Identifying and Addressing Critical Issues in the Indian Construction Industry: Perspectives of Large Building Construction Clients

The Indian construction industry faces increasing challenges amidst serious performance shortfalls. Confronting similar issues in past decades, other countries such as the UK, USA, and Singapore commissioned high-powered studies and set up industry development bodies to address their own priorities. Initiatives in other countries are briefly reviewed before outlining the launch of the “Construction Industry Improvement Initiative India” (Ci3 India) that aims to address our own challenges. This paper focuses on identifying and launching a platform to address the current and imminent critical issues in the Indian Construction Industry. Nineteen critical issues were identifed, verifed, and validated through four focus group sessions at two Regional Roundtables with 54 high calibre large building construction clients, academicians, and other invited experts. The identifed issues were consolidated to 10 Action Items. Seven Action Teams were then mobilized to work on the 10 Action Items. Having consolidated a base consensus of clients on the way forward, it was also proposed to develop a “Construction Clients’ Charter” that will set out basic principles, protocols, and targeted good practices by lead clients, who by voluntarily agreeing and implementing these together, could catalyse signifcant industry improvement

This page is intentionally left blank. Feedback Directed Prefetching: Improving the Performance and Bandwidth-Efficiency of Hardware Prefetchers

High performance processors employ hardware data prefetching to reduce the negative performance impact of large main memory latencies. While prefetching improves performance substantially on many programs, it can significantly reduce performance on others. Also, prefetching can significantly increase memory bandwidth requirements. This paper proposes a mechanism that incorporates dynamic feedback into the design of the prefetcher to increase the average performance improvement provided by prefetching as well as to reduce the negative performance and bandwidth impact of prefetching. Our mechanism estimates prefetcher accuracy, prefetcher timeliness, and prefetcher-caused cache pollution to adjust the aggressiveness of the data prefetcher dynamically. We introduce a new method to track cache pollution caused by the prefetcher at run-time. We also introduce a mechanism that dynamically decides where in the LRU stack to insert the prefetched blocks in the cache based on the cache pollution caused by the prefetcher. Using the proposed dynamic mechanism improves average performance by 6.5 % on the 17 memory-intensive benchmarks in the SPEC CPU2000 suite compared to the best-performing conventional stream-based data prefetcher configuration, while it consumes 18.7 % less memory bandwidth. Compared to a conventional stream-based data prefetcher configuration that consumes similar amount of memory bandwidth, feedback directed prefetching provides 13.6 % higher performance. Our results show that feedback-directed prefetching eliminates the large negative performance impact incurred on som

Feedback directed prefetching: Improving the performance and bandwidth-efficiency of hardware prefetchers

High performance processors employ hardware data prefetching to reduce the negative performance impact of large main memory latencies. While prefetching improves performance substantially on many programs, it can significantly reduce performance on others. Also, prefetching can significantly increase memory bandwidth requirements. This paper proposes a mechanism that incorporates dynamic feedback into the design of the prefetcher to increase the performance improvement provided by prefetching as well as to reduce the negative performance and bandwidth impact of prefetching. Our mechanism estimates prefetcher accuracy, prefetcher timeliness, and prefetcher-caused cache pollution to adjust the aggressiveness of the data prefetcher dynamically. We introduce a new method to track cache pollution caused by the prefetcher at run-time. We also introduce a mechanism that dynamically decides where in the LRU stack to insert the prefetched blocks in the cache based on the cache pollution caused by the prefetcher. Using the proposed dynamic mechanism improves average performance by 6.5 % on 17 memory-intensive benchmarks in the SPEC CPU2000 suite compared to the best-performing conventional stream-based data prefetcher configuration, while it consumes 18.7 % less memory bandwidth. Compared to a conventional stream-based data prefetcher configuration that consumes similar amount of memory bandwidth, feedback directed prefetching provides 13.6 % higher performance. Our results show that feedback-directed prefetching eliminates the large negative performance impact incurred on some benchmarks due to prefetching, and it is applicable to streambased prefetchers, global-history-buffer based delta correlation prefetchers, and PC-based stride prefetchers. 1

Clinicopathological Profile of Lung Cancer Patients in a Teaching Hospital in South India

Introduction: Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer related deaths in the world. The incidence of lung cancer is increasing in India and there is a need to understand the natural history of this disease. Aim of the study: To study the clinico- pathological- radiological profile of patients diagnosed with lung cancer from January 2013 to May 2015 at a tertiary care teaching hospital. Materials and Methods: Inpatient records of all patients admitted during the study period were examined and  all patients with a histologically proven diagnosis of bronchogenic carcinoma were recruited. Demographic characteristics, clinical, radiological and pathological details of each patient were recorded. Results: Fifty four patients with lung cancer were identified. Forty three (79.6%) were male and 11 (20.4%) were female. Thirty two (59.7%) were smokers and 22 (40.7%) were non smokers. Cough and expectoration (61.1%) was the most common presenting symptom followed by breathlessness (59.3%). Mass lesion (81.5%) was the most common radiological presentation and adenocarcinoma (42.6%) was the most common histological subtype. When compared to fiber optic bronchoscopy, image guided percutaneous biopsy had a better  yield for diagnosing lung cancer (51.9% vs 48.1%). But this difference was not statistically significant (p=0.892) Conclusion: Adenocarcinoma is replacing squamous cell carcinoma as the most common type of lung cancer in India

Genome analysis of triple phages that curtails MDR E. coli with ML based host receptor prediction and its evaluation

Abstract Infections by multidrug resistant bacteria (MDR) are becoming increasingly difficult to treat and alternative approaches like phage therapy, which is unhindered by drug resistance, are urgently needed to tackle MDR bacterial infections. During phage therapy phage cocktails targeting different receptors are likely to be more effective than monophages. In the present study, phages targeting carbapenem resistant clinical isolate of E. coli U1007 was isolated from Ganges River (U1G), Cooum River (CR) and Hospital waste water (M). Capsid architecture discerned using TEM identified the phage families as Podoviridae for U1G, Myoviridae for CR and Siphoviridae for M phage. Genome sequencing showed the phage genomes varied in size U1G (73,275 bp) CR (45,236 bp) and M (45,294 bp). All three genomes lacked genes encoding tRNA sequence, antibiotic resistant or virulent genes. A machine learning (ML) based multi-class classification model using Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and Decision Tree were employed to predict the host receptor targeted by receptor binding protein of all 3 phages and the best performing algorithm Random Forest predicted LPS O antigen, LamB or OmpC for U1G; FhuA, OmpC for CR phage; and FhuA, LamB, TonB or OmpF for the M phage. OmpC was validated as receptor for U1G by physiological experiments. In vivo intramuscular infection study in zebrafish showed that cocktail of dual phages (U1G + M) along with colsitin resulted in a significant 3.5 log decline in cell counts. Our study highlights the potential of ML tool to predict host receptor and proves the utility of phage cocktail to restrict E. coli U1007 in vivo

B-3-Tree: Byte-Addressable Binary B-Tree for Persistent Memory

In this work, we propose B-3-tree, a hybrid index for persistent memory that leverages the byte-addressability of the in-memory index and the page locality of B-trees. As in the byte-addressable in-memory index, B-3-tree is updated by 8-byte store instructions. Also, as in disk-based index, B-3-tree is failure-atomic since it makes every 8-byte store instruction transform a consistent index into another consistent index without the help of expensive logging. Since expensive logging becomes unnecessary, the number of cacheline flush instructions required for B-3-tree is significantly reduced. Our performance study shows that B-3-tree outperforms other state-of-the-art persistent indexes in terms of insert and delete performance. While B-3-tree shows slightly worse performance for point query performance, the range query performance of B-3-tree is 2x faster than FAST and FAIR B-tree because the leaf page size of B-3-tree can be set to 8x larger than that of FAST and FAIR B-tree without degrading insertion performance. We also show that read transactions can access B-3- tree without acquiring a shared lock because B-3-tree remains always consistent while a sequence of 8-byte write operations are making changes to it. As a result, B-3-tree provides high concurrency level comparable to FAST and FAIR B-tree