Coarse-grain Load Distribution in Heterogeneous Computing

HPC heterogeneous clusters are composed by different type of machines (various types of component manufacturers, varying computational capacities), and different hardware accelerators. TThe most common type of data distributions is the equal division of the data across all the nodes. A more sophisticated policy of data distribution is needed to explode the computational capacity of the entire system

TuCCompi: a multi-layer model for distributed heterogeneous computing with tuning capabilities

Producción CientíficaDuring the last decade, parallel processing architectures have become a powerful tool to deal with massively-parallel problems that require High Performance Computing (HPC). The last trend of HPC is the use of heterogeneous environments, that combine different computational processing devices, such as CPU-cores and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). Maximizing the performance of any GPU parallel implementation of an algorithm requires an in-depth knowledge about the GPU underlying architecture, becoming a tedious manual effort only suited for experienced programmers. In this paper, we present TuCCompi, a multi-layer abstract model that simplifies the programming on heterogeneous systems including hardware accelerators, by hiding the details of synchronization, deployment, and tuning. TuCCompi chooses optimal values for their configuration parameters using a kernel characterization provided by the programmer. This model is very useful to tackle problems characterized by independent, high computational-load independent tasks, such as embarrassingly-parallel problems. We have evaluated TuCCompi in different, real-world, heterogeneous environments using the All-Pair Shortest-Path problem as a case study.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and ERDF program of the European Union: CAPAP-H5 network (TIN2014-53522-REDT), MOGECOPP project (TIN2011-25639); Junta de Castilla y Leon (Spain): ATLAS project (VA172A12-2); and the COST Program Action IC1305: NESUS

rte con R:reciclar, reparar y reinventar. La visión creativa del arte sostenible.

El cambio climático es la mayor amenaza medioambiental a la que se enfrenta la humanidad y, por lo tanto, tiene un impacto potencial que nos afecta a todos/as irrumpiendo así en todos los ámbitos de la sociedad, incluida la educación. Así pues, diversos investigadores y educadores ambientales tienen como objetivo ayudar a los jóvenes a entender y abordar las consecuencias del calentamiento del planeta, alentarles a modificar sus actitudes y conductas, y ayudarlos a adaptarse a las tendencias vinculadas al cambio climático. Uno de los cambios cotidianos que podemos llevar a cabo es informar y educar a los demás, sobre todo a través del papel docente en la educación. Dada la importancia que tiene el reciclaje dentro del cambio climático, se presenta un Trabajo de Fin de Máster (TFM) comprendido en la modalidad A en el que se plantean dos actividades relacionadas entre sí: un Proyecto de Innovación Docente y una Actividad de Aula. Estos dos elementos tienen como punto de partida la concienciación sobre cambio climático junto con la utilización del reciclaje y los recursos ecológicos a través del arte sostenible. Ambos elementos están dirigidos a la asignatura de Educación Plástica, Visual y Audiovisual de 1o de la ESO en el Colegio Nuestra Señora del Pilar Salesianos, Zaragoza.Se espera que, tras este Proyecto de Innovación Docente, el alumnado sea capaz de entender y aprender las consecuencias del calentamiento global y aumentar los conocimientos básicos sobre el clima entre los jóvenes, todo ello a través del arte. Específicamente, se trabajarán los siguientes aspectos: realizar composiciones con métodos creativos, experimentar texturas con finalidad expresiva, identificar el proceso de percepción de imágenes, así como identificar y analizar la iconicidad de las imágenes, los diferentes lenguajes visuales y los diferentes elementos de comunicación. Por su parte, la Actividad de Aula se llevará a cabo gracias a la interdisciplinariedad de las asignaturas de Educación Física y Biología y Geología, cuyos contenidos curriculares se combinan para lograr que los alumnos realicen sus propias creaciones artísticas, efectúen producciones con finalidades expresivas, comunicativas o ilustrativas y las muestren al público.Todo esto se llevará a cabo para introducir el fenómeno del cambio climático y dinamizar este proceso de manera lúdica y responsable, concienciando al alumnado y, a su vez, enseñándolesa cooperar con otras personas, participando en actividades de grupo con flexibilidad y responsabilidad.<br /

Neurotoxicity and endocrine disruption caused by polystyrene nanoparticles in zebrafish embryo

Nanoplastics (NP) are present in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Humans can be exposed to them through contaminated water, food, air, or personal care products. Mechanisms of NP toxicity are largely unknown and the Zebrafish embryo poses an ideal model to investigate them due to its high homology with humans. Our objective in the present study was to combine a battery of behavioral assays with the study of endocrine related gene expression, to further explore potential NP neurotoxic effects on animal behavior. Polystyrene nanoplastics (PSNP) were used to evaluate NP toxicity. Our neurobehavioral profiles include a tail coiling assay, a light/dark activity assay, two thigmotaxis anxiety assays (auditory and visual stimuli), and a startle response - habituation assay in response to auditory stimuli. Results show PSNP accumulated in eyes, neuromasts, brain, and digestive system organs. PSNP inhibited acetylcholinesterase and altered endocrine-related gene expression profiles both in the thyroid and glucocorticoid axes. At the whole organism level, we observed altered behaviors such as increased activity and anxiety at lower doses and lethargy at a higher dose, which could be due to a variety of complex mechanisms ranging from sensory organ and central nervous system effects to others such as hormonal imbalances. In addition, we present a hypothetical adverse outcome pathway related to these effects. In conclusion, this study provides new understanding into NP toxic effects on zebrafish embryo, emphasizing a critical role of endocrine disruption in observed neurotoxic behavioral effects, and improving our understanding of their potential health risks to human populations.This work was supported by the Joint Research Institute IMIENS (Grant Number: IMIENS-2020-001-PIC), and the Spanish Government (Grant Number: PID2021-125948OB-I00 from MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE to ADV).S

EPSILOD: efficient parallel skeleton for generic iterative stencil computations in distributed GPUs

Producción CientíficaIterative stencil computations are widely used in numerical simulations. They present a high degree of parallelism, high locality and mostly-coalesced memory access patterns. Therefore, GPUs are good candidates to speed up their computa- tion. However, the development of stencil programs that can work with huge grids in distributed systems with multiple GPUs is not straightforward, since it requires solv- ing problems related to the partition of the grid across nodes and devices, and the synchronization and data movement across remote GPUs. In this work, we present EPSILOD, a high-productivity parallel programming skeleton for iterative stencil computations on distributed multi-GPUs, of the same or different vendors that sup- ports any type of n-dimensional geometric stencils of any order. It uses an abstract specification of the stencil pattern (neighbors and weights) to internally derive the data partition, synchronizations and communications. Computation is split to better overlap with communications. This paper describes the underlying architecture of EPSILOD, its main components, and presents an experimental evaluation to show the benefits of our approach, including a comparison with another state-of-the-art solution. The experimental results show that EPSILOD is faster and shows good strong and weak scalability for platforms with both homogeneous and heterogene- ous types of GPUJunta de Castilla y León, Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, y Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER): Proyecto PCAS (TIN2017-88614-R) y Proyecto PROPHET-2 (VA226P20).Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Agencia Estatal de Investigación y “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR” : (MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033) - grant TED2021-130367B-I00CTE-POWER and Minotauro and the technical support provided by Barcelona Supercomputing Center (RES-IM-2021-2-0005, RES-IM-2021-3-0024, RES- IM-2022-1-0014).Publicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCL

Biodegradación de los componentes de mayor impacto en la gasolina

El benceno, tolueno, etilbenceno y la mezcla de xilenos (BTEX), junto con éter metil tert-butílico (EMTB) son compuestos orgánicos volátiles, estos junto con el etanol comúnmente son encontrados en sitios contaminados con gasolinas. En este estudio se evaluó la biodegradación de estos contaminantes mediante consorcios microbianos aclimatados a diferentes sustratos (diesel, gasolina, EMTB, pentano y pentano-EMTB) en sistemas aerobios de lote y de biopelícula de flujo continuo. A partir de éste ultimo sistema se lograron los máximos porcentajes de biodegradación que fueron casi de 100% para cada uno de los BTEX y etanol; y de 67.76% para el EMTB, a un tiempo de retención hidráulico de doce horas

Supporting efficient overlapping of host-device operations for heterogeneous programming with CtrlEvents

Producción CientíficaHeterogeneous systems with several kinds of devices, such as multi-core CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, among others, are now commonplace. Exploiting all these devices with device-oriented programming models, such as CUDA or OpenCL, requires expertise and knowledge about the underlying hardware to tailor the application to each specific device, thus degrading performance portability. Higher-level proposals simplify the programming of these devices, but their current implementations do not have an efficient support to solve problems that include frequent bursts of computation and communication, or input/output operations. In this work we present CtrlEvents, a new heterogeneous runtime solution which automatically overlaps computation and communication whenever possible, simplifying and improving the efficiency of data-dependency analysis and the coordination of both device computations and host tasks that include generic I/O operations. Our solution outperforms other state-of-the-art implementations for most situations, presenting a good balance between portability, programmability and efficiency.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación - FEDER (TIN2017-88614-R)Junta de Castilla y León (VA226P20)Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación - AEI and European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR (TED2021–130367B–I00 and MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033

Variability management in process families through change patterns

© 2016. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Context: The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems together with the high variability in business processes has resulted in collections of process families. These families correspond to a business process model and its variants, which can comprise hundreds or thousands of different ways of realizing this process. Managing process variability in this context can be very challenging, labor-intensive, and error-prone, and new approaches for managing process families are necessary. Objective: We aim to facilitate variability management in process families, ensure process family correctness, and reduce the effort needed for such purposes. Method: We have derived a set of change patterns for process families from variability-specific language constructs identified in the literature. For validation, we have conducted a case study with a safety standard in which we have measured the number of operations needed to model and evolve the variability of the standard with and without the patterns. Results: We present 10 change patterns for managing variability in process families and show how they can be implemented. The patterns support the modeling and evolution of process families and ensure process family correctness by automatically introducing and deleting modeling elements. The case study results show that the application of the defined change patterns can reduce the number of operations when modeling a process family by 34% and when evolving it by 40%. Conclusions: The application of the change patterns can help in effectively modeling and evolving large and highly-variable process families. Their application can also considerably reduce variability management effort. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been developed with the financial support of Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the project SMART-ADAPT TIN2013-42981-P. We also want to thank Barbara Weber and Manfred Reichert for their valuable input and feedback on the design and development of the set of change patterns for process families.Ayora Esteras, C.; Torres Bosch, MV.; De La Vara González, JL.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2016). Variability management in process families through change patterns. Information and Software Technology. 74:86-104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2016.01.007S861047

Assessing amphiphilic ABAB Zn(II) phthalocyanines with enhanced photosensitization abilities in in vitro photodynamic therapy studies against cancer

We have previously demonstrated that singlet oxygen photosensitization abilities of Zn(II) phthalocyanines (Zn(II)Pcs) are enhanced through α-functionalization with bulky fluorinated substituents (i.e., bis(trifluoromethyl)phenyl units) at facing positions of ABAB Zn(II)Pcs, where A and B refer to differently functionalized isoindoles. In this work, we have prepared the Zn(II)Pc ABAB 1 endowed with hydrophilic triethylene glycol monomethyl ether (i.e., at the A isoindoles) to provide solubility in aqueous media, together with its A3B and A4 counterparts, and compared their ability to behave as photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy. All photophysical data, aggregation studies and preliminary in vitro biological assays in cell cultures of SCC-13 (squamous cell carcinoma) and HeLa (cervical cancer cells), have proved ABAB 1 as the best photosensitizer of the seriesThis research was funded by MINECO, Spain (CTQ2017-85393-P and CTQ2016-78454-C2-1-R) , Instituto de Salud Carlos III and Feder Funds (FIS PI18/00708) and ERANET/MINECO EuroNanoMe