3D-Mesomechanical analysis of external sulfate attack in concrete

The present study focuses on degradation of concrete by external sulfate attack. The numerical model developed by the MECMAT/UPC group, incorporates coupled C-M analysis using a meso-mechanical approach with discrete cracking, using the MEF and zero thickness interface elements with a constitutive law based on nonlinear fracture mechanics concepts. Examples of application are run on 2D and 3D samples, with geometries and FE meshes generated with a code developed also in-house. The numerical analysis is carried out using two independent codes and a “staggered” procedure. The first code performs the mechanical analysis and the second the diffusive/reaction chemical problem. 2D uncoupled and coupled analysis are presented and discussed. Preliminary coupled 3D results are also presented and compared with equivalent 2D results, and the differences are detected and analyzed

New data about the presence of white grouper Epinephelus aeneus (Osteichthyes: Serranidae) in Balearic Islands (Western Mediterranean)

Abstract not availabl

Check-list of interstitial polychaetes from intertidal and shallow subtidal soft bottoms of Tenerife, Canary Islands

A check-list of polychaete species from two stations on the south coast of Tenerife (Los Abrigos and Los Cristianos) at two different tidal levels, intertidal and shallow subtidal (3 m depth) is presented. A total of 47 species were collected, the hesionid Microphthalmus pseudoaberrans Campoy & Viéitez, 1982 and the spionids Rhynchospio glutaea (Ehlers, 1897) and Spio filicornis (O.F. Müller, 1776) being the most abundant. With 18 species the family Syllidae is the most diverse, followed by the Spionidae and Paraonidae with 6 and 5 species, respectively. The interstitial polychaetes found are represented by both meiofaunalsized and small-sized macrofaunal species

SIN ENGAÑOS ¿CUÁNTO HAN CAMBIADO LAS COSAS EN EL MUNDO EDITORIAL PARA LAS NARRADORAS VENEZOLANAS?

Este artículo explora, a través de las preguntasde Virginia Woolf al comienzo de Unahabitación propia:” ¿Tenéis alguna nociónde cuántos libros se escriben al año sobrelas mujeres? ¿Cuántos están escritos porhombres?”, la complejidad de la relaciónde las narradoras venezolanas con el mundoeditorial a través de un apretado viaje desdelos años 30 hasta el presente. Este espaciode la narrativa, trabajo intelectual sostenido,sin horario y a dedicación exclusiva, hasido ocupado en su mayoría por hombresy representó y representa un camino tortuosopara las escritoras por la inequidad manifiestaque se produce a la hora de comparar cuántose publica a los narradores y cuánto a lasnarradoras en el país

Three new records of Desmodorids (Nematoda, Desmodoridae) from sandy seabeds of the Canary islands

In an ecological study of meiofaunal assemblages in two locations (Los Abrigos and Los Cristianos) of Tenerife (Canary Islands, NE Atlantic Ocean), several desmodorid species were found throughout the study period. Three species belonging to the family Desmodoridae were collected in intertidal and shallow subtidal sandy seabeds. These species were Desmodorella aff. tenuispiculum Allgen, 1928, Metachromadora sp. and Spirinia parasitifera Bastian, 1865. Descriptions, figures and tables with meristic data are presented. Moreover, differences between canarian and specimens from other geographical regions were discussed.Durante la realización de un estudio ecológico de las comunidades meiofaunales en dos localidades de muestreo (Los Abrigos y Los Cristianos) de la isla de Tenerife (Islas Canarias, Océano Atántico), varios ejemplares de desmodóridos fueron recolectados. Tres especies pertenecientes a la familia Desmodoridae fueron encontradas en fondos arenosos intermareales y submareales someros. Estas tres especies fueron: Desmodorella aff. tenuispiculum Allgen, 1928, Metachromadora sp. y Spirinia parasitifera Bastian, 1865. Se presentan descripciones, figuras y tablas con datos merísticos de estas especies. Además, se detallan las diferencias encontradas entre los ejemplares canarios y los procedentes de otras áreas geográficas

DNN pruning with principal component analysis and connection importance estimation

DNN pruning reduces memory footprint and computational work of DNN-based solutions to improve performance and energy-efficiency. An effective pruning scheme should be able to systematically remove connections and/or neurons that are unnecessary or redundant, reducing the DNN size without any loss in accuracy. In this paper we show that some of the most popular pruning schemes, such as the Near Zero Weights, require an extremely time-consuming iterative process that requires retraining the DNN many times to tune the pruning hyperparameters. Then, we propose a DNN pruning scheme based on Principal Component Analysis and relative importance of each neuron’s connection (PCA+DIRIE) that automatically finds the optimized DNN in one shot without requiring hand-tuning of multiple parameters. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our method on several benchmarks. Notably, on ImageNet, PCA+DIRIE can prune up to 60% of ResNet-50 with negligible impact on accuracy.This work has been supported by the CoCoUnit ERC Advanced Grantof the EU’s Horizon 2020 program (grant No 833057), the Spanish StateResearch Agency under grant PID2020-113172RB-I00 (MCIN/AEI), theICREA Academia program, and the Spanish Ministry of Education undergrant FPU15/02294.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

CREW: Computation reuse and efficient weight storage for hardware-accelerated MLPs and RNNs

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved tremendous success for cognitive applications. The core operation in a DNN is the dot product between quantized inputs and weights. Prior works exploit the weight/input repetition that arises due to quantization to avoid redundant computations in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, in this paper we show that their effectiveness is severely limited when applied to FullyConnected (FC) layers, which are commonly used in state-of-the-art DNNs, as it is the case of modern Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Transformer models. To improve energy-efficiency of FC computation we present CREW, a hardware accelerator that implements Computation Reuse and an Efficient Weight Storage mechanism to exploit the large number of repeated weights in FC layers. CREW first performs the multiplications of the unique weights by their respective inputs and stores the results in an on-chip buffer. The storage requirements are modest due to the small number of unique weights and the relatively small size of the input compared to convolutional layers. Next, CREW computes each output by fetching and adding its required products. To this end, each weight is replaced offline by an index in the buffer of unique products. Indices are typically smaller than the quantized weights, since the number of unique weights for each input tends to be much lower than the range of quantized weights, which reduces storage and memory bandwidth requirements. Overall, CREW greatly reduces the number of multiplications and provides significant savings in model memory footprint and memory bandwidth usage. We evaluate CREW on a diverse set of modern DNNs. On average, CREW provides 2.61x speedup and 2.42x energy savings over a TPU-like accelerator. Compared to UCNN, a state-of-art computation reuse technique, CREW achieves 2.10x speedup and 2.08x energy savings on average.This work has been supported by the CoCoUnit ERC Advanced Grant of the EU’s Horizon 2020 program (grant No 833057), the Spanish State Research Agency (MCIN/AEI) under grant PID2020-113172RB-I00, the ICREA Academia program, and the Spanish Ministry of Education under grant FPU15/02294.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Effect of a thermal annealing on the mechanical behaviour of green pm compacts

Cold die compaction can produce different effects on the dimensional and mechanical behaviour of green PM compacts. They can be due to different causes, such as residual stresses, microcracks and others. Residual stresses should be relieved by means of applying thermal annealing treatments. In this work, the authors present the results obtained from uniaxial compression tests applied on green specimens of an atomised iron based powder, compacted to different densities and having undergone thermal annealings at several temperatures, always below the sintering one. The stress-strain compression curves obtained are compared with those corresponding to as compacted samples. The results seem indicate the existence of residual stresses that could act at different levels: microscopically, in the contact among particles, and macroscopically, in the overall specimen resistance.Postprint (published version