3,754 research outputs found
Probable solar flare doses encountered on an interplanetary mission as calculated by the MCFLARE code
The computer program, MCFLARE, uses Monte Carlo methods to simulate solar flare occurrences during an interplanetary space voyage. The total biological dose inside a shielded crew compartment due to the flares encountered during the voyage is determined. The computer program evaluates the doses obtained on a large number of trips having identical trajectories. From these results, a dose D sub p having a probability p of not being exceeded during the voyage can be determined as a function of p for any shield material configuration. To illustrate the use of the code, a trip to Mars and return is calculated, and estimated doses behind several thicknesses of aluminum shield and water shield are presented
Generalized Fock spaces and the Stirling numbers
The Bargmann-Fock-Segal space plays an important role in mathematical
physics, and has been extended into a number of directions. In the present
paper we imbed this space into a Gelfand triple. The spaces forming the
Fr\'echet part (i.e. the space of test functions) of the triple are
characterized both in a geometric way and in terms of the adjoint of
multiplication by the complex variable, using the Stirling numbers of the
second kind. The dual of the space of test functions has a topological algebra
structure, of the kind introduced and studied by the first named author and G.
Salomon.Comment: revised versio
Statistical Mechanics of Steiner trees
The Minimum Weight Steiner Tree (MST) is an important combinatorial
optimization problem over networks that has applications in a wide range of
fields. Here we discuss a general technique to translate the imposed global
connectivity constrain into many local ones that can be analyzed with cavity
equation techniques. This approach leads to a new optimization algorithm for
MST and allows to analyze the statistical mechanics properties of MST on random
graphs of various types
Optimal Vertex Cover for the Small-World Hanoi Networks
The vertex-cover problem on the Hanoi networks HN3 and HN5 is analyzed with
an exact renormalization group and parallel-tempering Monte Carlo simulations.
The grand canonical partition function of the equivalent hard-core repulsive
lattice-gas problem is recast first as an Ising-like canonical partition
function, which allows for a closed set of renormalization group equations. The
flow of these equations is analyzed for the limit of infinite chemical
potential, at which the vertex-cover problem is attained. The relevant fixed
point and its neighborhood are analyzed, and non-trivial results are obtained
both, for the coverage as well as for the ground state entropy density, which
indicates the complex structure of the solution space. Using special
hierarchy-dependent operators in the renormalization group and Monte-Carlo
simulations, structural details of optimal configurations are revealed. These
studies indicate that the optimal coverages (or packings) are not related by a
simple symmetry. Using a clustering analysis of the solutions obtained in the
Monte Carlo simulations, a complex solution space structure is revealed for
each system size. Nevertheless, in the thermodynamic limit, the solution
landscape is dominated by one huge set of very similar solutions.Comment: RevTex, 24 pages; many corrections in text and figures; final
version; for related information, see
http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/boettcher
Theoretically Efficient Parallel Graph Algorithms Can Be Fast and Scalable
There has been significant recent interest in parallel graph processing due
to the need to quickly analyze the large graphs available today. Many graph
codes have been designed for distributed memory or external memory. However,
today even the largest publicly-available real-world graph (the Hyperlink Web
graph with over 3.5 billion vertices and 128 billion edges) can fit in the
memory of a single commodity multicore server. Nevertheless, most experimental
work in the literature report results on much smaller graphs, and the ones for
the Hyperlink graph use distributed or external memory. Therefore, it is
natural to ask whether we can efficiently solve a broad class of graph problems
on this graph in memory.
This paper shows that theoretically-efficient parallel graph algorithms can
scale to the largest publicly-available graphs using a single machine with a
terabyte of RAM, processing them in minutes. We give implementations of
theoretically-efficient parallel algorithms for 20 important graph problems. We
also present the optimizations and techniques that we used in our
implementations, which were crucial in enabling us to process these large
graphs quickly. We show that the running times of our implementations
outperform existing state-of-the-art implementations on the largest real-world
graphs. For many of the problems that we consider, this is the first time they
have been solved on graphs at this scale. We have made the implementations
developed in this work publicly-available as the Graph-Based Benchmark Suite
(GBBS).Comment: This is the full version of the paper appearing in the ACM Symposium
on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), 201
Meeting the challenge of food and energy security
Growing crops for bioenergy or biofuels is increasingly viewed as conflicting with food production. However, energy use continues to rise and food production requires fuel inputs, which have increased with intensification. Focussing on the question of food or fuel is thus not helpful. The bigger, more pertinent, challenge is how the increasing demands for food and energy can be met in the future, particularly when water and land availability will be limited. Energy crop production systems differ greatly in environmental impact. The use of high-input food crops for liquid transport fuels (first-generation biofuels) needs to be phased out and replaced by the use of crop residues and low-input perennial crops (second/advanced-generation biofuels) with multiple environmental benefits. More research effort is needed to improve yields of biomass crops grown on lower grade land, and maximum value should be extracted through the exploitation of co-products and integrated biorefinery systems. Policy must continually emphasize the changes needed and tie incentives to improved greenhous gas reduction and environmental performance of biofuels
Genetic Algorithm with Optimal Recombination for the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman Problem
We propose a new genetic algorithm with optimal recombination for the
asymmetric instances of travelling salesman problem. The algorithm incorporates
several new features that contribute to its effectiveness: (i) Optimal
recombination problem is solved within crossover operator. (ii) A new mutation
operator performs a random jump within 3-opt or 4-opt neighborhood. (iii)
Greedy constructive heuristic of W.Zhang and 3-opt local search heuristic are
used to generate the initial population. A computational experiment on TSPLIB
instances shows that the proposed algorithm yields competitive results to other
well-known memetic algorithms for asymmetric travelling salesman problem.Comment: Proc. of The 11th International Conference on Large-Scale Scientific
Computations (LSSC-17), June 5 - 9, 2017, Sozopol, Bulgari
Subtropical Real Root Finding
We describe a new incomplete but terminating method for real root finding for
large multivariate polynomials. We take an abstract view of the polynomial as
the set of exponent vectors associated with sign information on the
coefficients. Then we employ linear programming to heuristically find roots.
There is a specialized variant for roots with exclusively positive coordinates,
which is of considerable interest for applications in chemistry and systems
biology. An implementation of our method combining the computer algebra system
Reduce with the linear programming solver Gurobi has been successfully applied
to input data originating from established mathematical models used in these
areas. We have solved several hundred problems with up to more than 800000
monomials in up to 10 variables with degrees up to 12. Our method has failed
due to its incompleteness in less than 8 percent of the cases
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