Closing the gap? Military co-operation from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. OSW Report, December 2012

The contracting defence budgets in Europe, the difficulties in developing the EU’s security policy, NATO's transformation, the reorientation of US security policy and the problems experienced by European defence industries – all together have in recent years created an increased interest in political, military and military-technological co-operation in Europe.It has manifested itself in concepts of closer co-operation within NATO and the EU (smart defence and pooling&sharing), bilateral and multilateral initiatives outside the structures of NATO and the EU (such as the Nordic Defence Co-operation or the Franco-British co-operation) and debates about the prerequisites, principles and objectives of bilateral, multilateral and regional security and defence co-operation. The present report aims to analyse the potential for security and defence co-operation among selected countries in the area between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, i.e. the Nordic states (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden), the Baltic states (Lithuania Latvia and Estonia), Poland's partners in the Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia) as well as Romania and Bulgaria. The authors were guided by the assumption that those states are Poland's natural partners for closer regional military co-operation. It may complement ‘the Western’ direction of Poland's security and defence policy, i.e. relations with the partners from the Weimar Triangle and the US. Its goal is not to replace the existing security structures but rather to strengthen military capabilities in the region within NATO and the EU

High-Performance Lightweight HLS Generator Module of Normally Distributed Random Numbers in FPGAs

This paper focuses on the problem of high-performance streaming random number generation in the range of uniform and normal distributions in FPGAs. Our work is focused on lightweight implementation, suitable for a wide range of FPGAs. First, we review the existing types of random generation modules. Next, in this paper we present the construction of the designed generator. We divide it into two sections: Stream Uniform Numbers Generator Implementation and Cumulative Distribution-Based Stream Gaussian Generator. Each design step was verified in the scope of the quality of the output data, especially regarding the produced distributions. The results obtained are compared with existing solutions. We mainly consider resource utilization and throughput. We also add our quality factor, which is an effective utilization of FPGAs. Despite quality results, our modules were implemented using a high-level synthesis language (C/C++), contrary to typical hardware description level (HDL) approaches. It provides the opportunity to implement the proposed algorithms on CPUs. It was tested with positive results, thus highlighting the versatility of the solution that is unavailable in terms of HDL implementations. Our designed generators were confirmed to stand out for their satisfactory performance while occupying low logical resources

New results on light nuclei, hyperons and hypernuclei from HADES (HADES collaboration)

International audienceIn March 2019 the HADES experiment recorded 14 billion Ag+Ag collisions at √sNN = 2.55 GeV as a part of the FAIR phase-0 physics program. In this contribution, we present and investigate our capabilities to reconstruct and analyze weakly decaying strange hadrons and hypernuclei emerging from these collisions. The focus is put on measuring the mean lifetimes of these particles