Application and Exploration of FLUENT Software in the Teaching of Engineering Thermophysics

Engineering thermophysics is a basic discipline for energy majors, but this course emphasizes the theoretical level and is difficult to understand. Students\u27 enthusiasm and participation in the learning process are low, and it is difficult to understand the course. Accordingly, the research team attempts to introduce Fluent software into the course teaching exploration. Specifically, Fluent software is adopted to provide a reliable physics teaching model, and to change the traditional teaching mode, so as to improve students\u27 daily learning ability and practical ability, and ultimately enable students to learn and practice

The role of IGFBP-5 proteolysis in regulating IGF bioavailablity in pregnancy

The insulin-like growth factor binding proteins (IGFBPs) are a group of six structurally related proteins that modulate the activity of insulin-like growth factors (IGF—I and IGF—II) through high—affinity interaction. IGFs circulate in binary complexes with individual IGFBPs, and in high molecular mass ternary complexes with either IGFBP-3 or IGFBP-5, and the acid-labile subunit (ALS). Formation of IGF complexes prolongs the half-lives of IGFs in the circulation and limits their access to target tissues. Proteolysis of IGFBPs, on the other hand, generates IGFBP fragments that have greatly reduced IGF affinity and it is thought to be the key mechanism invoked to increase IGF bioavailability in response to the body’s metabolic demand in certain conditions such as pregnancy. It has long been known that serum IGFBP-3 undergoes proteolysis in pregnancy and other catabolic states. Circulating IGFBP-5 proteases capable of proteolysing IGFBP-5 in vitro have also been described. The current study aimed to characterise IGFBP-5 proteolytic activity in pregnancy plasma and to determine whether the proteolysis of the binding protein contributes to the regulation of IGF tissue bioavailability. With the use of affinity-purified IGFBP-5 antibody in Western immunoblotting, it was demonstrated that plasma IGFBP-5 was fully proteolysed into stable fragments at all stages of pregnancy. A pregnancy-specific IGFBP-5 proteolytic activity was identified in the >150 kDa gel-filtration fraction from pregnancy plasma. The proteolytic activity was identical, in the cleavage of IGFBP-5, to that of PAPP-A or PAPP-A2 which cleaved recombinant IGFBP-5 at one site between Serl43 and Lysl44. Proteolysis of IGFBP-5 by the activity was fully inhibited by a PAPP-AZ antibody but not by a PAPP—A antibody, suggesting that PAPP—A2 was the protease involved in the proteolysis of IGFBP-5 in pregnancy plasma. The proteolytic fragments of IGFBP-5, representing the cleavage products by the PAPP-A2 activity, were also identified in pregnancy plasma. The recombinant pregnancy IGFBP-S fragments, IGFBP—Sl'143 and IGFBP-SI‘M‘ZSZ, showed markedly reduced affinities for IGFS compared to the intact protein. Despite exhibiting cooperativity in IGF binding, the two fragments were unable to form IGF complexes efficiently. Functional assays using IGF-I sensitive cells showed that the fragments, either individually or in combination, were less potent than the intact protein in inhibiting IGF-Iinduced type 1 IGF receptor phosphorylation. Conversely, proteolysis of IGFBP-5 by pregnancy plasma released free bioactive IGF-I from IGF-I-IGFBP-S complexes, and the released IGF-I appeared to remain biologically active after being transported across the vascular endothelial cell barrier. In summary, this study has characterised IGFBP-S fragments from pregnancy plasma and provided evidence that PAPP—AZ is the protease responsible for the proteolysis of IGFBP—5. Proteolysis of IGFBP-5 can markedly affect the stability of IGFBP-5 complexes and contribute to increased IGF bioavailability during pregnancy

Access Adaptive and Thread-Aware Cache Partitioning in Multicore Systems

Cache partitioning is a successful technique for saving energy for a shared cache and all the existing studies focus on multi-program workloads running in multicore systems. In this paper, we are motivated by the fact that a multi-thread application generally executes faster than its single-thread counterpart and its cache accessing behavior is quite different. Based on this observation, we study applications running in multi-thread mode and classify data of the multi-thread applications into shared and private categories, which helps reduce the interferences among shared and private data and contributes to constructing a more efficient cache partitioning scheme. We also propose a hardware structure to support these operations. Then, an access adaptive and thread-aware cache partitioning (ATCP) scheme is proposed, which assigns separate cache portions to shared and private data to avoid the evictions caused by the conflicts from the data of different categories in the shared cache. The proposed ATCP achieves a lower energy consumption, meanwhile improving the performance of applications compared with the least recently used (LRU) managed, core-based evenly partitioning (EVEN) and utility-based cache partitioning (UCP) schemes. The experimental results show that ATCP can achieve 29.6% and 19.9% average energy savings compared with LRU and UCP schemes in a quad-core system. Moreover, the average speedup of multi-thread ATCP with respect to single-thread LRU is at 1.89

Energy-Efficient Scheduling of Periodic Applications on Safety-Critical Time-Triggered Multiprocessor Systems

Energy optimization for periodic applications running on safety/time-critical time-triggered multiprocessor systems has been studied recently. An interesting feature of the applications on the systems is that some tasks are strictly periodic while others are non-strictly periodic, i.e., the start time interval between any two successive instances of the same task is not fixed as long as task deadlines can be met. Energy-efficient scheduling of such applications on the systems has, however, been rarely investigated. In this paper, we focus on the problem of static scheduling multiple periodic applications consisting of both strictly and non-strictly periodic tasks on safety/time-critical time-triggered multiprocessor systems for energy minimization. The challenge of the problem is that both strictly and non-strictly periodic tasks must be intelligently addressed in scheduling to optimize energy consumption. We introduce a new practical task model to characterize the unique feature of specific tasks, and formulate the energy-efficient scheduling problem based on the model. Then, an improved Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) method is proposed to obtain the optimal scheduling solution by considering strict and non-strict periodicity of the specific tasks. To decrease the high complexity of MILP, we also develop a heuristic algorithm to efficiently find a high-quality solution in reasonable time. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate the proposed MILP and heuristic methods can on average achieve about 14.21% and 13.76% energy-savings respectively compared with existing work