AN5D: Automated Stencil Framework for High-Degree Temporal Blocking on GPUs

Stencil computation is one of the most widely-used compute patterns in high performance computing applications. Spatial and temporal blocking have been proposed to overcome the memory-bound nature of this type of computation by moving memory pressure from external memory to on-chip memory on GPUs. However, correctly implementing those optimizations while considering the complexity of the architecture and memory hierarchy of GPUs to achieve high performance is difficult. We propose AN5D, an automated stencil framework which is capable of automatically transforming and optimizing stencil patterns in a given C source code, and generating corresponding CUDA code. Parameter tuning in our framework is guided by our performance model. Our novel optimization strategy reduces shared memory and register pressure in comparison to existing implementations, allowing performance scaling up to a temporal blocking degree of 10. We achieve the highest performance reported so far for all evaluated stencil benchmarks on the state-of-the-art Tesla V100 GPU

A Case Report of Schwannoma Presenting as Sciatica

Background & aim: Schwannomas are benign and slowly growing nerve sheath tumors which are usually solitary and encapsulated. They may arise from any peripheral nerve containing Schwann cells including distal portions of cranial nerves. Here we are reporting a case of Schwannoma presenting as sciatica. Case: A 30 years old woman admitted as severe chronic right lower limb pain, her complain was sciatica with an irregular prominent 15*10 cm mass found on her right buttock. She had normal laboratory data and MRI demonstrated extra muscular mass in posterior of mid zone of right thigh that was iso-signal in T1W1 and hyper-signal in T2W2. The patient underwent operation and sciatic nerve explored via posterior tight and unique neural branch of mass dissociated of sciatic and mass resected. Pathology report confirmed Schwannoma in the patient. Conclusion: In patients with sciatic pain, schwannoma nerve is one of the differential diagnosis and it needs to be considered in assessing of patients