Optimization-based power and thermal management for dark silicon aware 3D chip multiprocessors using heterogeneous cache hierarchy

Management of a problem recently known as “dark silicon” is a new challenge in multicore designs. Prior innovative studies have addressed the dark silicon problem in the fields of power-efficient core design. However, addressing dark silicon challenges in uncore component designs such as cache hierarchy, on-chip interconnect etc. that consume significant portion of the on-chip power consumption is largely unexplored. In this paper, for the first time, we propose an integrated approach which considers the impact of power consumption of core and uncore components simultaneously to improve multi/many-core performance in the dark silicon era. The proposed approach dynamically (1) predicts the changing program behavior on each core; (2) re-determines frequency/voltage, cache capacity and technology in each level of the cache hierarchy based on the program's scalability in order to satisfy the power and temperature constraints. In the proposed architecture, for future chip-multiprocessors (CMPs), we exploit emerging technologies such as non-volatile memories (NVMs) and 3D techniques to combat dark silicon. Also, for the first time, we propose a detailed power model which is useful for future dark silicon CMPs power modeling. Experimental results on SPEC 2000/2006 benchmarks show that the proposed method improves throughput by about 54.3% and energy-delay product by about 61% on average, respectively, in comparison with the conventional CMP architecture with homogenous cache system. (A preliminary short version of this work was presented in the 18th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD), 2015.) © 2017 Elsevier B.V

Academic Performance and Friendship Relation in Students: Role of Personality

Abstract: There have been many studies about personality role in students’ studies in recent years. However, these studies do not provide a comprehensive model. In addition, statistical researchers have just attended the relationship between each individual’s personality and his academic performance without considering the impact of people around him on his educationalachievements. In this research, a social simulation has been propounded which shows the impact of an individual’s personality and other people around him in his academic performance using multi-agent systems. Each individual in the simulation has five personality factors which came from the theory of “big five personality”. The simulation is prepared as a tool with a user interface to set parameters and see the result of each simulation. The parameters have been considered by experts to be replaced during the test phase. Data used for simulation was taken with the help of the “big five personality” questionnaire distributed among 35 second-year computer students in Iran University of Science and Technology. Reliability and validity of questions have been previously reviewed by experts. Simulation was executed on the data and the results had been prepared using each student’s personality and adding the friendship links between them. It has been shown that taking into account each student’s friends’ personality can improve the simulation results

Effect of general versus spinal anesthesia on postoperative delirium and early cognitive dysfunction in elderly patients

Background: Postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) and delirium are common in the elderly patients, given the controversial results of previous studies about the impact of anesthesia type on the occurrence of these complications. Objectives: This study was planned to compare the effects of general and spinal anesthesia on the prevalence of POCD and delirium. Methods: A single-blind non-randomized clinical trial. Setting was in two academic hospitals. Ninety-four patients over 50 years old scheduled for hip fracture fixation. Patients were divided into two groups to receive either general (GA) or spinal (SA) anesthesia. Both Mini-Mental State examination (MMSE) and Wechsler tests were used before the operation and 3 times postoperatively to assess the cognitive function and detect early POCD. The DSM-IV criteria were also used for the diagnosis of delirium. The incidence of delirium and POCD and their precipitating factors were compared between the two groups. Results: Ninety-four patients with a mean age of 67.12 years were studied. The overall prevalence of POCD and delirium was 17.02; however, it was significantly higher in the GA group rather than the SA group, 29.7, and 4.25, respectively (P < 0.001). There was a significant relationship between age (P = 0.048), ASA class (P = 0.034), and educational level with the incidence of POCD, meaning that the probability of developing cognitive impairment decreases with patients� higher level of education and lower ASA-physical status. Also, the rate of POCD in men was significantly higher than in women (P = 0.026). Conclusions: The finding of this study showed that, if there is no specific contraindication, neuraxial anesthesia may be preferred over general anesthesia in elderly patients. © 2020, Author(s)

A heterogeneous memory organization with minimum energy consumption in 3D chip-multiprocessors

Main memories play an important role in overall energy consumption of embedded systems. Using conventional memory technologies in future designs in nanoscale era cause a drastic increase in leakage power consumption and temperature-related problems. Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies offer many desirable characteristics such as near-zero leakage power, high density and non-volatility. They can significantly mitigate the issue of memory leakage power in future embedded chip-multiprocessor (eCMP) systems. However, they suffer from challenges such as limited write endurance and high write energy consumption which restrict them for adoption in modern memory systems. In this article, we propose a stacked hybrid memory system for 3D chip-multiprocessors to take advantages of both traditional and non-volatile memory technologies. For reaching this target, we present a convex optimization-based model that minimizes the system energy consumption while satisfy endurance constraint in order to design a reliable memory system. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves energy-delay product (EDP) and performance by about 44.8% and 13.8% on average respectively compared with the traditional memory design where single technology is used. © 2016 IEEE

Acute nonbacterial gastroenteritis in hospitalized children: A cross sectional study

Background: Viral acute gastroenteritis (AGE) is a major cause of morbidity in childhood and leads to hospitalization in developed countries, such as Iran. Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence and viral types (rotavirus, adenovirus, human parechoviruses-1, and human bocavirus) of acute nonbacterial gastroenteritis in hospitalized children. Patients and Materials: This was a across-sectional prospective study performed at the Pediatric Department of Rasoul Hospital, Tehran, Iran (2009-2011) on 80 hospitalized children with viral AGE. All Stool samples were collected on viral transport media. Human bocavirus (HBoV) was detected using the Real-time PCR TaqMan method. Molecular detection of human parechovirus type 1 (HPeV-1) RNA in stool samples was done using a specific nested reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR). Rota and adeno virus antigens were sought by rapid chromatographic tests. P values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: Fever was determined in 47.5 of cases (38), nausea and vomiting in 42.5 (34), respiratory symptoms in 16.3 (13), abdominal pain in 76. Duration of diarrhea was 1-30 days (mean = 6.3 + 4.3 days). No dehydration was observed in 43.5 of subjects, mild dehydration in 33.8, moderate dehydration in 17.5 and severe dehydration in 5 of cases. Positive rotavirus was found in 48.8 of cases (39), adenovirus in 20 (16), HBoV in 8 (6) and HPeV-1 in 23.2 (19), and adeno and rotaviruses co-infection in 6 (4). The frequency of positive HBoV was significantly lower than adeno and rotaviruses infection (P value = 0.0001). Rotavirus was more frequent in males (P value = 0.003) and in young children (17.49 months vs. 21.44 months) P value = 0.03, CI = -13.4, 5.5. Rotavirus infection was related to the degree of dehydration (P value = 0.001) but was not related to the presence of vomiting or fever (P value > 0.5). Conclusions: This study indicates that viral agents, especially rotavirus (48.8%), HPeV-1 (23.2%) and adenovirus (20%) are the most important causes for viral AGE in children while HBoV (8%) is infrequent during childhood. Determination of various viral pathogens of AGE is very important in planning diarrhea disease control strategies in our country where rotavirus vaccination in not routinely used. © 2014, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences

Customized clinical practice guidelines for management of adult cataract in Iran

Purpose: To customize clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for cataract management in the Iranian population. Methods: First, four CPGs (American Academy of Ophthalmology 2006 and 2011, Royal College of Ophthalmologists 2010, and Canadian Ophthalmological Society 2008) were selected from a number of available CPGs in the literature for cataract management. All recommendations of these guidelines, together with their references, were studied. Each recommendation was summarized in 4 tables. The first table showed the recommendation itself in clinical question components format along with its level of evidence. The second table contained structured abstracts of supporting articles related to the clinical question with their levels of evidence. The third table included the customized recommendation of the internal group respecting its clinical advantage, cost, and complications. In the fourth table, the internal group their recommendations from 1 to 9 based on the customizing capability of the recommendation (applicability, acceptability, external validity). Finally, customized recommendations were sent one month prior to a consensus session to faculty members of all universities across the country asking for their comments on recommendations. Results: The agreed recommendations were accepted as conclusive while those with no agreement were discussed at the consensus session. Finally, all customized recommendations were codified as 80 recommendations along with their sources and levels of evidence for the Iranian population. Conclusion: Customization of CPGs for management of adult cataract for the Iranian population seems to be useful for standardization of referral, diagnosis and treatment of patients. © 2015 Journal of Ophthalmic and Vision Research | Published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow

Diagnostic and methodological evaluation of studies on the urinary shedding of SARS-CoV-2, compared to stool and serum: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Investigating the infectivity of body fluid can be useful for preventative measures in the community and ensuring safety in the operating rooms and on the laboratory practices. We performed a literature search of clinical trials, cohorts, and case series using PubMed/MEDLINE, Google Scholar, and Cochrane library, and downloadable database of CDC. We excluded case reports and searched all-language articles for review and repeated until the final drafting. The search protocol was registered in the PROSPERO database. Thirty studies with urinary sampling for viral shedding were included. A total number of 1,271 patients were enrolled initially, among which 569 patients had undergone urinary testing. Nine studies observed urinary viral shedding in urine from 41 patients. The total incidence of urinary SARS-CoV-2 shedding was 8, compared to 21.3 and 39.5 for blood and stool, respectively. The summarized risk ratio (RR) estimates for urine positive rates compared to the pharyngeal rate was 0.08. The pertaining RR urine compared to blood and stool positive rates were 0.20 and 0.33, respectively. Our review concludes that not only the SARS-CoV-2 can be excreted in the urine in eight percent of patients but also its incidence may have associations with the severity of the systemic disease, ICU admission, and fatality rates. Moreover, the findings in our review suggest that a larger population size may reveal more positive urinary cases possibly by minimizing biases

Association between psychosocial distress with cardio metabolic risk factors and liver enzymes in a nationally-representative sample of Iranian children and adolescents: The CASPIAN-III study

Background: The present study was designed to evaluate association of psychosocial distress with cardio metabolic risk factors and liver enzymes in Iranian children and adolescents.Method: This nationwide study was conducted as the third survey of the school-based surveillance system that was conducted among 5593 school students, 10-18 years in Iran. High triglyceride (TG), high fasting blood sugar (FBS), high total cholesterol (TC), high low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), hypertension (HTN), generalized obesity and abdominal obesity were considered as cardio metabolic risk factors and alanine transaminase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) were considered as liver enzymes. Data were analyzed using multiple logistic regression (MLR) analysis.Result: Psychosocial distress was detected in2027 (71.2) of boys and 1759 (63.3) of girls. Among boys, the mean of LDL, AST and DBP were higher and the mean FBS and HDL were lowering those with psychiatric distress than their other counterparts. Girls with psychosocial distress had significantly higher mean of HDL and FBS than those without psychiatric distress. Psychosocial distress significantly increased the odds of high LDL (OR = 2.36, 95CI 1.53, 3.64), high FBS (OR = 1.23, 95CI 1.02, 1.49) and low HDL (OR = 1.65, 95CI 1.41, 1.95).Conclusion: Psychosocial distress in adolescents is associated with increased risk of some cardio metabolic risk factors. © 2014 Qorbani et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd