2,672 research outputs found
Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling
Improving performance is a central concern for software developers. To locate
optimization opportunities, developers rely on software profilers. However,
these profilers only report where programs spent their time: optimizing that
code may have no impact on performance. Past profilers thus both waste
developer time and make it difficult for them to uncover significant
optimization opportunities.
This paper introduces causal profiling. Unlike past profiling approaches,
causal profiling indicates exactly where programmers should focus their
optimization efforts, and quantifies their potential impact. Causal profiling
works by running performance experiments during program execution. Each
experiment calculates the impact of any potential optimization by virtually
speeding up code: inserting pauses that slow down all other code running
concurrently. The key insight is that this slowdown has the same relative
effect as running that line faster, thus "virtually" speeding it up.
We present Coz, a causal profiler, which we evaluate on a range of
highly-tuned applications: Memcached, SQLite, and the PARSEC benchmark suite.
Coz identifies previously unknown optimization opportunities that are both
significant and targeted. Guided by Coz, we improve the performance of
Memcached by 9%, SQLite by 25%, and accelerate six PARSEC applications by as
much as 68%; in most cases, these optimizations involve modifying under 10
lines of code.Comment: Published at SOSP 2015 (Best Paper Award
Introduction to the special issue: challenges and opportunities in the fight against neglected tropical diseases: a decade from the London Declaration on NTDs
Twenty neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are currently prioritised by the World Health Organization for eradication, elimination as a public health problem, elimination of transmission or control by 2030. This issue celebrates progress made since the 2012 London Declaration on NTDs and discusses challenges currently faced to achieve these goals. It comprises 14 contributions spanning NTDs tackled by intensified disease management to those addressed by preventive chemotherapy. Although COVID-19 negatively affected NTD programmes, it also served to spur new multisectoral approaches to strengthen school-based health systems. The issue highlights the needs to improve impact survey design, evaluate new diagnostics, understand the consequences of heterogeneous prevalence and human movement, the potential impact of alternative treatment strategies and the importance of zoonotic transmission. This article is part of the theme issue 'Challenges and opportunities in the fight against neglected tropical diseases: a decade from the London Declaration on NTDs'
OPA1 mutations impair mitochondrial function in both pure and complicated dominant optic atrophy
Multiexcitons confined within a sub-excitonic volume: Spectroscopic and dynamical signatures of neutral and charged biexcitons in ultrasmall semiconductor nanocrystals
The use of ultrafast gating techniques allows us to resolve both spectrally
and temporally the emission from short-lived neutral and negatively charged
biexcitons in ultrasmall (sub-10 nm) CdSe nanocrystals (nanocrystal quantum
dots). Because of forced overlap of electronic wave functions and reduced
dielectric screening, these states are characterized by giant interaction
energies of tens (neutral biexcitons) to hundreds (charged biexcitons) of meV.
Both types of biexcitons show extremely short lifetimes (from sub-100
picoseconds to sub-picosecond time scales) that rapidly shorten with decreasing
nanocrystal size. These ultrafast relaxation dynamics are explained in terms of
highly efficient nonradiative Auger recombination.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.
Order statistics for d-dimensional diffusion processes
We present results for the ordered sequence of first passage times of arrival
of N random walkers at a boundary in Euclidean spaces of d dimensions
Transcriptomic analysis of field-droughted sorghum from seedling to maturity reveals biotic and metabolic responses.
Drought is the most important environmental stress limiting crop yields. The C4 cereal sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] is a critical food, forage, and emerging bioenergy crop that is notably drought-tolerant. We conducted a large-scale field experiment, imposing preflowering and postflowering drought stress on 2 genotypes of sorghum across a tightly resolved time series, from plant emergence to postanthesis, resulting in a dataset of nearly 400 transcriptomes. We observed a fast and global transcriptomic response in leaf and root tissues with clear temporal patterns, including modulation of well-known drought pathways. We also identified genotypic differences in core photosynthesis and reactive oxygen species scavenging pathways, highlighting possible mechanisms of drought tolerance and of the delayed senescence, characteristic of the stay-green phenotype. Finally, we discovered a large-scale depletion in the expression of genes critical to arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis, with a corresponding drop in AM fungal mass in the plants' roots
Assessing the efficiency of mother-to-child HIV prevention in low- and middle-income countries using data envelopment analysis
AIDS is one of the most significant health care problems worldwide. Due to the difficulty and costs involved in treating HIV, preventing infection is of paramount
importance in controlling the AIDS epidemic. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to establish international
comparisons on the efficiency of implementation of HIV prevention programmes. To do this we use data from 52 low- and middle-income countries regarding
the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Our results indicate that there is a remarkable variation in the efficiency of prevention services across nations,
suggesting that a better use of resources could lead to more and improved services, and ultimately, prevent the infection of thousands of children. These results also
demonstrate the potential strategic role of DEA for the efficient and effective planning of scarce resources to fight the epidemic
Principles of meiotic chromosome assembly revealed in S. cerevisiae
During meiotic prophase, chromosomes organise into a series of chromatin loops emanating from a proteinaceous axis, but the mechanisms of assembly remain unclear. Here we use Saccharomyces cerevisiae to explore how this elaborate three-dimensional chromosome organisation is linked to genomic sequence. As cells enter meiosis, we observe that strong cohesin-dependent grid-like Hi-C interaction patterns emerge, reminiscent of mammalian interphase organisation, but with distinct regulation. Meiotic patterns agree with simulations of loop extrusion with growth limited by barriers, in which a heterogeneous population of expanding loops develop along the chromosome. Importantly, CTCF, the factor that imposes similar features in mammalian interphase, is absent in S. cerevisiae, suggesting alternative mechanisms of barrier formation. While grid-like interactions emerge independently of meiotic chromosome synapsis, synapsis itself generates additional compaction that matures differentially according to telomere proximity and chromosome size. Collectively, our results elucidate fundamental principles of chromosome assembly and demonstrate the essential role of cohesin within this evolutionarily conserved process
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