Impact of season of harvest on in vitro gas production and dry matter degradability of Acacia saligna leaves with inoculum from three ruminant species

In vitro gas production (IVGP) and dry matter degradability (IVDMD) of Acacia saligna leaves (ASL) from four seasons were studied under arid Egyptian conditions as a 4×3 factorial experiment (4 seasons×3 ruminant species). Incubations were completed using rumen liquid collected immediately after slaughter from sheep, cattle and buffalo, in order to investigate differences among ruminants in their ASL fermentation capacity. Samples of ASL were collected during the last 2 months of each season, being autumn, winter, spring and summer (between the 5th and 12th week of each season). Dried samples of ASL were incubated for 24 h in each of the three buffered rumen liquors, using a syringe technique, to determine IVGP and IVDMD. The crude protein content of ASL was lower (P<0.01) in summer (143 g/kg DM) than autumn (171 g/kg DM), winter (177 g/kg DM) and spring (182 g/kg DM). In winter, ASL had lower neutral detergent fibre, acid detergent fibre, acid detergent lignin and cellulose than in other seasons (P<0.05), but there were no differences among seasons in ash and hemicellulose contents. Condensed tannin (CT, as quebracho tannin equivalent) contents of ASL were higher (P<0.001) in summer (113 g/kg DM) versus the other seasons, with the lowest value during winter (63 g/kg DM). Gas production after 24 h was higher (P<0.05) with buffalo rumen fluid, versus cattle or sheep, in all seasons except winter. IVGP with buffalo rumen fluid was not affected by season but, with cattle and sheep, IVGP was higher (P<0.01) in winter. IVDMD was higher in winter and spring, and lower in summer and autumn, within all species, and higher (P<0.001) values were general with buffalo versus other species. IVGP was positively (P<0.05) correlated with IVDMD, but there was no consistent relationship between IVGP or IVDMD and chemical composition of ASL. Rumen fluid from buffalo, cattle and sheep have different capacities to ferment A. saligna leaves, and differences among species were smallest in winter, when the fibre and CT contents of ASL were lower. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Tale of Loss & Personal Ruin in Response to Time of Crisis in Selected Plays by Christopher Shinn & Jon Robin Baitz

Dying City by Christopher Shinn, an American playwright, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London 2006. Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz, also an American playwright, premiered at Off-Broadway in January 2011. Both plays deal with Iraqi war in apolitical way. However, Dying City puts into focus conflicting identities as a result of social and political context that threatens individuals’ agency and concepts about themselves. Meanwhile, Other Desert Cities investigates domineering paternal relationships that produce passive/docile subjects. This study demonstrates that individuals’ agency and identity could be affected by domination relationship, limiting individuals’ choices and eliciting rebellion. This is undertaken by investigating characters’ ability to resist hegemonic relationships and endure controversial war debate. Characters’ subordination and resistance are also discussed. However, Shinn and Baitz’s aims are not to deal with the war but to underline its influence on personal relationships

Biochemical parameters in sheep fed diet in presence of mixed Salix babylonica extract and exogenous enzyme as feed additives

The aim of this study was to evaluate the interaction impacts of Salix babylonica L. (SB) extract with exogenous enzyme (EZ) as feed additives on some serum biochemistry parameters in lambs. Suffolk lambs (20), 24±0.3 kg live weight and 6–8 months old were used during 60 days. The lambs were distributed in individual cages of 1.5×1.5 m cages into 4 treatments of 5 lambs each of completely randomized design. All animals were fed a basal diet (BD) of 70% maize silage and 30% commercial concentrate. Treatments were: (i) control; PD without any additives; (ii) EZ; PD plus 10 g of EZ; (iii) SB; BD plus 30 mL of S. babylonica (SB) extract; and (iv) EZSB; BD plus 10 g EZ and 30 mL of SB extract. Blood samples were collected on days 0, 15, 30, 45 and 60 and analyzed for total proteins, glucose, creatinine, blood urea N (BUN), alanin aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), calcium, phosphorus and magnesium. Interactions between treatment×time were occurred in creatinine, BUN and magnesium. The highest values of total proteins were obtained with control and SB animals versus EZ or EZSB. The SB treatment tend to increase the levels of creatinine versus other treatments. The ALP level was highest in SB animals. In conclusion, supplementation with S. babylonica extract, exogenous enzymes and/or their combination did not cause any major health disorders in lambs within 60 days of experimen

Direct-fed microbial: Animal nutrition and reproduction responses

Manipulating the gastrointestinal microbial ecosystem to enhance animal performance and reproductive responses has been one of the main goals of animal science researchers and veterinarians. Recent restrictions to the use of antimicrobials as growth promoters led researchers to seek alternative practices that can show promise both from the standpoint of efficacy as well as from the practical and economic aspects. One of the alternatives that surfaced as very promising in the last few decades is the use of direct-fed microbials (DFM) as a means to modulate the effects of the gastrointestinal microbiome on the host immune status, health and productivity. Direct-fed microbials or probiotics is a term most commonly reserved for live, naturally occurring microorganisms that can be supplemented orally to animals to cause a beneficial effect in the host animal. The main objective of this special focus is to expand the knowledge on the mode of action of different microorganisms used as additives as well as to explore novel species of microorganisms and their potential contributions to enhance animal performance and health in ruminants and non-ruminants

DiviML: A Module-based Heuristic for Mapping Neural Networks onto Heterogeneous Platforms

Datacenters are increasingly becoming heterogeneous, and are starting to include specialized hardware for networking, video processing, and especially deep learning. To leverage the heterogeneous compute capability of modern datacenters, we develop an approach for compiler-level partitioning of deep neural networks (DNNs) onto multiple interconnected hardware devices. We present a general framework for heterogeneous DNN compilation, offering automatic partitioning and device mapping. Our scheduler integrates both an exact solver, through a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation, and a modularity-based heuristic for scalability. Furthermore, we propose a theoretical lower bound formula for the optimal solution, which enables the assessment of the heuristic solutions' quality. We evaluate our scheduler in optimizing both conventional DNNs and randomly-wired neural networks, subject to latency and throughput constraints, on a heterogeneous system comprised of a CPU and two distinct GPUs. Compared to na\"ively running DNNs on the fastest GPU, he proposed framework can achieve more than 3$\times$ times lower latency and up to 2.9$\times$ higher throughput by automatically leveraging both data and model parallelism to deploy DNNs on our sample heterogeneous server node. Moreover, our modularity-based "splitting" heuristic improves the solution runtime up to 395$\times$ without noticeably sacrificing solution quality compared to an exact MILP solution, and outperforms all other heuristics by 30-60% solution quality. Finally, our case study shows how we can extend our framework to schedule large language models across multiple heterogeneous servers by exploiting symmetry in the hardware setup. Our code can be easily plugged in to existing frameworks, and is available at https://github.com/abdelfattah-lab/diviml.Comment: accepted at ICCAD'2

Programming model abstractions for optimizing I/O intensive applications

This thesis contributes from the perspective of task-based programming models to the efforts of optimizing I/O intensive applications. Throughout this thesis, we propose programming model abstractions and mechanisms that target a twofold objective: from the one hand, improve the I/O and total performance of applications on nowadays complex storage infrastructures. From the other hand, achieve such performance improvement without increasing the complexity of applications programming. The following paragraphs briefly summarize each of our contributions. First, towards exploiting compute-I/O patterns of I/O intensive applications and transparently improving I/O and total performance, we propose a number of abstractions that we refer to as I/O Awareness abstractions. An I/O aware task-based programming model is able to separate the handling of I/O and computations by supporting I/O Tasks. The execution of such tasks can overlap with compute tasks execution. Moreover, we provide programming model support to improve I/O performance by addressing the issue of I/O congestion. This is achieved by using Storage Bandwidth Constraints to control the level of task parallelism. We support two types of such constraints: (i) Static storage bandwidth constraints that are manually set by application developers. (ii) Auto-tunable constraints that are automatically set and tuned throughout the execution of application. Second, in order to exploit the heterogeneity of modern storage systems to improve performance in a transparent manner, we propose a set of capabilities that we refer to as Storage heterogeneity Awareness. A storage-heterogeneity aware task-based programming model builds on the concepts and abstractions that are introduced in the first contribution to improve the I/O performance of applications on heterogeneous storage systems. More specifically, such programming models support the following features: (i) abstracting the heterogeneity of the storage devices and exposing them as one hierarchical storage resource. (ii) supporting dedicated I/O scheduling. (iii) Finally, we introduce a mechanism that automatically and periodically flushes obsolete data from higher storage layers to lower storage layers. Third, targeting increasing parallelism levels of applications, we propose a Hybrid Programming Model that combines task-based programming models and MPI. In this programming model, tasks are used to achieve coarse-grained parallelism on large-scale distributed infrastructures, whereas MPI is used to gain fine-grained parallelism by parallelizing tasks execution. Such a hybrid programming model offers the possibility to enable parallel I/O and high-level I/O libraries in tasks. We enable such a hybrid programming model by supporting Native MPI Tasks. These tasks are native to the programming model for two reasons: they execute task code as opposed to calling external MPI binaries or scripts. Also, the data transfers and input/output handling is done in a completely transparent manner to application developers. Therefore, increasing parallelism levels while easing the design and programming of applications. Finally, to exploit the inherent parallelism opportunities in applications and overlap computation with I/O, we propose an Eager mechanism for releasing data dependencies. Unlike the traditional approach for releasing dependencies, eagerly releasing data dependencies allows successor tasks to be released for execution as soon as their data dependencies are ready, without having to wait for predecessor task(s) to completely finish execution. In order to support the eager-release of data dependencies, we describe the following core modifications to the design of task-based programming models: (i) defining and managing data dependency relationships as parameter-aware dependencies (ii) a mechanism for notifying the programming model that an output data has been generated before the execution of the producer task ends.Aquesta tesi contribueix des de la perspectiva dels models de programació basats en tasques als esforços d’optimitzar les aplicacions intensives de I/O. Al llarg d'aquesta tesi, proposem abstraccions i mecanismes del model de programació que persegueixen un doble objectiu: per una banda, millorar la I/O i el rendiment total de les aplicacions a les complexes infraestructures d'emmagatzematge de l'actualitat. D'altra banda, aconsegueixi aquesta millora del rendiment sense augmentar la complexitat de la programació d'aplicacions. Els paràgrafs següents resumeixen cadascuna de les nostres contribucions. En primer lloc, proposem una sèrie d'abstraccions a què ens referim com a abstraccions de consciència de I/O. Un model de programació basat en tasques amb reconeixement d'I/O pot separar el maneig d'I/O i els càlculs en admetre Tasques d'I/O. L'execució d'aquestes tasques es pot superposar amb l'execució de tasques de càlcul. A més, proporcionem suport de model de programació per millorar el rendiment d'I/O en abordar el problema de la congestió d'I/O. Això s'aconsegueix mitjançant l'ús de restriccions d'amplada de banda d'emmagatzematge per controlar el nivell de paral·lelisme de tasques. Admetem dos tipus d'aquestes restriccions: estàtic i autoajustable. En segon lloc, proposem un conjunt de capacitats a què ens referim com a Consciència d'heterogeneïtat d'emmagatzematge. Un model de programació basat en tasques conscient de l'heterogeneïtat de l'emmagatzematge es basa en els conceptes i les abstraccions que s'introdueixen en la primera contribució per millorar el rendiment d'I/O de les aplicacions en sistemes d'emmagatzematge heterogenis. Més específicament, aquests models de programació admeten les característiques següents: (i) abstreure l'heterogeneïtat dels dispositius d'emmagatzematge i exposar-los com a recurs d'emmagatzematge jeràrquic. (ii) admetre la programació d'I/O dedicada. (iii) Finalment, presentem un mecanisme que descarrega automàticament i periòdicament les dades obsoletes de les capes d'emmagatzematge superiors a les capes d'emmagatzematge inferiors. En tercer lloc, proposem un model de programació híbrid que combina models de programació basats en tasques i MPI. En aquest model de programació, les tasques s'utilitzen per aconseguir un paral·lelisme de gra gruixut en infraestructures distribuïdes a gran escala, mentre que MPI es fa servir per obtenir un paral·lelisme de gra fi en paral·lelitzar l'execució de tasques. Un model d'aquest tipus de programació híbrid ofereix la possibilitat d'habilitar I/O paral·leles i biblioteques d'I/O d'alt nivell en tasques. Habilitem un model de programació híbrid d'aquest tipus en admetre tasques MPI natives que executen codi de tasca en lloc de trucar a binaris o scripts MPI externs. A més, la transferència de dades i el maneig d’entrada / sortida es realitza d’una manera completament transparent per als desenvolupadors d’aplicacions. Per tant, augmenta els nivells de paral·lelisme alhora que se'n facilita el disseny i la programació d'aplicacions. Finalment proposem un mecanisme Eager per alliberar dependències de dades. A diferència de l'enfocament tradicional per alliberar dependències, alliberar amb entusiasme les dependències de dades permet que les tasques successores s'alliberin per a la seva execució tan aviat com les dependències de dades estiguin llestes, sense haver d'esperar que les tasques predecessores acabin completament l'execució. Per tal de donar suport a l'alliberament ansiós de les dependències de dades, descrivim les següents modificacions centrals al disseny de models de programació basats en tasques: (i) definir i administrar les relacions de dependència de dades com a dependències conscients de paràmetres (ii ) un mecanisme per notificar la model de programació que s'ha generat una dada de sortida abans que finalitzi l'execució de la tasca de productor.Postprint (published version

BRAMAC: Compute-in-BRAM Architectures for Multiply-Accumulate on FPGAs

Deep neural network (DNN) inference using reduced integer precision has been shown to achieve significant improvements in memory utilization and compute throughput with little or no accuracy loss compared to full-precision floating-point. Modern FPGA-based DNN inference relies heavily on the on-chip block RAM (BRAM) for model storage and the digital signal processing (DSP) unit for implementing the multiply-accumulate (MAC) operation, a fundamental DNN primitive. In this paper, we enhance the existing BRAM to also compute MAC by proposing BRAMAC (Compute-in-$\underline{\text{BR}}$AM $\underline{\text{A}}$rchitectures for $\underline{\text{M}}$ultiply-$\underline{\text{Ac}}$cumulate). BRAMAC supports 2's complement 2- to 8-bit MAC in a small dummy BRAM array using a hybrid bit-serial & bit-parallel data flow. Unlike previous compute-in-BRAM architectures, BRAMAC allows read/write access to the main BRAM array while computing in the dummy BRAM array, enabling both persistent and tiling-based DNN inference. We explore two BRAMAC variants: BRAMAC-2SA (with 2 synchronous dummy arrays) and BRAMAC-1DA (with 1 double-pumped dummy array). BRAMAC-2SA/BRAMAC-1DA can boost the peak MAC throughput of a large Arria-10 FPGA by 2.6$\times$/2.1$\times$, 2.3$\times$/2.0$\times$, and 1.9$\times$/1.7$\times$ for 2-bit, 4-bit, and 8-bit precisions, respectively at the cost of 6.8%/3.4% increase in the FPGA core area. By adding BRAMAC-2SA/BRAMAC-1DA to a state-of-the-art tiling-based DNN accelerator, an average speedup of 2.05$\times$/1.7$\times$ and 1.33$\times$/1.52$\times$ can be achieved for AlexNet and ResNet-34, respectively across different model precisions.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, FCCM conference 202

Effect of glucoamylase enzyme extract on in vitro gas production and degradability of two diets with 25% of corn or sorghum grains

The optimal use of starch is fundamental in improving performance of ruminants fed high grain diets (Huntington 1997, Rojo et al. 2000). Many strategies were developed to increase starch digestion rate and grain energetic value such as ground, dry rolled and steamed, and harvest of grains with high moisture content (Owens et al. 1997). Amylolytic enzymes in the rumen are extracellular or cell-bound (Thurn and Kotarsky 1987), and the extracellular enzymes are the most important in the group of amylolytic bacteria (Cotta 1988). Amylases are present in protozoa (Mendoza et al. 1993 1995) and ruminal fungi (Yanke et al. 1993). Exogenous amylolytic enzymes are obtained from controlled fermentation of bacteria or fungi (Declerk et al. 1997) and they are used in the food industry for starch hydrolysis (Reilly 1985).The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of glucoamylase enzyme (GEZ) extract on the in vitro ruminal gas production (GP) and degradability of 2 total mixed rations (TMR) of 25% of corn and other of 25% of sorghum grains. The 2 diets were treated with 0, 1.5 and 3 g of GEZ protein (65% of protein) per kg of grain in diet. Diets GP were measured at 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 24, 48 and 72 h of incubation. Incubations were stopped after 72 h where pH was measured and supernatant was filtered to determine in vitro dry matter (DMD), neutral detergent fiber (NDFD), and acid detergent fiber (ADFD) degradabilities. Addition of GEZ to corn diet had no effect on kinetics of GP, whereas GEZ added to sorghum diet, at the high dose of the enzyme (3 g/kg DM), was traduced by an increase of the rhythm of GP (c) and the volume of GP at 2, 4 and 6 h of incubation. Likewise, effect of GEZ was not affected either on the DMD or cell wall (NDFD and ADFD) of both diets (sorghum or corn). Irrespective to enzyme supply, kinetics of GP and pattern of degradation of corn were generally higher than those of sorghum. A net effect of the diet and the interactions between diet and enzyme were recorded for the volume of GP at different incubation times. The use of high doses of GEZ should be tested on the pattern rumen fermentation

Evaluating Critical Thinking Skills in Moroccan EFL Textbooks: Gateway to English 2 as a Case

The aim of this study is to evaluate critical thinking skills (CTS) in a Moroccan textbook of English as a foreign language entitled Gateway to English 2 (GTE2 henceforth) according to Bloom’s taxonomy. Alongside with this, a survey is conducted to investigate the perceptions and attitudes of a sample of Moroccan high school teachers towards CTS and their inclusion in the aforementioned textbook. The research design adopted in this study is the mixed methods research approach and three instruments are used to collect data: document analysis, a content analysis card and a questionnaire. The participants’ sample consists of 75 Moroccan high school teachers of English who use GTE2 textbook. The three instruments were intended to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. The findings of the study revealed that the current educational policy aims to foster the CTS of Moroccan students, but the textbooks used, namely GTE2, targets only lower order thinking skills, especially comprehension, and application at the expense of higher order thinking skills which will benefit students both academically and professionally. For this reason, the study suggests activities and materials to enrich the textbook in terms of thinking skills