525 research outputs found
Reproducible and User-Controlled Software Environments in HPC with Guix
Support teams of high-performance computing (HPC) systems often find
themselves between a rock and a hard place: on one hand, they understandably
administrate these large systems in a conservative way, but on the other hand,
they try to satisfy their users by deploying up-to-date tool chains as well as
libraries and scientific software. HPC system users often have no guarantee
that they will be able to reproduce results at a later point in time, even on
the same system-software may have been upgraded, removed, or recompiled under
their feet, and they have little hope of being able to reproduce the same
software environment elsewhere. We present GNU Guix and the functional package
management paradigm and show how it can improve reproducibility and sharing
among researchers with representative use cases.Comment: 2nd International Workshop on Reproducibility in Parallel Computing
(RepPar), Aug 2015, Vienne, Austria. http://reppar.org
DEEP: a provenance-aware executable document system
The concept of executable documents is attracting growing interest from both academics and publishers since it is a promising technology for the dissemination of scientific results. Provenance is a kind of metadata that provides a rich description of the derivation history of data products starting from their original sources. It has been used in many different e-Science domains and has shown great potential in enabling reproducibility of scientific results. However, while both executable documents and provenance are aimed at enhancing the dissemination of scientific results, little has been done to explore the integration of both techniques. In this paper, we introduce the design and development of DEEP, an executable document environment that generates scientific results dynamically and interactively, and also records the provenance for these results in the document. In this system, provenance is exposed to users via an interface that provides them with an alternative way of navigating the executable document. In addition, we make use of the provenance to offer a document rollback facility to users and help to manage the system's dynamic resources
Full counting statistics of strongly non-Ohmic transport through single molecules
We study analytically the full counting statistics of charge transport
through single molecules, strongly coupled to a weakly damped vibrational mode.
The specifics of transport in this regime - a hierarchical sequence of
avalanches of transferred charges, interrupted by "quiet" periods - make the
counting statistics strongly non-Gaussian. We support our findings for the
counting statistics as well as for the frequency-dependent noise power by
numerical simulations, finding excellent agreement.Comment: 4+ pages, 2 figures; minor changes, version published in Phys. Rev.
Let
Quasi-localization and quasi-mobility edge for light atoms mixed with heavy ones
A mixture of light and heavy atoms is considered. We study the kinetics of
the light atoms, scattered by the heavy ones, the latter undergoing slow
diffusive motion. In three-dimensional space we claim the existence of a
crossover region (in energy), which separates the states of the light atoms
with fast diffusion and the states with slow diffusion; the latter is
determined by the dephasing time. For the two dimensional case we have a
transition between weak localization, observed when the dephasing length is
less than the localization length (calculated for static scatterers), and
strong localization observed in the opposite case.Comment: LaTeX, 5 pages, 3 figures. The manuscript has been changed following
the Referees' constructive criticism and is accepted for publication in EPJ
Quantum noise in current biased Josephson junction
Quantum fluctuations in a current biased Josephson junction, described in
terms of the RCSJ-model, are considered. The fluctuations of the voltage and
phase across the junction are assumed to be initiated by equilibrium current
fluctuations in the shunting resistor. This corresponds to low enough
temperatures, when fluctuations of the normal current in the junction itself
can be neglected. We used the quantum Langevin equation in terms of random
variables related to the limit cycle of the nonlinear Josephson oscillator.
This allows to go beyond the perturbation theory and calculate the widths of
the Josephson radiation lines
The effect of sampling effort and methodology on range size estimates of poorly-recorded species for IUCN Red List assessments
Geographic range size is the most commonly implemented criterion of species’ extinction risk used in IUCN Red List assessments, especially for poorly-recorded species. IUCN applies two contrasting range size measures to capture different facets of a species’ distribution: Extent of Occurrence (EOO; Criterion B1) is the area bounding all known occurrences and is a proxy for the spatial autocorrelation of risk, while the Area of Occupancy (AOO; Criterion B2) is the area occupied within this boundary and is related to population size at finer grains. Various methods have been proposed to measure both EOO and AOO. We evaluate the impact of applying four methods for each of Criterion B1 and of B2, as well as key parameter choices, on the Red List status of 227 poorly-recorded neotropical pteridophyte species. Between 2 and 100% of species would be considered threatened depending on methodology. The minimum convex polygon method of estimating EOO was relatively robust to sampling effort for all but the least-recorded species. The IUCN-recommended method for estimating AOO of summing occupied 2 × 2 km grid cells was very strongly correlated with the total number of records. It is likely that only a small fraction of species can be adequately assessed using this method, and we recommend caution applying the method to poorly-recorded species in particular, where models predicting occupancy in unsampled areas (e.g. species distribution models) may provide more accurate assessments. It is vital that methodological information is retained with assessments, and comparisons should only be made between assessments utilising equivalent methods
Spin effects in Bose-Glass phases
We study the mechanism of formation of Bose glass (BG) phases in the spin-1
Bose Hubbard model when diagonal disorder is introduced. To this aim, we
analyze first the phase diagram in the zero-hopping limit, there disorder
induces superposition between Mott insulator (MI) phases with different filling
numbers. Then BG appears as a compressible but still insulating phase. The
phase diagram for finite hopping is also calculated with the Gutzwiller
approximation. The bosons' spin degree of freedom introduces another scattering
channel in the two-body interaction modifying the stability of MI regions with
respect to the action of disorder. This leads to some peculiar phenomena such
as the creation of BG of singlets, for very strong spin correlation, or the
disappearance of BG phase in some particular cases where fluctuations are not
able to mix different MI regions
Decoherence in Disordered Conductors at Low Temperatures, the effect of Soft Local Excitations
The conduction electrons' dephasing rate, , is expected to
vanish with the temperature. A very intriguing apparent saturation of this
dephasing rate in several systems was recently reported at very low
temperatures. The suggestion that this represents dephasing by zero-point
fluctuations has generated both theoretical and experimental controversies. We
start by proving that the dephasing rate must vanish at the limit,
unless a large ground state degeneracy exists. This thermodynamic proof
includes most systems of relevance and it is valid for any determination of
from {\em linear} transport measurements. In fact, our
experiments demonstrate unequivocally that indeed when strictly linear
transport is used, the apparent low-temperature saturation of is
eliminated. However, the conditions to be in the linear transport regime are
more strict than hitherto expected. Another novel result of the experiments is
that introducing heavy nonmagnetic impurities (gold) in our samples produces,
even in linear transport, a shoulder in the dephasing rate at very low
temperatures. We then show theoretically that low-lying local defects may
produce a relatively large dephasing rate at low temperatures. However, as
expected, this rate in fact vanishes when , in agreement with our
experimental observations.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the Euresco Conference on Fundamental
Problems of Mesoscopic Physics, Granada, September 2003, Kluwe
Relative and Absolute Risk to Guide the Management of Pulse Pressure, an Age-Related Cardiovascular Risk Factor
BACKGROUND Pulse pressure (PP) reflects the age-related stiffening of the central arteries, but no study addressed the management of the PP-related risk over the human lifespan.
METHODS In 4663 young (18-49 years) and 7185 older adults (≥50 years), brachial PP was recorded over 24-hour. Total mortality and all major cardiovascular events combined (MACE) were co-primary endpoints. Cardiovascular death, coronary events and stroke were secondary endpoints.
RESULTS In young adults (median follow-up, 14.1 years; mean PP, 45.1 mmHg), greater PP was not associated with absolute risk; the endpoint rates were ≤2.01 per 1000 person-years. The adjusted hazard ratios expressed per 10-mmHg PP increments were less than unity (P≤0.027) for MACE (0.67; 95% CI, 0.47-0.96) and cardiovascular death (0.33; 95% CI, 0.11-0.75). In older adults (median follow-up, 13.1 years; mean PP, 52.7 mmHg), the endpoint rates, expressing absolute risk, ranged from 22.5 to 45.4 per 1000 person-years and the adjusted hazard ratios, reflecting relative risk, from 1.09 to 1.54 (P3-fold from age 55 to 75 years, whereas absolute risk rose by a factor 3.
CONCLUSIONS From 50 years onwards, the PP-related relative risk decreases, whereas absolute risk increases. From a lifecourse perspective, young adulthood provides a window of opportunity to manage risk factors and prevent target organ damage as forerunner of premature death and MACE. In older adults, treatment should address absolute risk, thereby extending life in years and qualit
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