A performance comparison of the Cray-2 and the Cray X-MP

A suite of thirteen large Fortran benchmark codes were run on Cray-2 and Cray X-MP supercomputers. These codes were a mix of compute-intensive scientific application programs (mostly Computational Fluid Dynamics) and some special vectorized computation exercise programs. For the general class of programs tested on the Cray-2, most of which were not specially tuned for speed, the floating point operation rates varied under a variety of system load configurations from 40 percent up to 125 percent of X-MP performance rates. It is concluded that the Cray-2, in the original system configuration studied (without memory pseudo-banking) will run untuned Fortran code, on average, about 70 percent of X-MP speeds

A comparison of the Cray-2 performance before and after the installation of memory pseudo-banking

A suite of 13 large Fortran benchmark codes were run on a Cray-2 configured with memory pseudo-banking circuits, and floating point operation rates were measured for each under a variety of system load configurations. These were compared with similar flop measurements taken on the same system before installation of the pseudo-banking. A useful memory access efficiency parameter was defined and calculated for both sets of performance rates, allowing a crude quantitative measure of the improvement in efficiency due to pseudo-banking. Programs were categorized as either highly scalar (S) or highly vectorized (V) and either memory-intensive or register-intensive, giving 4 categories: S-memory, S-register, V-memory, and V-register. Using flop rates as a simple quantifier of these 4 categories, a scatter plot of efficiency gain vs Mflops roughly illustrates the improvement in floating point processing speed due to pseudo-banking. On the Cray-2 system tested this improvement ranged from 1 percent for S-memory codes to about 12 percent for V-memory codes. No significant gains were made for V-register codes, which was to be expected

A STUDY OF DICTATION AND TRANSCRIPTION PRACTICES IN KANSAS CLASS A PUBLIC SUPPORTED HIGH SCHOOLS

This study was made to determine the present status of the dictation and transcription phases of shorthand in the public supported high schools in Kansas. In collecting the data necessary for the study, check lists were mailed to 69 public supported high schools; these were the Class A high schools in Kansas having an enrollment of 250 or more. The findings from the study show that approximately one-half of the schools approve of dictation and transcription as a separate course; however, only one school stated that dictation and transcription are offered as a separate course. Pretranscription training is offered by a majority of schools; it is given during the second semester, first year of shorthand in a majority of schools. All schools that reported have first year students transcribe. Approximately one-half of the schools reported the basis for permitting students to take advanced shorthand and advanced typewriting is a passing grade of “D.” A minority of the responses consider a perfect copy or verbatim transcript as necessary for a mailable transcription. As to the method used in the teaching of shorthand, functional, manual, and a combination of the two are all used with approximately the same frequency

Academic Classrooms and Careers Defined by Race and Gender

The collective classroom and career experiences of a Black woman and White male professor are examined of the last twenty years are examined. It is revealed, that despite the presence of diversity classes and increases in diversity, as regards student and faculty presence, the circumstances of the faculty in this critical examination were defined by the student, faculty, and institutional reactions to their postionalities. Predictably, the White male faculty member had the more positive experiences, while the Black woman’s circumstances were more negative

Positionality: Whiteness as a Social Construct that Drives Classroom Dynamics

When teachers and learners enter classrooms, they bring their own positions in the hierarchies that order the world. This study examines how one of those positionalities, Whiteness, drives classroom dynamics

Race and Adult Education: A Critical Review of the North American Literature

The paper critically evaluates the North American literature showing how race has been treated historically and presents three perspectives on race that inform contemporary research

The Impact of Grading on a Curve: Assessing the Results of Kulick and Wright’s Simulation Analysis

Kulick and Wright concluded, based on theoretical mathematical simulations of hypothetical student exam scores, that assigning exam grades to students based on the relative position of their exam performance scores within a normal curve may be unfair, given the role that randomness plays in any given student’s performance on any given exam. However, their modeling predicts that academically heterogeneous students should fare much better than high achieving, academically homogenous students. We assess their conclusion indirectly using student scores from actual exams in actual university classes. We document that academically heterogeneous students do tend to perform at a similar level on different exams across a given semester: correlations among six different assessments were moderately strong and highly significant. We confirm their prediction that actual student scores for academically heterogeneous first-year students do not reveal gross random variation. We encourage similar analysis of scores for high achieving, academically homogeneous students