Rethinking DRAM design and organization for energy-constrained multicores

PosterDRAM vendors have traditionally optimized for low cost and high performance, often making design decisions that incur energy penalties. For example, a single conventional DRAM access activates thousands of bitlines in many chips, to return a single cache line to the CPU. The other bits may be accessed if there is high locality in the access stream. Otherwise significant energy is wasted, especially when memory access locality is reduced as core, thread, and socket counts increase. Instead we propose and analyze two optimizations which activate as little of the DRAM circuitry as possible, while incurring only modest performance penalties. The first approach, Selective Bitline Activation (SBA), is compatible with existing DRAM standards. SBA waits for both RAS and CAS signals to arrive before activating exactly those bitlines that provide the requested cache line. Our second proposal, Single Subarray Access (SSA), re-organizes the layout of DRAM subarrays and the mapping of data to subarrays so that the entire cache line is fetched from a single subarray. Since SSA reads an entire cache line from a single DRAM, we also examine the addition of DRAM checksums, to increase error detection and correction capabilities. The approach is similar to existing methods used on disk drives. We then provide chipkill-level reliability through RAID techniques. The SSA design yields memory energy savings of 6X, while incurring an area cost of 4.5%, and even improving performance by up to 15%. Our chipkill solution has significantly lower capacity and energy overheads than other known chipkill solutions, while incurring only an 11% performance penalty compared to an SSA memory system without chipkill

Dietary diversity and anthropometric status of 6–36 months old children of Mumbai city

Background: Dietary diversity (DD) is an indicator of food security, accessibility, availability, and also a significant predictor of growth. Poor feeding practices are responsible for low DD which affects the nutritional status of child. Objective: The objective of the study was to assess the association of DD with nutritional status of urban slum children. Methodology: Data were collected using structured interview schedule on 823 children from 16 slums of western suburbs of Mumbai city. DD score was calculated using food frequency questionnaire as per Food and Agriculture Organization. Weight and height measurements of all children were taken using standard techniques, and nutritional status was assessed using Z scores in terms of wasting, stunting, and underweight as per the World Health Organization norms. Results: About 5.4% children were severely wasted, 10.2% children were severely underweight, and 24.7% children were severely stunted. About 22.1% children had low DD scores, 41.3% had scores indicating medium diversity, and 36.6% children had high scores for DD. Children who were severely undernourished, i.e. those whose Z scores were ≤3 tended to have lower DD scores than their better-nourished counterparts for all three nutritional status indicators - weight for height, weight for age, and height for age. Conclusion: DD plays an important role in improving the nutritional status of child. Therefore, there is need to educate mothers in terms of DD to improve nutritional status of children

Corrigendum: Acceptability of Iron- and Zinc-Biofortified Pearl Millet (ICTP-8203)-Based Complementary Foods among Children in an Urban Slum of Mumbai, India

Biofortification, a method for increasing micronutrient content of staple crops, is a promising strategy for combating major global health problems, such as iron and zinc deficiency. We examined the acceptability of recipes prepared using iron- and zinc-biofortified pearl millet (FeZnPM) (~80 ppm Fe, ~34 ppm Zn, varietal ICTP-8203), compared to conventional pearl millet (CPM) (~20 ppm Fe, ~19 ppm Zn) in preparation for an efficacy trial. Our objective was to examine the acceptability of FeZnPM compared to CPM among young children and mothers living in the urban slums of Mumbai. Standardized traditional feeding program recipes (n = 18) were prepared with either FeZnPM or CPM flour. The weight (g) of each food product was measured before and after consumption by children (n = 125) and the average grams consumed over a 3-day period were recorded. Mothers (n = 60) rated recipes using a 9-point hedonic scale. Mean intakes and hedonic scores of each food product were compared using t-tests across the two types of pearl millet. There were no statistically significant differences in consumption by children (FeZnPM: 25.27 ± 13.0 g; CPM: 21.72 ± 6.90 g) across the food products (P = 0.28). Overall mean hedonic scores for all recipes were between 7 to 9 points. CPM products were rated higher overall (8.22 ± 0.28) compared to FeZnPM products (7.95 ± 0.35) (P = 0.01). FeZnPM and CPM were similarly consumed and had high hedonic scores, demonstrating high acceptability in this population. These results support using these varieties of pearl millet in a proposed trial [http://Clinicaltrials.gov ID: NCT02233764; Clinical Trials Registry of India (CTRI), reference number REF/2014/10/007731, CTRI number CTRI/2015/11/006376] testing the efficacy of FeZnPM for improving iron status and growth