On-Line Instruction-checking in Pipelined Microprocessors

Microprocessors performances have increased by more than five orders of magnitude in the last three decades. As technology scales down, these components become inherently unreliable posing major design and test challenges. This paper proposes an instruction-checking architecture to detect erroneous instruction executions caused by both permanent and transient errors in the internal logic of a microprocessor. Monitoring the correct activation sequence of a set of predefined microprocessor control/status signals allow distinguishing between correctly and not correctly executed instruction

Aging under Shear: Structural Relaxation of a Non-Newtonian Fluid

The influence of an applied shear field on the dynamics of an aging colloidal suspension has been investigated by the dynamic light scattering determination of the density autocorrelation function. Though a stationary state is never observed, the slow dynamics crosses between two different non-equilibrium regimes as soon as the structural relaxation time approaches the inverse shear rate. In the shear dominated regime (at high shear rate values) the structural relaxation time is found to be strongly sensitive to shear rate while aging proceeds at a very slow rate. The effect of shear on the detailed shape of the density autocorrelation function is quantitatively described assuming that the structural relaxation process arises from the heterogeneous superposition of many relaxing units each one independently coupled to shear with a parallel composition rule for timescales.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Colloidal attraction induced by a temperature gradient

Colloidal crystals are of extreme importance for applied research, such as photonic crystals technology, and for fundamental studies in statistical mechanics. Long range attractive interactions, such as capillary forces, can drive the spontaneous assembly of such mesoscopic ordered structures. However long range attractive forces are very rare in the colloidal realm. Here we report a novel strong and long ranged attraction induced by a thermal gradient in the presence of a wall. Switching on and off the thermal gradient we can rapidly and reversibly form stable hexagonal 2D crystals. We show that the observed attraction is hydrodynamic in nature and arises from thermal induced slip flow on particle surfaces. We used optical tweezers to directly measure the force law and compare it to an analytic prediction based on Stokes flow driven by Marangoni forces.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Solid-liquid equilibria for the dimethyl ether plus carbon dioxide binary system

A recently built experimental setup was employed for the estimation of the solid-liquid equilibria of alternative refrigerants systems. The behavior of dimethyl ether (DME) + carbon dioxide was measured down to temperatures of 131.6 K. To confirm the reliability of the apparatus, the triple point of the DME was measured. The triple point data measured revealed a good consistency with the literature. The results obtained for the mixtures were corrected by the Rossini method and interpreted by means of the Schröder equation. © 2010 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary

Exploiting low-cost 3D imagery for the purposes of detecting and analyzing pavement distresses

Road pavement conditions have significant impacts on safety, travel times, costs, and environmental effects. It is the responsibility of road agencies to ensure these conditions are kept in an acceptable state. To this end, agencies are tasked with implementing pavement management systems (PMSs) which effectively allocate resources towards maintenance and rehabilitation. These systems, however, require accurate data. Currently, most agencies rely on manual distress surveys and as a result, there is significant research into quick and low-cost pavement distress identification methods. Recent proposals have included the use of structure-from-motion techniques based on datasets from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and cameras, producing accurate 3D models and associated point clouds. The challenge with these datasets is then identifying and describing distresses. This paper focuses on utilizing images of pavement distresses in the city of Palermo, Italy produced by mobile phone cameras. The work aims at assessing the accuracy of using mobile phones for these surveys and also identifying strategies to segment generated 3D imagery by considering the use of algorithms for 3D Image segmentation to detect shapes from point clouds to enable measurement of physical parameters and severity assessment. Case studies are considered for pavement distresses defined by the measurement of the area affected such as different types of cracking and depressions. The use of mobile phones and the identification of these patterns on the 3D models provide further steps towards low-cost data acquisition and analysis for a PMS

Methodologies for self-organising systems:a SPEM approach

We define ’SPEM fragments’ of five methods for developing self-organising multi-agent systems. Self-organising traffic lights controllers provide an application scenario

Space-time symmetry restoration in cosmological models with Kalb--Ramond and scalar fields

We study symmetry of space-time in presence of a minimally coupled scalar field interacting with a Kalb--Ramond tensor fields in a homogeneous but initially anisotropic universe. The analysis is performed for the two relevant cases of a pure cosmological constant and a minimal quadratic, renormalizable, interaction term. In both cases, due to expansion, a complete spatial symmetry restoration is dynamically obtained.Comment: Latex, 7 pages, 3 eps figure