CU2CL: A CUDA-to-OpenCL Translator for Multi- and Many-core Architectures

The use of graphics processing units (GPUs) in high-performance parallel computing continues to become more prevalent, often as part of a heterogeneous system. For years, CUDA has been the de facto programming environment for nearly all general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) applications. In spite of this, the framework is available only on NVIDIA GPUs, traditionally requiring reimplementation in other frameworks in order to utilize additional multi- or many-core devices. On the other hand, OpenCL provides an open and vendorneutral programming environment and runtime system. With implementations available for CPUs, GPUs, and other types of accelerators, OpenCL therefore holds the promise of a “write once, run anywhere” ecosystem for heterogeneous computing. Given the many similarities between CUDA and OpenCL, manually porting a CUDA application to OpenCL is typically straightforward, albeit tedious and error-prone. In response to this issue, we created CU2CL, an automated CUDA-to- OpenCL source-to-source translator that possesses a novel design and clever reuse of the Clang compiler framework. Currently, the CU2CL translator covers the primary constructs found in CUDA runtime API, and we have successfully translated many applications from the CUDA SDK and Rodinia benchmark suite. The performance of our automatically translated applications via CU2CL is on par with their manually ported countparts

The global slack hypothesis

We illustrate the analytical content of the global slack hypothesis in the context of a variant of the widely used New Open-Economy Macro model of Clarida, Galí, and Gertler (2002) under the assumptions of both producer currency pricing and local currency pricing. The model predicts that the Phillips curve for domestic CPI inflation will be flatter under most plausible parameterizations, the more important international trade is to the domestic economy. The model also predicts that foreign output gaps will matter for inflation dynamics, along with the domestic output gap. We also show that the terms of trade gap can capture foreign influences on domestic CPI inflation in an open economy as well. When the Phillips curve includes the terms of trade gap rather than the foreign output gap, the response of domestic inflation to the domestic output gap is the same as in the closed-economy case ceteris paribus. We also note the conceptual and statistical difficulties of measuring the output gaps and suggest that measurement error bias can be a serious concern in the estimation of the open-economy Phillips curve relationship with reduced-form regressions when global slack is not actually observable.International trade - Econometric models ; Phillips curve ; Consumer price indexes ; Inflation (Finance) - Mathematical models

New insights in the origin and evolution of the old, metal-rich open cluster NGC 6791

NGC 6791 is one of the most studied open clusters, it is massive ($\sim5000\,M_{\odot}$), located at the solar circle, old ($~8\,$Gyr) and yet the most metal-rich cluster (${\rm [Fe/H]}\simeq0.4$) known in the Milky Way. By performing an orbital analysis within a Galactic model including spiral arms and a bar, we found that it is plausible that NGC 6791 formed in the inner thin disc or in the bulge, and later displaced by radial migration to its current orbit. We apply different tools to simulate NGC 6791, including direct $N$-body summation in time-varying potentials, to test its survivability when going through different Galactic environments. In order to survive the 8 Gyr journey moving on a migrating orbit, NGC 6791 must have been more massive, $M_0 \geq 5\times10^4 M_{\odot}$, when formed. We find independent confirmation of this initial mass in the stellar mass function, which is observed to be flat; this can only be explained if the average tidal field strength experienced by the cluster is stronger than what it is at its current orbit. Therefore, the birth place and journeys of NGC 6791 are imprinted in its chemical composition, in its mass loss, and in its flat stellar mass function, supporting its origin in the inner thin disc or in the bulge.Comment: 14 pages, 10 Figures, 3 Tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Determination of the permeability parameters of bagasse pulp from two different sugar extraction methods

The permeability, the specific surface area and the swelling factor have been determined for Australian bagasse pulp derived from bagasse from two different sugar extraction processes. The sugar extraction process was not found to affect the permeability of the pulp. The results for bagasse pulp are compared to those of eucalypt pulp, which is widely used in Australia for paper manufacture. The fibre length distribution showed a high fraction of small fibres in all of the bagasse pulp samples. Surprisingly, the permeability properties of the bagasse pulp samples were better than that that of eucalypt. It is presumed that this is due to the relatively large fraction of longer fibres in the bagasse pulp compared to the eucalypt pulp

Tax policy design in the presence of social preferences: some experimental evidence

This paper reports the results of experiments designed to examine whether a taste for fairness affects people’s preferred tax structure. Building on the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model, we devise a simple test for the presence of social preferences in voting for alternative tax structures. The experimental results show that individuals demonstrate concern for their own payoff and inequality aversion in choosing among alternative tax structures. However, concern for redistribution decreases when it leads to increasing deadweight losses. Our findings have important implications for the design of optimal tax theory.

Implementation Challenges and Training Needs for Comprehensive School Counseling Programs in Wisconsin High Schools

The data from this study details the challenges to implementing comprehensive school counseling programs in Wisconsin high schools. Results suggest that current professional development training practices may be ineffective in assisting high school counselors to implement key components of the ASCA National Model in their schools. This article discusses obstacles to conducting more rigorous, statewide evaluations, and describes connections to markers of student success

Shift: A Brujo Story

In the distant future, a viral agent that transforms people into monsters has overrun the world. Metropolis domains now dominate the United States, using large walls to keep the dangers from entering inside. But safety is not always a guarantee. A man named Nathan uses his ability as a shape-shifting folkloric creature to make a living as a mercenary for hire in the city he lives in. Nathan also struggles with his inner turmoil of attempting to live in a society that does not accept him while trying to deal with his past trauma that drives his life. But when Nathan is asked to work on a missing person case involving an influential member of the city, it proves to be complicated and dangerous. This will force Nathan to make a critical decision that may have a deadly outcome

Communication, Technology, Temporality

This paper proposes a media studies that foregrounds technological objects as communicative and historical agents. Specifically, I take the digital computer as a powerful catalyst of crises in communication theories and certain key features of modernity. Finally, the computer is the motor of “New Media” which is at once a set of technologies, a historical epoch, and a field of knowledge. As such the computer shapes “the new” and “the future” as History pushes its origins further in the past and its convergent quality pushes its future as a predominate medium. As treatment of information and interface suggest, communication theories observe computers, and technologies generally, for the mediated languages they either afford or foreclose to us. My project describes the figures information and interface for the different ways they can be thought of as aspects of communication. I treat information not as semantic meaning, formal or discursive language, but rather as a physical organism. Similarly an interface is not a relationship between a screen and a human visual intelligence, but is instead a reciprocal, affective and physical process of contact. I illustrate that historically there have been conceptions of information and interface complimentary to mine, fleeting as they have been in the face of a dominant temporality of mediation. I begin with a theoretically informed approach to media history, and extend it to a new theory of communication. In doing so I discuss a model of time common to popular, scientific, and critical conceptions of media technologies especially in theories of computer technology. This is a predominate model with particular rules of temporal change and causality for thinking about mediation, and limits the conditions of possibility for knowledge production about communication. I suggest a new model of time as integral to any event of observation and analysis, and that human mediation does not exhaust the possibilities within this temporality. In attempting to think past a merely human scale of time, my project interfaces with other non-totalizing, anti-anthropocentric philosophies, but begins from modernist and humanist understandings of temporality as opposed to subjectivity. Methodologically, my theory of temporality provides a shift in historical narrative, one that eschews famous inventors, threads of technological or epistemological progress, or other teleological constructions. Epistemologically, this temporality indicates that mediation is an event that occurs among various types of organisms of multiple temporalities. This allows precise interrogation of human notions inflected with time: duration, suspension, desire, fear, and imagination. Ethically, scaling time beyond the human gives a novel form of alterity articulated as the different ways in which we use time to capture the other within theories of communication and history

Rio Bravo: A journal of borderlands (New Series) Fall 2003 v.2 no.1

Como pez en agua: The Border from a Different Point of View / Daniel Villa -- The Use of Verbal Forms in the Spanish and English Writing Discourse 13 of Spanish Heritage Speakers in the U.S. / Maria Spicer-Escalante -- Special Considerations in the Writing Processes of Mexican- 25 American Students: The Problem of Text Control / Lila Lisa Canizales -- Solo la pobre se comen la /s/ and other Linguistic 39 Myths: Literary Dialect in the Spanish-for-Native-Speakers Curriculum / Maria M. Carreira -- Signs of the Times: Globalization and the linguistic landscape 57 along the US-Mexico Border / Glenn A. Martinez -- Sustantivos de origen ingles en discurso espahol: cual es su gramatica? / Rena Torres Cacoullos and Neddy A. Vigil -- Aculturacion e identidad en el nacimieto de los negros / Jose Esteban Hernandez -- Dialect Perception in the Free Trade Corridor Arizona-Sonora / Jose Alexandra Sousa -- Of Coyotes\u27, Coyotes, and Coyotes / Michelle Salazar.https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/riobravojournal/1011/thumbnail.jp