”A pie de calle” (“Grassroots”): Social housing and urban regeneration

En febrero de 2012 el grupo de investigación NuTAC presentó la exposición "A pie de calle: vivienda social y regenera-ción urbana" en la sala Arquería de Nuevos Ministerios (Madrid). En ella se presentaba el segundo episodio del proyecto I+D+VS, dedicado al estudio de la vivienda social contemporánea en los procesos de regeneración urbana. Como es sabido, la regeneración urbana constituye un reto fundamental para el futuro de las ciudades, que influye de forma deci-siva en factores como la seguridad, la integración social, la protección del ambiente, el desarrollo económico y el em-pleo. “A pie de calle” propone aprender de la experiencia acumulada en ocho ciudades del mundo, ocho casos interna-cionales de regeneración urbana en los que la vivienda social asume distintos papeles y grados de protagonismo. La exposición presenta y analiza los casos de forma sistemática a través de un conjunto de dibujos, datos y conceptos que permiten la comparación. La incorporación de videoproyecciones permite, además, trabajar con el factor tiempo, decisi-vo en los procesos de regeneración urbana, y abandonar las visiones despegadas del terreno, tan frecuentes en el urbanismo, para recorrer la ciudad real o imaginada “a pie de calle”.In February 2012, the NuTAC research group presented the exhibition "Grassroots: social housing and urban regenera-tion" in the Arcade of the New Ministries (Madrid). The second episode of the I+D+VS project is set out, dedicated to the study of contemporary social housing in the processes of urban regeneration. It is well-known that urban regeneration 1holds the key for thefuture of cities, and has a decisive influence on factors such as security, social integration, protec-tion of the environment, development of the economy, and employment. This grassroots approach proposes learning from experience accumulated from eight cities worldwide: eight international cases of urban regeneration in which social housing assumes distinct roles and degrees of prominence. The exhibition presents and systematically analyses the cases through a set of drawings, data and concepts that enable their compari-son. The incorporation of video projections also allows the time factor to be incorporated, which is decisive in the proces-ses of urban regeneration, and those visions, so often encountered in urban planning, that are detached from reality to be abandoned, in order to explore the real or imagined “grassroots”.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España) HAR 2010-1806

Analysis of advanced European nuclear fuel cycle scenarios including transmutation and economic estimates

Four European fuel cycle scenarios involving transmutation options (in coherence with PATEROS and CPESFR EU projects) have been addressed from a point of view of resources utilization and economic estimates. Scenarios include: (i) the current fleet using Light Water Reactor (LWR) technology and open fuel cycle, (ii) full replacement of the initial fleet with Fast Reactors (FR) burning U?Pu MOX fuel, (iii) closed fuel cycle with Minor Actinide (MA) transmutation in a fraction of the FR fleet, and (iv) closed fuel cycle with MA transmutation in dedicated Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS). All scenarios consider an intermediate period of GEN-III+ LWR deployment and they extend for 200 years, looking for long term equilibrium mass flow achievement. The simulations were made using the TR_EVOL code, capable to assess the management of the nuclear mass streams in the scenario as well as economics for the estimation of the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) and other costs. Results reveal that all scenarios are feasible according to nuclear resources demand (natural and depleted U, and Pu). Additionally, we have found as expected that the FR scenario reduces considerably the Pu inventory in repositories compared to the reference scenario. The elimination of the LWR MA legacy requires a maximum of 55% fraction (i.e., a peak value of 44 FR units) of the FR fleet dedicated to transmutation (MA in MOX fuel, homogeneous transmutation) or an average of 28 units of ADS plants (i.e., a peak value of 51 ADS units). Regarding the economic analysis, the main usefulness of the provided economic results is for relative comparison of scenarios and breakdown of LCOE contributors rather than provision of absolute values, as technological readiness levels are low for most of the advanced fuel cycle stages. The obtained estimations show an increase of LCOE ? averaged over the whole period ? with respect to the reference open cycle scenario of 20% for Pu management scenario and around 35% for both transmutation scenarios. The main contribution to LCOE is the capital costs of new facilities, quantified between 60% and 69% depending on the scenario. An uncertainty analysis is provided around assumed low and high values of processes and technologies

FRAGILIDAD FINANCIERA DE LAS FIRMAS EN COLOMBIA, 2000-2006: UN ANÁLISIS DISCRIMINANTE DE UN MODELO

Con base en Foley (2003) se establecen las situaciones financieras de las firmas, clasificándolas en cubiertas, especulativas y Ponzi. Se aplica también un análisis discriminante, técnica multivariante que permite una clasificación empírica basada en los índices financieros. Como resultado, la clasificación teórica es coherente con la empírica y evidencian que en la fase creciente de un auge hay un buen porcentaje de firmas cubiertas, pero a su vez, surge un leve deterioro de su estabilidad financiera. Así, se da evidencia empírica de consideraciones relevantes de la Hipótesis de Inestabilidad Financiera, se testea el segmento microeconómico de Foley (2003) y se plantea un indicador alternativo de la fragilidad financiera.Hipótesis de inestabilidad financiera, dinámica de financiamiento, análisis discriminante.

In-memory application-level checkpoint-based migration for MPI programs

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Supercomputing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-014-1120-2[Abstract] Process migration provides many benefits for parallel environments including dynamic load balancing, data access locality or fault tolerance. This paper describes an in-memory application-level checkpoint-based migration solution for MPI codes that uses the Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) to write the checkpoint files. The main features of the proposed solution are transparency for the user, achieved through the use of CPPC (ComPiler for Portable Checkpointing); portability, as the application-level approach makes the solution adequate for any MPI implementation and operating system, and the use of the HDF5 file format enables the restart on different architectures; and high performance, by saving the checkpoint files to memory instead of to disk through the use of the HDF5 in-memory files. Experimental results prove that the in-memory approach reduces significantly the I/O cost of the migration process.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Galicia. Consellería de Economía e Industria; 10PXIB105180P

Failure Avoidance in MPI Applications Using an Application-Level Approach

[Abstract] Execution times of large-scale computational science and engineering parallel applications are usually longer than the mean-time-between-failures. For this reason, hardware failures must be tolerated by the applications to ensure that not all computation done is lost on machine failures. Checkpointing and rollback recovery is one of the most popular techniques to provide fault tolerance support to parallel applications. However, when a failure occurs, most checkpointing mechanisms require a complete restart of the parallel application from the last checkpoint. New advances in the prediction of hardware failures have led to the development of proactive process migration approaches, where tasks are migrated in a preventive way when node failures are anticipated, avoiding the restart of the whole application. The work presented in this paper extends an application-level checkpointing framework to proactively migrate message passing interface (MPI) processes when impending failures are notified, without having to restart the entire application. The main features of the proposed solution are: low overhead in failure-free executions, avoiding the checkpoint dumping associated to rolling back strategies; low overhead at migration time, by means of the design of a light and asynchronous protocol to achieve a consistent global state; transparency for the user, thanks to the use of a compiler tool and a runtime library and portability, as it is not locked into a particular architecture, operating system or MPI implementation.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Galicia. Consellería de Economía e Industria; 10PXIB105180P

Reducing the overhead of an MPI application-level migration approach

[Abstract] Process migration provides many benefits for parallel environments including dynamic load balance, data access locality, or fault tolerance. This work proposes a solution that reduces the memory and I/O overhead in an application-level checkpoint-based migration approach. The proposal splits the checkpoint files in order to overlap the writing of the state in the terminating processes with the read and restarting operation in the newly spawned processes. It has been tested using the MPI NAS Parallel Benchmarks, showing encouraging results, both in terms of memory consumption and I/O migration times.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; TIN2013-42148-PGalicia. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria; GRC2013/05

Improving Scalability of Application-Level Checkpoint-Recovery by Reducing Checkpoint Sizes

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in New Generation Computing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00354-013-0302-4[Abstract] The execution times of large-scale parallel applications on nowadays multi/many-core systems are usually longer than the mean time between failures. Therefore, parallel applications must tolerate hardware failures to ensure that not all computation done is lost on machine failures. Checkpointing and rollback recovery is one of the most popular techniques to implement fault-tolerant applications. However, checkpointing parallel applications is expensive in terms of computing time, network utilization and storage resources. Thus, current checkpoint-recovery techniques should minimize these costs in order to be useful for large scale systems. In this paper three different and complementary techniques to reduce the size of the checkpoints generated by application-level checkpointing are proposed and implemented. Detailed experimental results obtained on a multicore cluster show the effectiveness of the proposed methods to reduce checkpointing cost.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Galicia. Consellería de Economía e Industria; 10PXIB105180P

Simulation of a biorefinery process as learning tool in chemical engineering degree

Currently, the search for alternative biomass to be used as renewable sources for energy production is one of the most important challenges to achieve a sustainable growth based on a bioeconomy strategy (Mendes et al., 2009). In this context, lignocellulosic waste are a renewable, clean, inexpensive and with high availability for the manufacture of biofuels. In this sense, the main objective of this study was the simulation and design of engineering processes that allows the valorization of lignocellulosic waste and the obtaining of biofuels as alternative to fossil fuels. This goal implies the practical application of the theoretical knowledge acquired by the student during the chemical engineering degree. Specifically, the students designed and simulated a biorefinery process that consisted of a Kraft pulping process as starting point of two main lines of production: (1) Process I: production of bioethanol and (2) Process II: direct and indirect production of dimethylether (DME), both from lignocellulosic biomass (Fig.1). Two commercial simulation packages, ASPEN HYSYS® and UNISIM were used to simulate the production of dimethylether and bioethanol, respectively. The first step was determining a strategic situation for the installation of the biorefinery. The central area of Andalusia (between the municipalities of Lucena and Antequera) was considered the most adequate area to develop the installation of the biorefinery plant after evaluating the biomass available inside of 100 kms of distance around this place. Specifically, different biomass mixtures were considered in order to ensure the viability of a constant inlet flow of biomass in the biorefinery. In function of this inlet flow of biomass, the installations were designed and dimensioned in each stage of the process. The student carried out a wide revision of state of the art to decide the most adequate processes among different alternatives to obtain dimethylether and bioethanol. The different stages selected as the most adequate in each line of the process can be observed in Fig.1. Moreover, the students evaluated the different alternatives for the valorisation and optimization of the by-products generated in each stage of the process in order to minimize the consuming of chemical compounds and energy requirements. Therefore, the students learnt to develop a real engineering process more sustainable and friendly with the environment. To sum up, the used of programs to simulate the transformation of lignocellulosic biomass in biofuels, such as, bioethanol or dimethylether, which is a process with several social, environmental and economic advantages, was an interesting learning tool for students of chemical engineering degree. Keywords Bioethanol, design, dimethylether, Kraft pulping process, simulations. References Mendes, C.V.T., Carvalho, M.G.V.S., Baptista, C.M.S.G., Rocha, J.M.S., Soares, B.I.G., Sousa, G.D.A., 2009. Valorisation of hardwood hemicelluloses in the kraft pulping process by using an integrated biorefinery concept. Food Bioproduct Process 87:197–207.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech MINECO: Proyecto CTQ2015-68654-

Technique to evaluate the thermoregulatory capacity before thermal stress. Application case of thermographic images to blood flow monitoring

7 p.In order to improve the acquisition of skills in nursing and physiotherapy, a new learning methodology is presented. To this end, a laboratory practice based on the combination of thermographic technologies and clinical practice is shown. The thermographic images are used for the evaluation of the thermoregulatory system of the hands, with particular emphasis on Raynaud's syndrome or phenomenon. In Raynaud's syndrome, alterations in surface temperature occur in peripheral regions such as the hands. In this methodological practice, thermographic information is evaluated to observe the physiological response to thermal stress, information that can be handled by students via e-learning. It is a protocol model of thermal stress by immersing hands in cold water. The present work is related to the application of infrared technology that can be used not only for the acquisition of practical skills, but also for the evaluation of competencies in the area of health sciences. In this practical project the student is able to apply complex competences in the field that will be developed throughout their career in both clinical and / or researchS