General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Units Using OpenCL

Computational Science has emerged as a third pillar of science along with theory and experiment, where the parallelization for scientific computing is promised by different shared and distributed memory architectures such as, super-computer systems, grid and cluster based systems, multi-core and multiprocessor systems etc. In the recent years the use of GPUs (Graphic Processing Units) for General purpose computing commonly known as GPGPU made it an exciting addition to high performance computing systems (HPC) with respect to price and performance ratio. Current GPUs consist of several hundred computing cores arranged in streaming multi-processors so the degree of parallelism is promising. Moreover with the development of new and easy to use interfacing tools and programming languages such as OpenCL and CUDA made the GPUs suitable for different computation demanding applications such as micromagnetic simulations. In micromagnetic simulations, the study of magnetic behavior at very small time and space scale demands a huge computation time, where the calculation of magnetostatic field with complexity of O(Nlog(N)) using FFT algorithm for discrete convolution is the main contribution towards the whole simulation time, and it is computed many times at each time step interval. This study and observation of magnetization behavior at sub-nanosecond time-scales is crucial to a number of areas such as magnetic sensors, non volatile storage devices and magnetic nanowires etc. Since micromagnetic codes in general are suitable for parallel programming as it can be easily divided into independent parts which can run in parallel, therefore current trend for micromagnetic code concerns shifting the computationally intensive parts to GPUs. My PhD work mainly focuses on the development of highly parallel magnetostatic field solver for micromagnetic simulators on GPUs. I am using OpenCL for GPU implementation, with consideration that it is an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems for cross platform. The magnetostatic field calculation is dominated by the multidimensional FFTs (Fast Fourier Transform) computation. Therefore i have developed the specialized OpenCL based 3D-FFT library for magnetostatic field calculation which made it possible to fully exploit the zero padded input data with out transposition and symmetries inherent in the field calculation. Moreover it also provides a common interface for different vendors' GPUs. In order to fully utilize the GPUs parallel architecture the code needs to handle many hardware specific technicalities such as coalesced memory access, data transfer overhead between GPU and CPU, GPU global memory utilization, arithmetic computation, batch execution etc. In the second step to further increase the level of parallelism and performance, I have developed a parallel magnetostatic field solver on multiple GPUs. Utilizing multiple GPUs avoids dealing with many of the limitations of GPUs (e.g., on-chip memory resources) by exploiting the combined resources of multiple on board GPUs. The GPU implementation have shown an impressive speedup against equivalent OpenMp based parallel implementation on CPU, which means the micromagnetic simulations which require weeks of computation on CPU now can be performed very fast in hours or even in minutes on GPUs. In parallel I also worked on ordered queue management on GPUs. Ordered queue management is used in many applications including real-time systems, operating systems, and discrete event simulations. In most cases, the efficiency of an application itself depends on usage of a sorting algorithm for priority queues. Lately, the usage of graphic cards for general purpose computing has again revisited sorting algorithms. In this work i have presented the analysis of different sorting algorithms with respect to sorting time, sorting rate and speedup on different GPU and CPU architectures and provided a new sorting technique on GPU

Population Diversity and Role in the Socioeconomic Development of Domestic Buffaloes of Rural Areas of District Haripur, KPK Pakistan

This study conducted as a type of survey in a time period duration of 6 month that starts from the end of the march to the end of September total of the 1000 houses were visited from each of the selected villages of Haripur Pakistan along with 100 dairy farms study carried out by the questionnaires and by the direct meeting with the keepers of buffalos. Four villages were selected where the highest population of buffaloes were found in Syria maira. The farm buffalos were kept mostly for the purpose of selling the milk Results showed that the most of the areas the buffalo keeping is for the purpose of selling the milk wile in other where the selling rate is not found they keep them for their own food and milk purposes. It facilitate their economic status to rise as a part time job. Government should take steps to rise there stander

Safety of percutaneous transhepatic biliary stenting in patients with obstructive jaundice

OBJECTIVE: To determine the safety of percutaneous transhepatic biliary stenting (PTBS) in patients with obstructive jaundice. STUDY DESIGN: A case series. PLACE AND DURATION OF STUDY: Department of Radiology, The Aga Khan University Hospital Karachi, Pakistan, from February 2012 to April 2013. METHODOLOGY: Patients with obstructive jaundice due to any cause referred for percutaneous transhepatic biliary stenting were included in the study. Patients were excluded if they had undergone previous ERCP, had guided transhepatic biliary stenting, previous percutaneous transhepatic biliary stenting and were lost to follow-up. Follow-up was taken at a 2, 4 and 6 week interval and clinical outcome was assessed as the difference between the bilirubin levels at base line and 6 weeks after PTBS, which was measured using Freidman\u27s test. RESULTS: A total of 102 patients were included; 59 (58%) were males and 43 (42%) were females. The age ranged from 21 to 89 years. A total of 30 patients experienced complications making an overall complication rate of 29.4%; 20 experienced minor and 10 experienced major complications. Pain was the most frequent minor complication (n=15 patients, 14.7%) followed by biliary leakage, fever and cholangitis. Major complications included death in 10 (10%) patients followed by biliary peritonitis and septicemia. CONCLUSION: PTBS achieved satisfactory palliation with a low complication rate in patients with obstructive jaundic

Investigating Critical Resemblances of Islamic Banking with Conventional: Binary Matrices as Solution Methodology

Identifying, ranking, exhuming and classifying the relations among the critical resemblances between Islamic and conventional banking is aim of this study. It also discusses the structure of these resemblances and devises valuable guidelines for discerners. It follows qualitative paradigm of research philosophy and overall design consists of review of literature, data collection and analysis. Literature review is used to prepare a list of resemblances, Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) is employed for ranking, exhuming and modeling the relationships among resemblances, whereas, cross impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) for substantiating the results of ISM by classifying factors into independent, dependent, linkage and autonomous clusters. Through the discourse of literature review a list of eighteen critical resemblances has been prepared. Results of ISM show that resemblance in rating system and resemblance in public perception occupy highest rank therefore are least critical, whereas, resemblance in settlement of cost of funds and similar employee qualification occupy bottom of the model therefore are the most critical. MICMAC analysis validates the results of ISM. This study is helpful to discerners who want to understand differences and similarities between two paradigms of banking. It is equally useful for regulators, management, employees, customers, researchers, religious scholars and society at large being an original attempt by the authors substantiated by real time survey data collected from experts on the issue

Expounding Dynamics of Tacit Knowledge Critical to Credit Decision Making: Juxtaposed Findings of GRA and RIDIT

This study explores importance of Tacit Knowledge (TK) sharing for formal loan makers in Pakistan. Main objective of the study is to expound, conceptualize and hierarchicalize the factors of TK critical to credit decision making. The study follows positivist approach and overall research design consists of literature review, field survey and data analyses. Data was collected from credit officers of Pakistani banks. Following the triangulation approach for confirmation and comparison of results, multiple techniques viz EFA, GRA and RIDIT were employed. Results of EFA showed that there are eight major dynamics of TK. Findings of GRA revealed that TK about recovery of loans is the most important factor hence occupies the highest GRA rank, whereas, the TK about resources of borrowers occupies the lowest rank. RIDIT analysis showed that TK about multitude of business sectors is the most important factor hence occupies the highest RIDIT rank, whereas, TK about capacity to repay the loans occupies the lowest rank. Juxtaposition of results of GRA and RIDIT revealed that TK gained during recovery of loans is one of the most important factors. It is a seminal study in the area of knowledge management particularly in context of Pakistani banks based on original data collected in field setting. The study gives insight of critical factors of TK, which has high value for credit personnel in banks. The results are useful for decision makers in banks, academicians and researchers

Profitability and Working Capital Management Nexus: Evidence from Food & Personal Care Products Sector Firms Listed on Pakistan Stock Exchange

Working capital management (WCM) usually have an essential role to play in a firm’s overall performance, especially those of manufacturing sector. The key aim of the current research work is to find the empirical association amid profitability and working capital management of the Food & Personal Care Product sector Pakistani firms. Eight companies are selected randomly as a sample from the firms listed on Pakistan Stock Exchange. Secondary data for six years, that is, 2010 - 2016 is gathered from the financial reports of these companies and evaluated through Pearson correlation coefficient and regression analysis techniques, using STATA software. The results prove that Return on Assets (ROA) is negatively correlated with Average Collection Period (ACP) and positively correlated with Inventory Turnover in Days (ITID), Average Payment Period (APP), Current Ratio (CR) and Sales Growth (SG). All the relationships are significant except ITID and SG one

Antioxidative properties of spices and their impact on postprandial blood glucose in humans

Background: Diabetes mellitus represents disrupted orderly processes of carbohydrate metabolism, in which body cells become unable to utilize glucose. Consequently, glucose molecules pile up in blood and exceed upper normal limit. Spices are vital source of bioactive molecules, which could be useful to treat different diseases including diabetes. Present study was conducted to determine the effect of turmeric, cloves, green cardamom and cinnamon intake on postprandial blood glucose (PBG) levels in normal healthy human subjects.Methods: A total of 10 participants including both genders were considered to assess blood glycemic response of said four culinary spices. Participants’ ages were 20-25 years. Incremental area under the curve (IAUC) method was employed for glycemic index (GI) determination. In addition to this, antioxidative properties were estimated by 2, 2-azino-bis-(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid (ABTS+)) radical, Folin-Cioucalteau reagent and aluminum chloride.Results: GI values of turmeric, cloves, green cardamom, cinnamon and their combined blend were 83.06, 87.48, 82.27, 73.59 and 69.48, respectively. Antioxidative activity (AA) of spices was 2.63, 1.55, 2.55 2.8 and 3.33, respectively. Regarding antioxidant levels cinnamon contained the highest amount (32.78 mg/g) of total phenolic compounds (TPC) than turmeric (28.7 mg/g), cloves (29.6 mg/g) and green cardamom (15.04 mg/g). Similarly, total flavonoid contents (TFC) were found maximum (6.17 mg/g) in cinnamon relative to the other three spices i.e. 2.66, 4.6 and 1.6 mg/g, respectively. Furthermore, GI was inversely related to antioxidative properties i.e. AA (r=-0.88), TPC (r=-0.5625) TFC (r=-0.7716).Conclusion: The results obtained from this present study indicate that spices’ antioxidants interfere with gastrointestinal digestion, lowering starch conversion into blood glucose, effectively. An appropriate intake of spices may be wanted to keep blood glucose level within an optimum limit.Keywords: Antioxidants; Glycemic index; Humans; Spice

A power comparison of various normality tests

<p>The assumption of normality is very important because it is used in many statistical procedures such as Analysis of variance, linear regression analysis, discriminant analysis and t-tests. The three common procedures are used for assessing the assumption of normality that is graphical methods, numerical methods and formal normality tests. In the literature, significant amount of normality tests are available. In this paper, only eight different tests of normality are discussed. The tests consider in the present study are Shapiro Wilk, Shapiro Francia, Kolmogrov Smirnov, Anderson Darling, Cramer von Mises, Jarque Bera, Geary and Lilliefors test. Power comparisons of each test are obtained by using Monte Carlo computation of sample data generated from different alternate distributions by using 5% level of significance. The results show that power of each test is affected by sample size and alternate distribution. Shapiro Francia and Kolmogrov Smirnov test perform well for Cauchy exponential distribution respectively. For t-distribution Geary, Shapiro Francia and Jarque Bera test perform well for degrees of freedom 5, 10 and 15 respectively.</p

Remote Sensing Change Detection With Transformers Trained from Scratch

Current transformer-based change detection (CD) approaches either employ a pre-trained model trained on large-scale image classification ImageNet dataset or rely on first pre-training on another CD dataset and then fine-tuning on the target benchmark. This current strategy is driven by the fact that transformers typically require a large amount of training data to learn inductive biases, which is insufficient in standard CD datasets due to their small size. We develop an end-to-end CD approach with transformers that is trained from scratch and yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on four public benchmarks. Instead of using conventional self-attention that struggles to capture inductive biases when trained from scratch, our architecture utilizes a shuffled sparse-attention operation that focuses on selected sparse informative regions to capture the inherent characteristics of the CD data. Moreover, we introduce a change-enhanced feature fusion (CEFF) module to fuse the features from input image pairs by performing a per-channel re-weighting. Our CEFF module aids in enhancing the relevant semantic changes while suppressing the noisy ones. Extensive experiments on four CD datasets reveal the merits of the proposed contributions, achieving gains as high as 14.27\% in intersection-over-union (IoU) score, compared to the best-published results in the literature. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/mustansarfiaz/ScratchFormer}.Comment: 5 figures and 4 table

PS-ARM: An End-to-End Attention-aware Relation Mixer Network for Person Search

Person search is a challenging problem with various real-world applications, that aims at joint person detection and re-identification of a query person from uncropped gallery images. Although, the previous study focuses on rich feature information learning, it is still hard to retrieve the query person due to the occurrence of appearance deformations and background distractors. In this paper, we propose a novel attention-aware relation mixer (ARM) module for person search, which exploits the global relation between different local regions within RoI of a person and make it robust against various appearance deformations and occlusion. The proposed ARM is composed of a relation mixer block and a spatio-channel attention layer. The relation mixer block introduces a spatially attended spatial mixing and a channel-wise attended channel mixing for effectively capturing discriminative relation features within an RoI. These discriminative relation features are further enriched by introducing a spatio-channel attention where the foreground and background discriminability is empowered in a joint spatio-channel space. Our ARM module is generic and it does not rely on fine-grained supervision or topological assumptions, hence being easily integrated into any Faster R-CNN based person search methods. Comprehensive experiments are performed on two challenging benchmark datasets: CUHKSYSU and PRW. Our PS-ARM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. On the challenging PRW dataset, our PS-ARM achieves an absolute gain of 5 in the mAP score over SeqNet, while operating at a comparable speed.Comment: Paper accepted in ACCV 202