Night Battle

A battle that was fought continuously in the Pacific Islands was the one with those adorable creatures of nature, land crabs and mosquitoes

White Paper: Lustre WAN over 100Gbps

This work is an international collaboration with Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany (RWTH) and the Center of Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany to analyze the effect of a high-bandwidth high-latency link on the I/O patterns of scientific applications using the 100Gbps transatlantic link.NSF Grant: America Connects to Europe (ACE) (Award #0962973

Today's Children, Tomorrow's America: Six Experts Face the Facts

Compiles essays about trends in family structure; how federal, state, and local budget deficits and projected cuts affect child poverty rates and health; and their long-term implications of reduced investment in children. Includes policy recommendations

The morphological development of a wood burl shader

In the field of computer graphics, shaders provide an interface between lights and surfaces, giving the appearance of metal, plastic, wood, etc. As the field progresses, more and more shaders are required to simulate a wider and wider variety of materials. We present a new shader for the simulation of wood burl, a complex material used in furniture, art, car interiors, and a host of other luxury items. This shader was developed through a morphological approach - a study of the original material, its structure, and growth. Consequently, research began with a thorough look at wood burl, polished and unpolished, in an assortment of different species. We discovered the appearance can be broken into three sub-appearances - knots, curl, and a subtle undergrain. These three sub-appearances interact to create the characteristic swirls and whorls of burl. For the subtle undergrain, we used a common oak shader, added noise, and faded it into the background. We then developed a system of randomly placing points through the material to act as knots. Since the knots grow and distort the surrounding grain, we used distance-scaled forces to push the surface coordinates around and between all the knots. When the oak shader is applied, it appears to swirl and curl around the knots, much like a stream between rocks. This created the first level of curl or swirly grained wood, but one level alone appeared flat. To solve this, we procedurally blended levels of curl to give a look of increased depth. Finally, we added reflection, gloss, and other surface properties to give a look of warmth and polish. All of these properties are controlled by a set of parameters in the shader's interface. By adjusting these parameters, the user can emulate a variety of different burl types

Using Near-Surface Photogrammetry Assessment of Surface Roughness (NSPAS) to assess the effectiveness of erosion control treatments applied to slope forming materials from a mine site in West Africa

Geo-spatial studies are increasingly using photogrammetry technology because the cost of the equipment is becoming cheaper, the techniques are accessible to non-experts and can generate better quality topographic data than traditional approaches. NSPAS (Near-Surface Photogrammetry Assessment of Surface Roughness) was developed to quantify the micro-topographic changes in ground surface roughness caused by simulated rainfall, to better understand the comparative erodibility of two non-soil and one soil slope forming materials from a mine in West Africa. This innovative approach creates DEMs (digital elevation models) using image pairs acquired by near-surface stereo photogrammetry (<300 m), to measure surface roughness within Leica Photogrammetry Suite 2011 (LPS) in ERDAS Imagine software and ESRI Arc-GIS. NSPAS can readily quantify aggregate breakdown processes across a 0.02 m2 surface by accurately detecting 0.84 mm to 2.49 mm changes in surface topography. The methodology is advantageous to micro-scale (2 mm) at the surface. With further development NSPASS has the capability to be used in many other types of geospatial investigations

Use of IU parallel computing resources and high performance file systems - July 2013 to Dec 2014

This report details use of IU's parallel computing resources and high performance file systems from July 2013 through December 2014

Uppermost Triassic to Lower Jurassic sediments of the island of Ireland and its surrounding basins

The uppermost Triassic to Lower Jurassic interval has not been extensively studied across the island of Ireland. This paper seeks to redress that situation and presents a synthesis of records of the uppermost Triassic and Lower Jurassic from both onshore and offshore basins as well as describing the sedimentological characteristics of the main lithostratigraphical units encountered. Existing data have been supplemented with a re-examination and logging of some outcrops and the integration of data from recent hydrocarbon exploration wells and boreholes. The Late Triassic Penarth Group and Early Jurassic Lias Group can be recognised across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. In some onshore basins, almost 600 m of strata are recorded, however in offshore basins thicknesses in excess of two kilometres for the Lower Jurassic have now been recognised, although little detailed information is currently available. The transition from the Triassic to the Jurassic was a period of marked global sea-level rise and climatic change (warming) and this is reflected in the lithostratigraphical record of these sediments in the basins of Northern Ireland and offshore basins of the Republic of Ireland. In general, the sediments of this interval are thicker than those in Great Britain and have potential for detailed study of climatic and sea-level fluctuation

Increased Frequency and Compromised Function of T Regulatory Cells in Systemic Sclerosis (SSc) Is Related to a Diminished CD69 and TGFβ Expression

Contains fulltext : 80239.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)BACKGROUND: Regulatory T cells (Tregs) are essential in the control of tolerance. Evidence implicates Tregs in human autoimmune conditions. Here we investigated their role in systemic sclerosis (SSc). METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Patients were subdivided as having limited cutaneous SSc (lcSSc, n = 20) or diffuse cutaneous SSc (dcSSc, n = 48). Further subdivision was made between early dcSSc (n = 24) and late dcSSc (n = 24) based upon the duration of disease. 26 controls were studied for comparison. CD3+ cells were isolated using FACS and subsequently studied for the expression of CD4, CD8, CD25, FoxP3, CD127, CD62L, GITR, CD69 using flow cytometry. T cell suppression assays were performed using sorted CD4CD25(high)CD127(-) and CD4CD25(low)CD127(high) and CD3(+) cells. Suppressive function was correlated with CD69 surface expression and TGFbeta secretion/expression. The frequency of CD4(+)CD25(+) and CD25(high)FoxP3(high)CD127(neg) T cells was highly increased in all SSc subgroups. Although the expression of CD25 and GITR was comparable between groups, expression of CD62L and CD69 was dramatically lower in SSc patients, which correlated with a diminished suppressive function. Co-incubation of Tregs from healthy donors with plasma from SSc patients fully abrogated suppressive activity. Activation of Tregs from healthy donors or SSc patients with PHA significantly up regulated CD69 expression that could be inhibited by SSc plasma. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These results indicate that soluble factors in SSc plasma inhibit Treg function specifically that is associated with altered Treg CD69 and TGFbeta expression. These data suggest that a defective Treg function may underlie the immune dysfunction in systemic sclerosis

Performance and quality of service of data and video movement over a 100 Gbps testbed

AbstractDigital instruments and simulations are creating an ever-increasing amount of data. The need for institutions to acquire these data and transfer them for analysis, visualization, and archiving is growing as well. In parallel, networking technology is evolving, but at a much slower rate than our ability to create and store data. Single fiber 100 Gbps networking solutions have recently been deployed as national infrastructure. This article describes our experiences with data movement and video conferencing across a networking testbed, using the first commercially available single fiber 100 Gbps technology. The testbed is unique in its ability to be configured for a total length of 60, 200, or 400 km, allowing for tests with varying network latency. We performed low-level TCP tests and were able to use more than 99.9% of the theoretical available bandwidth with minimal tuning efforts. We used the Lustre file system to simulate how end users would interact with a remote file system over such a high performance link. We were able to use 94.4% of the theoretical available bandwidth with a standard file system benchmark, essentially saturating the wide area network. Finally, we performed tests with H.323 video conferencing hardware and quality of service (QoS) settings, showing that the link can reliably carry a full high-definition stream. Overall, we demonstrated the practicality of 100 Gbps networking and Lustre as excellent tools for data management