Structural properties of silicon dioxide thin films densified by medium-energy particles

Classical molecular-dynamics simulations have been carried out to investigate densification mechanisms in silicon dioxide thin films deposited on an amorphous silica surface, according to a simplified ion-beam assisted deposition (IBAD) scenario. We compare the structures resulting from the deposition of near-thermal (1 eV) SiO$_{2}$ particles to those obtained with increasing fraction of 30 eV SiO$_{2}$ particles. Our results show that there is an energy interval - between 12 and 15 eV per condensing SiO$_2$ unit on average - for which the growth leads to a dense, low-stress amorphous structure, in satisfactory agreement with the results of low-energy ion-beam experiments. We also find that the crossover between low- and high-density films is associated with a tensile to compressive stress transition, and a simultaneous healing of structural defects of the {\em a-}SiO$_2$ network, namely three- and four-fold rings. It is observed, finally, that densification proceeds through significant changes at intermediate length scales (4--10 \AA), leaving essentially unchanged the ``building blocks'' of the network, viz. the Si(O$_{1/2}$)$_{4}$ tetrahedra. This latter result is in qualitative agreement with the mechanism proposed to explain the irreversible densification of amorphous silica recovered from high pressures ($\sim$ 15--20 GPa).Comment: 12 pages including 10 postscript figures; submitted to Phys. Rev. B; related publications can be found on web site http://www.centrcn.umontreal.ca/~lewi

Discrete-time port-Hamiltonian systems: A definition based on symplectic integration

International audienceWe introduce a new definition of discrete-time port-Hamiltonian systems (PHS), which results from structure-preserving discretization of explicit PHS in time. We discretize the underlying continuous-time Dirac structure with the collocation method and add discrete-time dynamics by the use of symplectic numerical integration schemes. The conservation of a discrete-time energy balance-expressed in terms of the discrete-time Dirac structure-extends the notion of symplecticity of geometric integration schemes to open systems. We discuss the energy approximation errors in the context of the presented definition and show that their order is consistent with the order of the numerical integration scheme. Implicit Gauss-Legendre methods and Lobatto IIIA/IIIB pairs for partitioned systems are examples for integration schemes that are covered by our definition. The statements on the numerical energy errors are illustrated by elementary numerical experiments

Pseudo-spectral methods for the spatial symplectic reduction of open systems of conservation laws

International audienceA reduction method is presented for systems of conservation laws with boundary energy flow. It is stated as a generalized pseudo-spectral method which performs exact differentiation by using simultaneously several approximation spaces generated by polynomials bases and suitable choices of port-variables. The symplecticity of this spatial reduction method is proved when used for the reduction of both closed and open systems of conservation laws, for any choice of collocation points (i.e. for any polynomial bases). The symplecticity of some more usual collocation schemes is discussed and finally their accuracy on approximation of the spectrum, on the example of the ideal transmission line, is discussed in comparison with the suggested reduction scheme

Decontamination of Solid and Powder Foodstuffs using DIC Technology

International audienc

Vers des machines exaflopiques vertes

National audienceMoving to exascale era can not be done without taking into account the energy consumption of such systems. In this paper, we wonder if the solutions found for the petascale era will still be available for the exascale era. We propose to adapt some of them within a green framework.Les superordinateurs ont connu une croissance rapide en particulier ces dernières années. À peine avons-nous franchi l'échelle du petaflop que l'on s'intéresse déjà à concevoir des machines pouvant atteindre 1 exaflop par seconde et ce, afin d'être en mesure de satisfaire les besoins importants en terme de performances qu'expriment les scientifiques dans divers domaines. Cependant, pour concevoir des machines exaflopiques, il faut au préalable relever certains défis dont le principal est d'être capable de réduire les importants coûts de consommations énergétiques dans ces machines. Dans cet article, nous nous demandons si les solutions existantes pour réduire la consommation énergétique au niveau péta- flopique resteront valables à l'échelle exaflopique et dans quelles mesures il est possible de les adap- ter pour qu'elles puissent passer à l'échelle. Nous proposons également des solutions nouvelles pour l'échelle exaflopique, qui débouchent sur une architecture verte pour les machines exaflopiques

Systèmes de compréhension et de traduction de la parole (vers une approche unifiée dans le cadre de la portabilité multilingue des systèmes de dialogue)

La généralisation de l usage des systèmes de dialogue homme-machine accroît la nécessité du développement rapide des différents composants de ces systèmes. Les systèmes de dialogue peuvent être conçus pour différents domaines d application et dans des langues différentes. La nécessité d une production rapide pour de nouvelles langues reste un problème ouvert et crucial auquel il est nécessaire d apporter des solutions efficaces.Nos travaux s intéressent particulièrement au module de compréhension de la parole et proposent des approches pour la portabilité rapide peu coûteuse de ce module.Les méthodes statistiques ont montré de bonnes performances pour concevoir les modules de compréhension de la parole pour l étiquetage sémantique de tours de dialogue.Cependant ces méthodes nécessitent de larges corpus pour être apprises. La collecte de ces corpus est aussi coûteuse en temps et en expertise humaine.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons plusieurs approches pour porter un système de compréhension d une langue vers une autre en utilisant les techniques de la traduction automatique. Les premiers travaux consistent à appliquer la traduction automatique à plusieurs niveaux du processus de portabilité du système de compréhension afin de réduire le coût lié à production de nouvelles données d apprentissage. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que l utilisation de la traduction automatique permet d obtenir des systèmes performant avec un minimum de contribution humaine.Cette thèse traite donc à la fois de la traduction automatique et de la compréhension de la parole. Nous avons effectué une comparaison approfondie entre les méthodes utilisées pour chacune des tâches et nous avons proposé un décodage conjoint basé sur une méthode discriminante qui à la fois traduit une phrase et lui attribue ses étiquettes sémantiques. Ce décodage est obtenu par une approche à base de graphe qui permet de composer un graphe de traduction avec un graphe de compréhension. Cette représentation peut être généralisée pour permettre des transmissions d informations riches entre les composants du système de dialogueThe generalisation of human-machine dialogue system increases the need for a rapid development of the various components of these systems. Dialogue systems can be designed for different applications and in different languages. The need for a fast production of systems for new languages is still an open and crucial issue which requires effective solutions. Our work is particularly interested in speech understanding module and propose approaches for language portability of this module. The statistical methods showed good performance to design modules for speech understanding. However, these methods require large corpora to be trained. The collection of these corpora is expensive in time and human expertise. In this thesis, we propose several approaches to port an understanding system from one language to another using machine translation techniques. The experimental results show that the use of machine translation allows to produce efficient systems with minimal human effort. This thesis addresses both machine translation and speech understanding domain. We conducted a comparison between the methods used for each task and we have proposed a joint decoding between translation and understanding based on a discriminant method. This decoding is achieved by a graph-based approach which allows to compose a translation graph with an understanding graph. This representation can be generalized to allow a rich transmission of information between the components of the dialogue systemAVIGNON-Bib. numérique (840079901) / SudocSudocFranceF

DNA-inspired Scheme for Building the Energy Profile of HPC Systems

International audienceEnergy usage is becoming a challenge for the design of next generation large scale distributed systems. This paper explores an inno- vative approach of profiling such systems. It proposes a DNA-like solution without making any assumptions on the running applications and used hardware. This profiling based on internal counters usage and energy monitoring allows to isolate specific phases during the execution and enables some energy consumption control and energy usage prediction. First experimental validations of the system modeling are presented and analyzed

Beyond CPU Frequency Scaling for a Fine-grained Energy Control of HPC Systems

International audienceModern high performance computing subsystems (HPC) - including processor, network, memory, and IO - are provided with power management mechanisms. These include dynamic speed scaling and dynamic resource sleeping. Understanding the behavioral patterns of high performance computing systems at runtime can lead to a multitude of optimization opportunities including controlling and limiting their energy usage. In this paper, we present a general purpose methodology for optimizing energy performance of HPC systems consid- ering processor, disk and network. We rely on the concept of execution vector along with a partial phase recognition technique for on-the-fly dynamic management without any a priori knowledge of the workload. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our management policy under two real-life workloads. Experimental results show that our management policy in comparison with baseline unmanaged execution saves up to 24% of energy with less than 4% performance overhead for our real-life workloads

On Applying DTNs to a Delay Constrained Scenario in Wired Networks

International audienceThe Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) architecture has been successful in addressing communication issues such as disruption, variable delay, and network parti- tioning. DTN uses intermittently available links to communicate opportunistically regardless of delivery delay. In the literature, much work has been done mainly to improve the rate of message delivery and routing algorithms. However, previous work has not focused on guaranteeing the message delivery delay in a DTN scenario. In addition, real deployments of DTN systems have so far been mostly proof-of-concepts in research projects. We address the problem of delivery delay in a wired DTN scenario where messages are moved across a time-varying graph topology whose dynamics are known in advance and can be modified. We propose a framework that guarantees bounded delivery delay of users' data. To demonstrate the feasibility of our network management approach, we evaluate our framework on a 10-node wired DTN topology deployed on the Grid5000 platfor