738 research outputs found
FPSA: A Full System Stack Solution for Reconfigurable ReRAM-based NN Accelerator Architecture
Neural Network (NN) accelerators with emerging ReRAM (resistive random access
memory) technologies have been investigated as one of the promising solutions
to address the \textit{memory wall} challenge, due to the unique capability of
\textit{processing-in-memory} within ReRAM-crossbar-based processing elements
(PEs). However, the high efficiency and high density advantages of ReRAM have
not been fully utilized due to the huge communication demands among PEs and the
overhead of peripheral circuits.
In this paper, we propose a full system stack solution, composed of a
reconfigurable architecture design, Field Programmable Synapse Array (FPSA) and
its software system including neural synthesizer, temporal-to-spatial mapper,
and placement & routing. We highly leverage the software system to make the
hardware design compact and efficient. To satisfy the high-performance
communication demand, we optimize it with a reconfigurable routing architecture
and the placement & routing tool. To improve the computational density, we
greatly simplify the PE circuit with the spiking schema and then adopt neural
synthesizer to enable the high density computation-resources to support
different kinds of NN operations. In addition, we provide spiking memory blocks
(SMBs) and configurable logic blocks (CLBs) in hardware and leverage the
temporal-to-spatial mapper to utilize them to balance the storage and
computation requirements of NN. Owing to the end-to-end software system, we can
efficiently deploy existing deep neural networks to FPSA. Evaluations show
that, compared to one of state-of-the-art ReRAM-based NN accelerators, PRIME,
the computational density of FPSA improves by 31x; for representative NNs, its
inference performance can achieve up to 1000x speedup.Comment: Accepted by ASPLOS 201
Recent Advances in Nanostructured Thermoelectric Half-Heusler Compounds
Half-Heusler (HH) alloys have attracted considerable interest as promising
thermoelectric (TE) materials in the temperature range around 700 K and above,
which is close to the temperature range of most industrial waste heat sources.
The past few years have seen nanostructuing play an important role in
significantly enhancing the TE performance of several HH alloys. In this
article, we briefly review the recent progress and advances in these HH
nanocomposites. We begin by presenting the structure of HH alloys and the
different strategies that have been utilized for improving the TE properties of
HH alloys. Next, we review the details of HH nanocomposites as obtained by
different techniques. Finally, the review closes by highlighting several
promising strategies for further research directions in these very promising TE
materials.Comment: 34 pages, 22 figure
Superoxide dismutase 2 as a marker to differentiate tuberculous pleural effusions from malignant pleural effusions
OBJECTIVES: Our previous study demonstrated that superoxide dismutase levels were higher in tuberculous pleural effusions than in malignant pleural effusions, but that this difference could not be used to discriminate between the two. The objective of the present study was to investigate the levels of superoxide dismutase 2 in pleural effusions and to evaluate the diagnostic significance of pleural effusion superoxide dismutase 2. METHODS: Superoxide dismutase 2 concentrations were determined in pleural effusions from 54 patients with tuberculous pleural effusion and 33 with malignant pleural effusion using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit. Pleural effusion interferon gamma and tumor necrosis factor alpha levels were also analyzed by ELISA. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to evaluate the significance of differences. Associations between superoxide dismutase 2 concentrations and sex, age and smoking habits were assessed using Spearman's or Pearson's correlation coefficient analysis. Receiver operator characteristic analysis was performed to evaluate the value of superoxide dismutase 2 levels in the discrimination of tuberculous pleural effusion from malignant pleural effusion. RESULTS: Superoxide dismutase 2 levels were significantly higher in patients with tuberculous pleural effusion compared with those with malignant pleural effusion (
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