An Architecture for Scaling NVO Services to TeraGrid

The term "cyberinfrastructure" has been adopted by the US National Science Foundation to mean "advanced computing engines, data archives and digital libraries, observation and sensor systems, and other research and education instrumentation [linked] into a common framework". One of the largest awards in this program is the TeraGrid, a linkage of large supercomputer centers based on the Globus software. Another cyberinfrastructure program is the National Virtual Observatory, a linkage of astronomical data publishers into a service-oriented framework. There are different philosophies behind the TeraGrid and the NVO architecture. This note explains a proposed service-oriented architecture for TeraGrid nodes that is an attempt to bridge these ways of working, and a prototype instantiation at Caltech

Dan Burns, interviewed by Joe Hickey

Dan Burns enrolled at SUNY Brockport after graduating from high school in 1964, but dropped out after a year and a half. He then worked in a tin can factory, at a funeral home as an apprentice, and at an Ossabaw writers and artists colony as a maintenance worker, before returning to Brockport and completing his degree in History in 1979. He student taught in Rio de Janeiro through Brockport, then taught in an American school in Asuncion, Paraguay for four years. He then worked at the Lakeside hospital, Lakeside nursing home, and as environmental services director for the Mariette Corporation before retiring. As of the fall of 2019, he now volunteers at the link center at the Brockport community library and at the Emily Knapp museum, and takes classes at Brockport through the lifelong learning program

What Context Features Can Transformer Language Models Use?

Transformer-based language models benefit from conditioning on contexts of hundreds to thousands of previous tokens. What aspects of these contexts contribute to accurate model prediction? We describe a series of experiments that measure usable information by selectively ablating lexical and structural information in transformer language models trained on English Wikipedia. In both mid- and long-range contexts, we find that several extremely destructive context manipulations -- including shuffling word order within sentences and deleting all words other than nouns -- remove less than 15% of the usable information. Our results suggest that long contexts, but not their detailed syntactic and propositional content, are important for the low perplexity of current transformer language models.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, to be published at ACL 202

P6_4 Tee Off Into Space

Our aim in this paper was explore the possibility of hitting a gold ball into orbit around various objects inthe solar system by using the orbital velocity equation. We found this to be possible around four moons,four dwarf planet candidates and a trojan of Jupiter with masses greater than 10^18kg

P6_5 Matrioshka Brain

The Matrioshka brain is a hypothetical structure originally proposed by Robert Bradbury in 1999[1]. It consists of layers of Dyson spheres around a star, generating energy through solar panels, to power a supercomputer. In this paper we look at the amount of energy and thus computational power that could be obtained from a Matrioshka brain at our current level of technology and then go on to discuss how it would not be feasible to build said structure

Experimental and numerical investigation of residual stress effects on fatigue crack growth behaviour of S355 steel weldments

Fatigue crack growth tests have been conducted on S355 G10+M structural steel which is widely used in the fabrication of offshore structures. Fracture mechanics tests have been performed on compact tension specimens with the crack tip located in the heat affected zone. All tests were performed at room temperature in air and the obtained results are compared with the literature data available on a range of offshore structural steels and also the recommended BS7910 trends using the 2-stage law and simplified law. The specimen orientation, with respect to the location of the extraction within the welded plate, has also been examined and discussed in this work. Residual stress measurements have been performed prior to testing by using the neutron diffraction technique. Finally, a numerical model has been developed in order to calculate the effective stress intensity factor range in the presence of residual stresses. The results have shown that the residual stresses play a key role in the fatigue life of the welded structures, especially in the near threshold regio