El testimonio y sus aporías

Throughout his vast production, Derrida carried out a strict work of deconstruction of some aspects which have made up the thesis of metaphysical tradition. The aim of this article is to point out the philosophical meaning of the testimony provided by the witness. A reflection which, even if included in what was called “thinking the impossible” in the 90s, we can trace back to his very first publications.Derrida, a lo largo de su dilatada obra, ha llevado a cabo un riguroso trabajo de deconstrucción de algunas cuestiones que han conformado el discurso de la tradición metafísica. En este artículo nos detendremos en el significado filosófico del testimonio que porta el testigo. Una reflexión que, si bien se enmarca en lo que desde los años noventa se ha denominado “pensamiento de lo imposible”, se deja rastrear desde sus primeras publicaciones

Reducing Branch Misprediction Penalty through Confidence Estimation

The goal of this Thesis is reducing the global penalty associated to branch mispredictions, in terms of both performance degradation and energy consumption, through the use of confidence estimation. The reduction of this global penalty has been achieved, firstly, by increasing the accuracy of branch predictors, next, by reducing the time necessary to restore the processor from a mispredicted branch, and finally, by reducing the energy consumption due to the execution of incorrect instructions. All these proposals rely on the use of confidence estimation, a mechanism that assesses the quality of branch predictions by means of estimating the probability of a dynamic branch prediction to be correct or incorrect.Resumen de tesis presentada por el autor en la Universidad de Murcia (2003)Facultad de Informátic

An algorithm for the Cartan-Dieudonn\'e theorem on generalized scalar product spaces

We present an algorithmic proof of the Cartan-Dieudonn\'e theorem on generalized real scalar product spaces with arbitrary signature. We use Clifford algebras to compute the factorization of a given orthogonal transformation as a product of reflections with respect to hyperplanes. The relationship with the Cartan-Dieudonn\'e-Scherk theorem is also discussed in relation to the minimum number of reflections required to decompose a given orthogonal transformation.Comment: 25 page

Control speculation for energy-efficient next-generation superscalar processors

Conventional front-end designs attempt to maximize the number of "in-flight" instructions in the pipeline. However, branch mispredictions cause the processor to fetch useless instructions that are eventually squashed, increasing front-end energy and issue queue utilization and, thus, wasting around 30 percent of the power dissipated by a processor. Furthermore, processor design trends lead to increasing clock frequencies by lengthening the pipeline, which puts more pressure on the branch prediction engine since branches take longer to be resolved. As next-generation high-performance processors become deeply pipelined, the amount of wasted energy due to misspeculated instructions will go up. The aim of this work is to reduce the energy consumption of misspeculated instructions. We propose selective throttling, which triggers different power-aware techniques (fetch throttling, decode throttling, or disabling the selection logic) depending on the branch prediction confidence level. Results show that combining fetch-bandwidth reduction along with select-logic disabling provides the best performance in terms of overall energy reduction and energy-delay product improvement (14 percent and 10 percent, respectively, for a processor with a 22-stage pipeline and 16 percent and 13 percent, respectively, for a processor with a 42-stage pipeline).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The Catholic Athlete #7: Me, myself, and I

This series of short reflections addresses athletes who profess the Christian faith, in an attempt to bring together sports and Christianity. I write as a Catholic, hence the title of the series. I trust, however, that athletes from other denominations may also find spiritual profit in these texts.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Educación::Escuela de Educación Físic

The Catholic Athlete #8: You are so weak!

This series of short reflections addresses athletes who profess the Christian faith, in an attempt to bring together sports and Christianity. I write as a Catholic, hence the title of the series. I trust, however, that athletes from other denominations may also find spiritual profit in these texts.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Educación::Escuela de Educación Físic

The Catholic Athlete #9: Witnessing vs. Privacy

This series of short reflections addresses athletes who profess the Christian faith, in an attempt to bring together sports and Christianity. I write as a Catholic, hence the title of the series. I trust, however, that athletes from other denominations may also find spiritual profit in these texts.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Educación::Escuela de Educación Físic

The Catholic Athlete #1: Sports Talent

This series of short reflections addresses athletes who profess the Christian faith, in an attempt to bring together sports and Christianity. I write as a Catholic, hence the title of the series. I trust, however, that athletes from other denominations may also find spiritual profit in these texts.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Educación::Escuela de Educación Físic

The Catholic Athlete #6: Ideals

This series of short reflections addresses athletes who profess the Christian faith, in an attempt to bring together sports and Christianity. I write as a Catholic, hence the title of the series. I trust, however, that athletes from other denominations may also find spiritual profit in these texts.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Educación::Escuela de Educación Físic

The Catholic Athlete #3: Sports and Health

This series of short reflections addresses athletes who profess the Christian faith, in an attempt to bring together sports and Christianity. I write as a Catholic, hence the title of the series. I trust, however, that athletes from other denominations may also find spiritual profit in these texts.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Educación::Escuela de Educación Físic