, an operating system scheduler that efficiently supports both SMPand NUMA-style performance-asymmetric architectures. AMPS contains three components: asymmetry-aware load balancing, fastercore-first scheduling, and NUMA-aware migration. We have implemented AMPS in Linux kernel 2.6.16 and used CPU clock modulation to emulate performance asymmetry on an SMP and NUMA system. For various workloads, we show that AMPS achieves a median speedup of 1.16 with a maximum of 1.44 over stock Linux on the SMP, and a median of 1.07 with a maximum of 2.61 on the NUMA system. Our results also show that AMPS improves fairness and repeatability of application performance measurements. 1

A hybrid realtime scheduling approach for large-scale multicore platforms

We propose a hybrid approach for scheduling real-time tasks on large-scale multicore platforms with hierarchical shared caches. In this approach, a multicore platform is partitioned into clusters. Tasks are statically assigned to these clusters, and scheduled within each cluster using the preemptive global EDF scheduling algorithm. We show that this hybrid of partitioning and global scheduling performs better on large-scale platforms than either approach alone. We also determine the appropriate cluster size to achieve the best performance possible, given the characteristics of the task set to be supported

Soft Real-Time Scheduling on Performance Asymmetric Multicore Platforms ∗ Abstract

This paper discusses an approach for supporting soft realtime periodic tasks in Linux on performance asymmetric multicore platforms (AMPs). Such architectures consist of a large number of processing units on one or several chips, where each processing unit is capable of executing the same instruction set at a different performance level. We discuss deficiencies of Linux in supporting periodic real-time tasks, particularly when cores are asymmetric, and how such deficiencies were overcome. We also investigate how to provide good performance for non-real-time tasks in the presence of a real-time workload. We show that this can be done by using deferrable servers to explicitly reserve a share of each core for non-real-time tasks. This allows non-real-time tasks to have priority over real-time tasks when doing so will not cause timing requirements to be violated, thus improving non-real-time response times. Experiments show that even small deferrable servers can have a dramatic impact on non-real-time task performance.

Soft Real-Time Scheduling on Performance Asymmetric MulticorePlatforms *

1 Introduction In this paper, we discuss an approach for supporting softreal-time periodic tasks in Linux on performance asymmetric multicore platforms, or AMPs. Such architectures consist ofa large number of processing cores on one or several chips, all capable of executing the same instruction set; however,each core may exhibit substantially different levels of performance. Performance asymmetry is in contrast to functionalasymmetry, where each core has a different set of "capabilities " and tasks must be matched with cores possessing thecapabilities they need

Développement durable et chimie verte

National audienc

Développement durable et chimie verte

National audienc

Développement durable et chimie verte

National audienc