Usage and health perception of cannabidiol-containing products among the population in Germany: a descriptive study conducted in 2020 and 2021

Abstract Background Cannabidiol (CBD), a non-intoxicating substance of Cannabis sativa L., is gaining consumer attention. Yet, legal regulations in the EU are complex and questions of potential health risks remain partly unanswered. In Germany, little is known about people who use CBD products. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to gain insight into the user group of CBD, reasons for consumption and risk perception towards CBD-containing products. Methods The study consisted of two parts: In the first part of the study, the prevalence of CBD awareness and usage in Germany was estimated using a telephone survey and a population-representative sample of n = 1,011 respondents. Based on these results, n = 2,000 participants being aware of CBD were surveyed with an online questionnaire in the second part of the study to examine usage and perception of CBD in users and non-users. Results When the study was conducted at the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, 40.2% of the German participants had already heard of products containing CBD, and 11.4% had actually used them. 42.1% of the users consumed such products regularly, at least once a week, primarily orally via oils or tinctures, and purchased them mainly online. Besides curiosity – addressed especially in young adults – anticipated health benefits including pain and stress relief were main reasons for use. More than half of the study participants perceived the health benefits of CBD use as high or very high. In contrast, the health risks were rated as low or very low by most respondents. Assumptions about official testing for safety as well as physical effects of CBD-containing products varied between users and non-users. Conclusion About one in nine people in Germany uses CBD-containing products. Given reasons for consumption and perception of potential health risks and benefits suggest that people are insufficiently informed about CBD-containing products. The results of the study indicate that risk communication is needed to raise awareness for the topic and to inform (potential) users

ExaNeSt - Holistic Evaluation

This deliverable describes the holistic evaluation of the platform. Why is this needed? Because the complexity of an exascale HPC system requires more than a simple integration between different components, it is instead a complete and complex merging of different technologies with the aim of achieving the maximum efficiency of the entire system within the resource limitations of ExaNeSt. Applications have also a crucial role in this process, as the system must be usable in real cases, by real users, and not just ready for benchmarks. Consequently the evaluation of the performance cannot be limited to single parts (network, storage, FPGA, etc.) but instead the entire hardware and software components must be considered as an integrated entity. In this document we highlight how the different software and hardware components of ExaNeSt integrate to provide a single HPC platform (the ExaNeSt testbed) with maximum performance for applications, with converged virtualization and Data-Analytics and high energy efficiency achieved

Next generation of Exascale-class systems:ExaNeSt project and the status of its interconnect and storage development

The ExaNeSt project started on December 2015 and is funded by EU H2020 research framework (call H2020-FETHPC-2014, n. 671553) to study the adoption of low-cost, Linux-based power-efficient 64-bit ARM processors clusters for Exascale-class systems. The ExaNeSt consortium pools partners with industrial and academic research expertise in storage, interconnects and applications that share a vision of an European Exascale-class supercomputer. The common goal is designing and implementing a physical rack prototype together with its cooling system, the non-volatile memory (NVM) architecture and a unified low-latency interconnect able to test different options for network and storage. Furthermore, the consortium goal is to provide real HPC applications to validate the system. In this paper we describe the unified data and storage network architecture, reporting on the status of development of different testbeds and highlighting preliminary benchmark results obtained through the execution of scientific, engineering and data analytics scalable application kernels

Co-designed Innovation and System for Resilient Exascale Computing in Europe: From Applications to Silicon (EuroEXA)

EuroEXA targets to provide the template for an upcoming exascale system by co-designing and implementing a petascale-level prototype with ground-breaking characteristics. To accomplish this, the project takes a holistic approach innovating both across the technology and the application/system software pillars. EuroEXA proposes a balanced architecture for compute and data-intensive applications, that builds on top of cost-efficient, modular-integration enabled by novel inter-die links, utilises a novel processing unit and embraces FPGA acceleration for computational, networking and storage operations. EuroEXA hardware designers work together with system software experts optimising the entire stack from language runtimes to low-level kernel drivers, and application developers that bring in a rich mix of key HPC applications from across climate/weather, physical/energy and life-science/bioinformatics domains to enable efficient system co-design and maximise the impact of the project