Neuromatch Academy: a 3-week, online summer school in computational neuroscience

Neuromatch Academy (https://academy.neuromatch.io; (van Viegen et al., 2021)) was designed as an online summer school to cover the basics of computational neuroscience in three weeks. The materials cover dominant and emerging computational neuroscience tools, how they complement one another, and specifically focus on how they can help us to better understand how the brain functions. An original component of the materials is its focus on modeling choices, i.e. how do we choose the right approach, how do we build models, and how can we evaluate models to determine if they provide real (meaningful) insight. This meta-modeling component of the instructional materials asks what questions can be answered by different techniques, and how to apply them meaningfully to get insight about brain function

Scout: A path-based operating system

Scout is a new operating system architecture that is designed specifically to accommodate the needs of communication-centric systems. An important class of such systems is formed by information appliances, which, broadly speaking, are devices whose primary task is to facilitate communication. Appliances are typically relatively small, special-purpose, and often mobile devices such as remote controls, personal information managers, network-attached disks, cameras, displays, or dedicated file-servers. Scout has a modular structure that is complemented by a new abstraction called the path. The modular structure enables the efficient building of systems that are tailored precisely to the requirements of a particular appliance. Paths address issues related to the performance and quality with which a communication service is rendered. A path can be visualized as a vertical slice through a layered system or viewed abstractly as a bidirectional flow of data. As such, a path typically traverses multiple modules in a Scout system. This means that paths provide additional context to the modules that process data that is being communicated through the system. This context often makes it possible to implement data processing more efficiently or to improve the quality with which resource management, such as CPU scheduling or memory allocation, is realized. This dissertation develops the path abstraction from first principles and then introduces the various aspects of the Scout architecture. Aside from the path abstraction, Scout uses a novel approach for network packet classification. With the Scout architecture defined, two studies are presented that provide an in-depth look at how to use Scout and its path abstraction. The first study employs the path abstraction to reduce processing latency in the networking subsystem. Evaluating these path optimizations also provides important insights on the performance behavior of networking subsystems on modern RISC machines. The second study employs the path abstraction to improve resource management for an information appliance that involves a networked TV displaying MPEG encoded video

Memory Consistency Models

This paper discusses memory consistency models and their influence on software in the context of parallel machines. In the first part we review previous work on memory consistency models. The second part discusses the issues that arise due to weakening memory consistency. We are especially interested in the influence that weakened consistency models have on language, compiler, and runtime system design. We conclude that tighter interaction between those parts and the memory system might improve performance considerably

Linux, kernel, IA64,

The IA-64 architecture co-developed by HP and Intel is going to reach market in the second half of 2000 with Itanium as its first implementation. All the major industry players have endorsed this architecture and nowadays most of the specifications are public. To provide for early availability of Linux on this platform, the port started over two years ago at HP Labs and grew to become an industry wide effort. A major milestone was reached earlier this year, when the entire source code produced to support this new platform was released to the Open Source community. In this paper, we describe some of the key system architecture features of IA-64 and the major machine dependent kernel subsystems. We also give a brief update on the application level developments including the software development kit for Linux/ia32 recently released. ∗ Internal Accession Date Only Approved for External Publicatio