2-Phenyl-4-(3,4,5-trimethoxy­benzyl­idene)-1,3-oxazol-5(4H)-one

The title compound, C19H17NO5, was synthesized as part of a continuing project involving the structures of oxazolone derivatives. The mol­ecule adopts a Z configuration about the central olefinic bond. The 2-phenyl ring is slightly twisted out of the plane of the oxazolone ring system by 11.2 (2)°. The crystal structure is stabilized by weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds

IOPS: An Unified SpMM Accelerator Based on Inner-Outer-Hybrid Product

Sparse matrix multiplication (SpMM) is widely applied to numerous domains, such as graph processing, machine learning, and data analytics. However, inner product based SpMM induces redundant zero-element computing for mismatched nonzero operands, while outer product based approach lacks input reuse across Process Elements (PEs) and poor output locality for accumulating partial sum (psum) matrices. Besides, current works only focus on sparse-sparse matrix multiplication (SSMM) or sparse-dense matrix multiplication (SDMM), rarely performing efficiently for both. To address these problems, this paper proposes an unified SpMM accelerator, called IOPS, hybridizing inner with outer products. It reuses the input matrix among PEs with inner product dataflow, and removes zero-element calculations with outer product approach in each PE, which can efficiently process SSMM and SDMM. Moreover, an address mapping method is designed to accumulate the irregular sparse psum matrices, reducing the latency and DRAM access of psum accumulating. Furthermore, an adaptive partition strategy is proposed to tile the input matrices based on their sparsity ratios, effectively utilizing the storage of architecture and reducing DRAM access. Compared with the SSMM accelerator, SpArch, we achieve 1.7x~6.3x energy efficiency and 1.2x~4.4x resource efficiency, with 1.4x~2.1x DRAM access saving

Improvement of two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution using optical amplifiers

The imperfections of a receiver's detector affect the performance of two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution protocols and are difficult to adjust in practical situations. We propose a method to improve the performance of two-way continuous-variable quantum key distribution by adding a parameter-adjustable optical amplifier at the receiver. A security analysis is derived against a two-mode collective entangling cloner attack. Our simulations show that the proposed method can improve the performance of protocols as long as the inherent noise of the amplifier is lower than a critical value, defined as the tolerable amplifier noise. Furthermore, the optimal performance can approach the scenario where a perfect detector is used.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Sense: Model Hardware Co-design for Accelerating Sparse CNN on Systolic Array

Sparsity is an intrinsic property of convolutional neural network(CNN) and worth exploiting for CNN accelerators, but extra processing comes with hardware overhead, causing many architectures suffering from only minor profit. Meanwhile, systolic array has been increasingly competitive on CNNs acceleration for its high spatiotemporal locality and low hardware overhead. However, the irregularity of sparsity induces imbalanced workload under the rigid systolic dataflow, causing performance degradation. Thus, this paper proposed a systolicarray-based architecture, called Sense, for sparse CNN acceleration by model-hardware co-design, achieving large performance improvement. To balance input feature map(IFM) and weight loads across Processing Element(PE) array, we applied channel clustering to gather IFMs with approximate sparsity for array computation, and co-designed a load-balancing weight pruning method to keep the sparsity ratio of each kernel at a certain value with little accuracy loss, improving PE utilization and overall performance. Additionally, Adaptive Dataflow Configuration is applied to determine the computing strategy based on the storage ratio of IFMs and weights, lowering 1.17x-1.8x DRAM access compared with Swallow and further reducing system energy consumption. The whole design is implemented on ZynqZCU102 with 200MHz and performs at 471-, 34-, 53- and 191-image/s for AlexNet, VGG-16, ResNet-50 and GoogleNet respectively. Compared against sparse systolic-array-based accelerators, Swallow, FESA and SPOTS, Sense achieves 1x-2.25x, 1.95x-2.5x and 1.17x-2.37x performance improvement on these CNNs respectively with reasonable overhead.Comment: 14 pages, 29 figures, 6 tables, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEM

Quantum electric-dipole liquid on a triangular lattice

Geometric frustrations and quantum mechanical fluctuations may prohibit the formation of long-range ordering even at the lowest temperature, and therefore liquid-like ground states could be expected. A good example is the quantum spin liquid in frustrated magnets that represents an exotic phase of matter and is attracting enormous interests. Geometric frustrations and quantum fluctuations can happen beyond magnetic systems. Here we propose that quantum electric-dipole liquids, analogs to quantum spin liquids, could emerge in frustrated dielectrics where antiferroelectrically coupled small electric dipoles reside on a triangular lattice. The quantum paraelectric hexaferrite BaFe12O19, in which small electric dipoles originated from the off-center displacement of Fe3+ in the FeO5 bipyramids constitute a two-dimensional triangular lattice, represents a promising candidate to generate the anticipated electric-dipole liquid. We present a series of experimental evidences, including dielectric permittivity, heat capacity, and thermal conductivity measured down to 66 mK, to reveal the existence of a nontrivial ground state in BaFe12O19, characterized by itinerant low-energy excitations with a small gap, to which we interpret as an exotic liquid-like quantum phase. The quantum electric-dipole liquids in frustrated dielectrics open up a fresh playground for fundamental physics and may find applications in quantum information and computation as well.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure