Serum Anti-Saccharomyces Cerevisiae Antibodies in Greek Patients with Behcet's Disease

We tested 59 Greek patients with Behcet's Disease (BD) for serum anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies. No increase of these antibodies was detected in the cases compared to 55 healthy unrelated blood donors from the same population. This finding is in contrast with the correlation between Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies and BD as reported in other populations. It seems that environmental factors may contribute to disease expression in different populations, producing different effects according to the individual's genetic predisposition. Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies do not seem to be of any significance in the Greek population

ECOSCALE: Reconfigurable Computing and Runtime System for Future Exascale Systems

In order to reach exascale performance, current HPC systems need to be improved. Simple hardware scaling is not a feasible solution due to the increasing utility costs and power consumption limitations. Apart from improvements in implementation technology, what is needed is to refine the HPC application development flow as well as the system architecture of future HPC systems. ECOSCALE tackles these challenges by proposing a scalable programming environment and architecture, aiming to substantially reduce energy consumption as well as data traffic and latency. ECOSCALE introduces a novel heterogeneous energy-efficient hierarchical architecture, as well as a hybrid many-core+OpenCL programming environment and runtime system. The ECOSCALE approach is hierarchical and is expected to scale well by partitioning the physical system into multiple independent Workers (i.e. compute nodes). Workers are interconnected in a tree-like fashion and define a contiguous global address space that can be viewed either as a set of partitions in a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS), or as a set of nodes hierarchically interconnected via an MPI protocol. To further increase energy efficiency, as well as to provide resilience, the Workers employ reconfigurable accelerators mapped into the virtual address space utilizing a dual stage System Memory Management Unit with coherent memory access. The architecture supports shared partitioned reconfigurable resources accessed by any Worker in a PGAS partition, as well as automated hardware synthesis of these resources from an OpenCL-based programming model

Use of the Minimum Spanning Tree Model for Molecular Epidemiological Investigation of a Nosocomial Outbreak of Hepatitis C Virus Infection

The minimum spanning tree (MST) model was applied to identify the history of transmission of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in an outbreak involving five children attending a pediatric oncology-hematology outpatient ward between 1992 and 2000. We collected blood samples from all children attending since 1992, all household contacts, and one health care worker positive for antibody to HCV (anti-HCV). HCV RNA detection was performed with these samples and with smears of routinely collected bone marrow samples. For all isolates, we performed sequence analysis and phylogenetic tree analysis of hypervariable region 1 of the E2 gene. The MST model was applied to clinical-epidemiological and molecular data. No additional cases were detected. All children, but not the health care worker, showed genotype 3a. On six occasions, all but one child had shared the medication room with another patient who later seroconverted. HCV RNA detection in bone marrow smears revealed, in some cases, a delay of several months in anti-HCV responses. Sequence analysis and phylogenetic tree analysis revealed a high identity among the isolates. The MST model applied to molecular data, together with the clinical-epidemiological data, allowed us to identify the source of the outbreak and the most probable patient-to-patient chain of transmission. The management of central venous catheters was suspected to be the probable route of transmission. In conclusion, the MST model, supported by an exhaustive clinical-epidemiological investigation, appears to be a useful tool in tracing the history of transmission in outbreaks of HCV infection

Serum Anti-Saccharomyces Cerevisiae Antibodies in Greek Patients with Behcet's Disease

We tested 59 Greek patients with Behcet’s Disease (BD) for serum anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies. No increase of these antibodies was detected in the cases compared to 55 healthy unrelated blood donors from the same population. This finding is in contrast with the correlation between Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies and BD as reported in other populations. It seems that environmental factors may contribute to disease expression in different populations, producing different effects according to the individual’s genetic predisposition. Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies do not seem to be of any significance in the Greek population

Increasing the trustworthiness of embedded applications

Embedded systems, by their nature, often run unattended with opportunistic rather then scheduled software upgrades and, perhaps most significantly, have long operational lifetimes, and, hence, provide excellent targets for massive and remote exploitation. Thus, such systems mandate higher assurances of trust and cyber-security compared to those presently available in State-of-the-Art ICT systems. In this poster we present some techniques we utilize in the SHARCS project to ensure a higher level of security for embedded systems

Secure hardware-software architectures for robust computing systems

The Horizon 2020 SHARCS project is a framework for designing, building and demonstrating secure-by-design applications and services, that achieve end-to-end security for their users. In this paper we present the basic elements of SHARCS that will provide a powerful foundation for designing and developing trustworthy, secure-by-design applications and services for the Future Internet