California\u27s Domestic Partnership Law: Incremental Progress or Dramatic Social Change?

Effective January 1, 2005, the California Domestic Partner Rights and Responsibilities Act of 2003 (CDPRRA) replaced the Domestic Partnership Act of 1999, vesting registered domestic partners with new rights and a court termination procedure similar to divorce. Does the new statute legalize gay marriage? Are domestic partners eligible for spousal support? Are the registration and termination procedures voluntary? Does the Unruh Civil Rights Act now require businesses and private organizations to include gay members? The article reviews the new law and analyzes how three recent court decisions resolve these controversial issues

The Influence of Feeding Level on Growth Performances of European Catfish (Silurus glanis L., 1758) Juveniles under Recirculating Water Conditions

The study was carried out with one summer-old Silurus glanis juveniles, having the mean size 23.04±2.05 cm and weight 73.84±19.12 g, reared in recirculating water condition, in order to assess the impact of feeding level on growth performances and body size variation of fish. Two feeding levels were tested (R1=1.5% BW/day and R2=2.5% BW/day), in duplicate, during 6 weeks, and the biomass gain (BG), feed conversion ratio (FCR), specific growth rate (SGR), protein efficiency ratio (PER), morphometric relationship between length-weight (LWR) and coefficient of variation (CV) were assessed. Data revealed that the overall mean weight of the biomass was doubled during the trial, from 14.92 kg to 31.17 kg, and the body growth significantly increases with the increment of the feeding rate (13.48 kg in R1 and 17.70 kg in R2), underlying the good potential of the species, at this life stage, for fast-growing under intense conditions. The calculated SGR in R1 was 1.43%/day and in R2, significantly higher, as 2.05 %/day, for the almost similar values of FCR (0.74 g/g) and PER (2.50 g/g) recorded between the treatments

Asynchronous In Situ Processing with Gromacs: Taking Advantage of GPUs

International audienceNumerical simulations using supercomputers are producing an ever growing amount of data. Efficient production and analysis of these data are the key to future discoveries. The in situ paradigm is emerging as a promising solution to avoid the I/O bottleneck encountered in the file system for both the simulation and the analytics by treating the data as soon as they are produced in memory. Various strategies and implementations have been proposed in the last years to support in situ treatments with a low impact on the simulation performance. Yet, little efforts have been made when it comes to perform in situ analytics with hybrid simulations supporting accelerators like GPUs. In this article, we propose a study of the in situ strategies with Gromacs, a molecular dynamic simulation code supporting multi-GPUs, as our application target. We specifically focus on the computational resources usage of the machine by the simulation and the in situ analytics. We finally extend the usual in situ placement strategies to the case of in situ analytics running on a GPU and study their impact on both Gromacs performance and the resource usage of the machine. We show in particular that running in situ analytics on the GPU can be a more efficient solution than on the CPU especially when the CPU is the bottleneck of the simulation

Distributed computing practice for large-scale science and engineering applications

It is generally accepted that the ability to develop large-scale distributed applications has lagged seriously behind other developments in cyberinfrastructure. In this paper, we provide insight into how such applications have been developed and an understanding of why developing applications for distributed infrastructure is hard. Our approach is unique in the sense that it is centered around half a dozen existing scientific applications; we posit that these scientific applications are representative of the characteristics, requirements, as well as the challenges of the bulk of current distributed applications on production cyberinfrastructure (such as the US TeraGrid). We provide a novel and comprehensive analysis of such distributed scientific applications. Specifically, we survey existing models and methods for large-scale distributed applications and identify commonalities, recurring structures, patterns and abstractions. We find that there are many ad hoc solutions employed to develop and execute distributed applications, which result in a lack of generality and the inability of distributed applications to be extensible and independent of infrastructure details. In our analysis, we introduce the notion of application vectors: a novel way of understanding the structure of distributed applications. Important contributions of this paper include identifying patterns that are derived from a wide range of real distributed applications, as well as an integrated approach to analyzing applications, programming systems and patterns, resulting in the ability to provide a critical assessment of the current practice of developing, deploying and executing distributed applications. Gaps and omissions in the state of the art are identified, and directions for future research are outlined

Effect of starvation and re-feeding with different dietary protein level on some hematological parameters of juvenile rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus Mykiss, Walbaum, 1792)

The aim of this experiment was to analyze the effect of applying of cyclical short periods of starvation (2 days and 4 days) on the hematological profile of rainbow trout. This experiment lasted for 46 days and was carried out in the facility of the University “Dunărea de Jos” from Galaţi. Six treatments with duplicate were assigned, as follows: two control groups, feed daily, ad libitum, with commercial pellets containing 41% crude protein (D41) and 50% crude protein (D50); two groups starved for 2 days (D2) and then fed with commercial pellets with 41% crude protein (D2/41), respectively 50% crude protein (D2/50) and two groups starved for 4 days (D4) and then fed with commercial pellets with 41% crude protein (D4/41), respectively 50% crude protein (D4/50). Starvation and re-feeding with different dietary protein level had no significant (p˃0.05) effect on some hematological parameters including hematocrit, mean corpuscular volume, mean corpuscular hemoglobin, while hemoglobin, Red blood cell counts and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration, registered significant differences (p˂0.05). Significantly higher (p˂0.05) concentration of hemoglobin was observed in the case of fish fed with higher protein content, while the increasing of the starvation period led to a significant decrease of the hemoglobin concentration. Furthermore, starvation and subsequent feeding led to a significant decrease of the erythrocyte number with the increasing of the starvation period

Parallel in situ indexing for data-intensive computing

As computing power increases exponentially, vast amount of data is created by many scientific re- search activities. However, the bandwidth for storing the data to disks and reading the data from disks has been improving at a much slower pace. These two trends produce an ever-widening data access gap. Our work brings together two distinct technologies to address this data access issue: indexing and in situ processing. From decades of database research literature, we know that indexing is an effective way to address the data access issue, particularly for accessing relatively small fraction of data records. As data sets increase in sizes, more and more analysts need to use selective data access, which makes indexing an even more important for improving data access. The challenge is that most implementations of in- dexing technology are embedded in large database management systems (DBMS), but most scientific datasets are not managed by any DBMS. In this work, we choose to include indexes with the scientific data instead of requiring the data to be loaded into a DBMS. We use compressed bitmap indexes from the FastBit software which are known to be highly effective for query-intensive workloads common to scientific data analysis. To use the indexes, we need to build them first. The index building procedure needs to access the whole data set and may also require a significant amount of compute time. In this work, we adapt the in situ processing technology to generate the indexes, thus removing the need of read- ing data from disks and to build indexes in parallel. The in situ data processing system used is ADIOS, a middleware for high-performance I/O. Our experimental results show that the indexes can improve the data access time up to 200 times depending on the fraction of data selected, and using in situ data processing system can effectively reduce the time needed to create the indexes, up to 10 times with our in situ technique when using identical parallel settings

Toward a first-principles integrated simulation of tokamak edge plasmas

Performance of the ITER is anticipated to be highly sensitive to the edge plasma condition. The edge pedestal in ITER needs to be predicted from an integrated simulation of the necessary first-principles, multi-scale physics codes. The mission of the SciDAC Fusion Simulation Project (FSP) Prototype Center for Plasma Edge Simulation (CPES) is to deliver such a code integration framework by (1) building new kinetic codes XGC0 and XGC1, which can simulate the edge pedestal buildup; (2) using and improving the existing MHD codes ELITE, M3D-OMP, M3D-MPP and NIMROD, for study of large-scale edge instabilities called Edge Localized Modes (ELMs); and (3) integrating the codes into a framework using cutting-edge computer science technology. Collaborative effort among physics, computer science, and applied mathematics within CPES has created the first working version of the End-to-end Framework for Fusion Integrated Simulation (EFFIS), which can be used to study the pedestal-ELM cycles