Asymmetric PCIe

Many devices such as accelerators, storage appliances, video transcoding accelerators, etc. have asymmetric bandwidth requirements. For example, the ingress bandwidth for a machine learning accelerator can be more than ten times the egress bandwidth. However, this asymmetry in bandwidth is not reflected in the interconnect. For example, PCI-express typically has as many lanes for host-to-device communications as it does for device-to-host communications. This disclosure presents techniques for asymmetric links between host and device. By reflecting the relative magnitudes of to-and-fro traffic more accurately, the asymmetric PCIe link achieves greater efficiency of communication

The role of diabetes in low back pain compared to non-diabetics

Background: Type 2 diabetes is a prevalent non-communicable disease, affecting significant proportion of the global population, with an estimated 382 million individuals affected. There exists a correlation among diabetes and low back pain. The objective of this investigation was to examine the potential association linking diabetes and low back pain by utilising the Oswestry disability Index as a gauge of the intensity of persistent lower back pain. Methods: The study was conducted by cross sectional method in which 200 patients with low back pain were included from period of October 2020 to September 2022. Oswestry disability index questionnaire was used for the intensity of lower back pain. Statistical package for the social sciences was used for data analysis. Results: In this study, out of 200 patients, 59 (29.5%) had diabetes and 141 (70.5%) were without diabetes, with a average age of 53.61±15.07 years. Overall, according to gender, patients were equally distributed, while female and male predominance was seen in diabetics and non-diabetics, respectively. Conclusions: The distribution of patients as per gender and ODI score did not differ, although more diabetics had a significantly higher ODI score than non-diabetics. A significant increase in blood glucose, HbA1c, microalbuminuria, and ODI score was noted in diabetics compared with non-diabetics, with significant positive associations of ODI with age, blood glucose, and HbA1c. The increased levels of the diabetic profile parameters and their association with the ODI indicate the possible role of diabetes with low back pain

Prospective study of treatment of extraarticular fractures of distal end radius by cross K wire fixation and cast immobilisation and its comparison with Kapandji’s method of intrafocal pinning anatomically and functionally

Background: Distal radius fractures account for 17% of all fractures in adults. The fracture of the lower end of radius crushes the mechanical foundation of man’s most elegant tool, the hand. No other fracture has a greater potential to devastate hand function. Extra-articular fractures (type A in the AO classification) require avoidance of malunion with angulation and shortening. Malalignment results in limitation of movement, changes in load distribution, midcarpal instability and an increased risk of osteoarthritis of the radiocarpal joint. Aims and objectives: Treatment of extraarticular fractures of distal end radius by cross K wire fixation and cast immobilisation and its comparison with Kapandji’s method of intrafocal pinning anatomically and functionally.Methods: Total 50 cases were included in the study. First 25 cases were treated by Kapandji’s method and next 25 cases were treated by cross K wire fixation and all cases were given below elbow cast after internal fixation. Patients were followed up at regular intervals and Anatomical and functional outcomes were evaluated in all the patients.Results: In our study anatomical end results were satisfactory in 96% and unsatisfactory in 4% of the subjects treated with cross K wire fixation and 72% and 28% in cases treated by Kapandji’s method whereas Functional end results were excellent in 28% cases, good in 68% cases, fair in 4% case and poor in 0% cases treated with cross k wire fixation and 12%, 60%, 24% and 4% in cases treated by Kapandji’s method.Conclusion: Cross K wire method proved to be better than Kapandji’s method of intrafocal K wire fixation both functionally and anatomically.

Discharge characteristics of a low-pressure geometrically asymmetric cylindrical capacitively coupled plasma with an axisymmetric magnetic field

We investigate the discharge characteristics of a low-pressure geometrically asymmetric cylindrical capacitively coupled plasma discharge with an axisymmetric magnetic field generating an EXB drift in the azimuthal direction. Vital discharge parameters, including electron density, electron temperature, DC self-bias, and Electron Energy distribution function (EEDF), are studied experimentally for varying magnetic field strength (B). A transition in the discharge asymmetry is observed along with a range of magnetic fields where the discharge is highly efficient with lower electron temperature. Outside this range of magnetic field, the plasma density drops, followed by an increase in the electron temperature. The observed behavior is attributed to the transition from geometrical asymmetry to magnetic field-associated symmetry due to reduced radial losses and plasma confinement in the peripheral region. In this region, the DC self-bias increases almost linearly from a large negative value to nearly zero, i.e., the discharge becomes symmetric. The EEDF undergoes a transition from bi-Maxwellian for unmagnetized to Maxwellian at intermediate B and finally becomes a weakly bi-Maxwellian at higher values of B. The above transitions present a novel way to independently control the ion energy and ion flux in a cylindrical CCP system using an axisymmetric magnetic field with an enhanced plasma density and lower electron temperature operation that is beneficial for plasma processing applications

Comparison of admission GCS score to admission GCS-P and FOUR scores for prediction of outcomes among patients with traumatic brain injury in the intensive care unit in India

Background This study aimed to determine the predictive power of the Full Outline of Unresponsiveness (FOUR) score and the Glasgow Coma Scale Pupil (GCS-P) score in determining outcomes for traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients. The Glasgow Outcome Scale (GOS) was used to evaluate patients at 1 month and 6 months after the injury. Methods We conducted a 15-month prospective observational study. It included 50 TBI patients admitted to the ICU who met our inclusion criteria. We used Pearson's correlation coefficient to relate coma scales and outcome measures. The predictive value of these scales was determined using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, calculating the area under the curve with a 99% confidence interval. All hypotheses were two-tailed, and significance was defined as P<0.01. Results In the present study, the GCS-P and FOUR scores among all patients on admission as well as in the subset of patients who were mechanically ventilated were statistically significant and strongly correlated with patient outcomes. The correlation coefficient of the GCS score compared to GCS-P and FOUR scores was higher and statistically significant. The areas under the ROC curve for the GCS, GCS-P, and FOUR scores and the number of computed tomography abnormalities were 0.912, 0.905, 0.937, and 0.324, respectively. Conclusions The GCS, GCS-P, and FOUR scores are all excellent predictors with a strong positive linear correlation with final outcome prediction. In particular, the GCS score has the best correlation with final outcome

TPU v4: An Optically Reconfigurable Supercomputer for Machine Learning with Hardware Support for Embeddings

In response to innovations in machine learning (ML) models, production workloads changed radically and rapidly. TPU v4 is the fifth Google domain specific architecture (DSA) and its third supercomputer for such ML models. Optical circuit switches (OCSes) dynamically reconfigure its interconnect topology to improve scale, availability, utilization, modularity, deployment, security, power, and performance; users can pick a twisted 3D torus topology if desired. Much cheaper, lower power, and faster than Infiniband, OCSes and underlying optical components are <5% of system cost and <3% of system power. Each TPU v4 includes SparseCores, dataflow processors that accelerate models that rely on embeddings by 5x-7x yet use only 5% of die area and power. Deployed since 2020, TPU v4 outperforms TPU v3 by 2.1x and improves performance/Watt by 2.7x. The TPU v4 supercomputer is 4x larger at 4096 chips and thus ~10x faster overall, which along with OCS flexibility helps large language models. For similar sized systems, it is ~4.3x-4.5x faster than the Graphcore IPU Bow and is 1.2x-1.7x faster and uses 1.3x-1.9x less power than the Nvidia A100. TPU v4s inside the energy-optimized warehouse scale computers of Google Cloud use ~3x less energy and produce ~20x less CO2e than contemporary DSAs in a typical on-premise data center.Comment: 15 pages; 16 figures; to be published at ISCA 2023 (the International Symposium on Computer Architecture

In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit

Many architects believe that major improvements in cost-energy-performance must now come from domain-specific hardware. This paper evaluates a custom ASIC---called a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)---deployed in datacenters since 2015 that accelerates the inference phase of neural networks (NN). The heart of the TPU is a 65,536 8-bit MAC matrix multiply unit that offers a peak throughput of 92 TeraOps/second (TOPS) and a large (28 MiB) software-managed on-chip memory. The TPU's deterministic execution model is a better match to the 99th-percentile response-time requirement of our NN applications than are the time-varying optimizations of CPUs and GPUs (caches, out-of-order execution, multithreading, multiprocessing, prefetching, ...) that help average throughput more than guaranteed latency. The lack of such features helps explain why, despite having myriad MACs and a big memory, the TPU is relatively small and low power. We compare the TPU to a server-class Intel Haswell CPU and an Nvidia K80 GPU, which are contemporaries deployed in the same datacenters. Our workload, written in the high-level TensorFlow framework, uses production NN applications (MLPs, CNNs, and LSTMs) that represent 95% of our datacenters' NN inference demand. Despite low utilization for some applications, the TPU is on average about 15X - 30X faster than its contemporary GPU or CPU, with TOPS/Watt about 30X - 80X higher. Moreover, using the GPU's GDDR5 memory in the TPU would triple achieved TOPS and raise TOPS/Watt to nearly 70X the GPU and 200X the CPU.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, 8 tables. To appear at the 44th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Toronto, Canada, June 24-28, 201

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

Impact of COVID-19 on cardiovascular testing in the United States versus the rest of the world

Objectives: This study sought to quantify and compare the decline in volumes of cardiovascular procedures between the United States and non-US institutions during the early phase of the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the care of many non-COVID-19 illnesses. Reductions in diagnostic cardiovascular testing around the world have led to concerns over the implications of reduced testing for cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality. Methods: Data were submitted to the INCAPS-COVID (International Atomic Energy Agency Non-Invasive Cardiology Protocols Study of COVID-19), a multinational registry comprising 909 institutions in 108 countries (including 155 facilities in 40 U.S. states), assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volumes of diagnostic cardiovascular procedures. Data were obtained for April 2020 and compared with volumes of baseline procedures from March 2019. We compared laboratory characteristics, practices, and procedure volumes between U.S. and non-U.S. facilities and between U.S. geographic regions and identified factors associated with volume reduction in the United States. Results: Reductions in the volumes of procedures in the United States were similar to those in non-U.S. facilities (68% vs. 63%, respectively; p = 0.237), although U.S. facilities reported greater reductions in invasive coronary angiography (69% vs. 53%, respectively; p < 0.001). Significantly more U.S. facilities reported increased use of telehealth and patient screening measures than non-U.S. facilities, such as temperature checks, symptom screenings, and COVID-19 testing. Reductions in volumes of procedures differed between U.S. regions, with larger declines observed in the Northeast (76%) and Midwest (74%) than in the South (62%) and West (44%). Prevalence of COVID-19, staff redeployments, outpatient centers, and urban centers were associated with greater reductions in volume in U.S. facilities in a multivariable analysis. Conclusions: We observed marked reductions in U.S. cardiovascular testing in the early phase of the pandemic and significant variability between U.S. regions. The association between reductions of volumes and COVID-19 prevalence in the United States highlighted the need for proactive efforts to maintain access to cardiovascular testing in areas most affected by outbreaks of COVID-19 infection