Ancient China and its Eurasian Neighbors: Artifacts, Identity, and Death in the Frontier, 3000-700 BCE

This volume examines the role of objects in the region north of early dynastic state centers, at the intersection of Ancient China and Eurasia, a large area that stretches from Xinjiang to the China Sea, from c.3000 BCE to the mid-eighth century BCE. This area was a frontier, an ambiguous space that lay at the margins of direct political control by the metropolitan states, where local and colonial ideas and practices were reconstructed transculturally. These identities were often merged and displayed in material culture. Types of objects, styles, and iconography were often hybrids or new to the region, as were the tomb assemblages in which they were deposited and found. Patrons commissioned objects that marked a symbolic vision of place and person and that could mobilize support, legitimize rule, and bind people together. Through close examination of key artifacts, this book untangles the considerable changes in political structure and cultural makeup of ancient Chinese states and their northern neighbors.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1138/thumbnail.jp

Container Resource Allocation versus Performance of Data-intensive Applications on Different Cloud Servers

In recent years, data-intensive applications have been increasingly deployed on cloud systems. Such applications utilize significant compute, memory, and I/O resources to process large volumes of data. Optimizing the performance and cost-efficiency for such applications is a non-trivial problem. The problem becomes even more challenging with the increasing use of containers, which are popular due to their lower operational overheads and faster boot speed at the cost of weaker resource assurances for the hosted applications. In this paper, two containerized data-intensive applications with very different performance objectives and resource needs were studied on cloud servers with Docker containers running on Intel Xeon E5 and AMD EPYC Rome multi-core processors with a range of CPU, memory, and I/O configurations. Primary findings from our experiments include: 1) Allocating multiple cores to a compute-intensive application can improve performance, but only if the cores do not contend for the same caches, and the optimal core counts depend on the specific workload; 2) allocating more memory to a memory-intensive application than its deterministic data workload does not further improve performance; however, 3) having multiple such memory-intensive containers on the same server can lead to cache and memory bus contention leading to significant and volatile performance degradation. The comparative observations on Intel and AMD servers provided insights into trade-offs between larger numbers of distributed chiplets interconnected with higher speed buses (AMD) and larger numbers of centrally integrated cores and caches with lesser speed buses (Intel). For the two types of applications studied, the more distributed caches and faster data buses have benefited the deployment of larger numbers of containers

Roderick Whitfield (ed.), The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes. Colloquies and Art et Archaeology in Asia, No. 15, Held June 1990

Linduff Katheryn M. Roderick Whitfield (ed.), The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes. Colloquies and Art et Archaeology in Asia, No. 15, Held June 1990. In: Arts asiatiques, tome 49, 1994. pp. 139-140

Cost-based Decision Aids for Custom Feed Millers

Methods for use by custom feed millers in pricing their services to recover short-run and long-run costs of operation are developed in this study. Descriptive information from the 1977 Custom Feed Milling Survey and multiple enterprise cost and pricing theory are employed in deriving the cost~based decision aids.Agricultural Economic

Roderick Whitfield (ed.), The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes. Colloquies and Art et Archaeology in Asia, No. 15, Held June 1990

Linduff Katheryn M. Roderick Whitfield (ed.), The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes. Colloquies and Art et Archaeology in Asia, No. 15, Held June 1990. In: Arts asiatiques, tome 49, 1994. pp. 139-140