Debris-Slide Susceptibility Modelling Using GIS Technology in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Debris-slides are one of the most frequently occurring geological hazards in metasedimentary rocks of the Anakeesta ridge in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GRSM), which often depends on the influence of multiple causing factors or geo-factors such as geological structures, slope, topographic elevation, land use, soil type etc. or a combination of these factors. The main objective of the study was to understand the control of geo-factors in initiating debris-slides using different knowledge and data-driven methods in GIS platform. The study was performed in three steps: (1) Evaluation of geometrical relationship between geological discontinuity and topographic orientation in initiation of debris-slides, (2) Preparation of knowledge-driven debris-slide susceptibility model, and (3) Preparation of data-driven debris-slide susceptibility models and compare their efficacy. Performance of the models were evaluated mostly using area under Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, which revealed that the models were statistically significant

A manual for PARTI runtime primitives, revision 1

Primitives are presented that are designed to help users efficiently program irregular problems (e.g., unstructured mesh sweeps, sparse matrix codes, adaptive mesh partial differential equations solvers) on distributed memory machines. These primitives are also designed for use in compilers for distributed memory multiprocessors. Communications patterns are captured at runtime, and the appropriate send and receive messages are automatically generated

Distributed memory compiler methods for irregular problems: Data copy reuse and runtime partitioning

Outlined here are two methods which we believe will play an important role in any distributed memory compiler able to handle sparse and unstructured problems. We describe how to link runtime partitioners to distributed memory compilers. In our scheme, programmers can implicitly specify how data and loop iterations are to be distributed between processors. This insulates users from having to deal explicitly with potentially complex algorithms that carry out work and data partitioning. We also describe a viable mechanism for tracking and reusing copies of off-processor data. In many programs, several loops access the same off-processor memory locations. As long as it can be verified that the values assigned to off-processor memory locations remain unmodified, we show that we can effectively reuse stored off-processor data. We present experimental data from a 3-D unstructured Euler solver run on iPSC/860 to demonstrate the usefulness of our methods

Application of knowledge-driven method for debris-slide susceptibility mapping in regional scale

Debris-slides are a frequent hazard in fragile decomposed metasedimentary rocks in the Anakeesta rock formation in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The spatial distribution of an existing debris-slide area could be used to prepare susceptibility map for future debris-slide initiation zones. This work aims to create a debris-slide susceptibility map by using a knowledge-driven method in a GIS platform in Anakeesta formation of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Six geofactors, namely, elevation, annual rainfall, slope curvature, landcover, soil texture and various slope failure modes were used to create the susceptibility map. Debris- slide locations were mapped from the satellite imagery, previous studies, and field visits. A Weighted Overlay Analysis was performed in order to generate the final susceptibility map, where individual classes of geofactors were ranked and were assigned weights based on their influence on debris-slide. The final susceptibility map was classified into five categories: very low, low, moderate, high and very high susceptible zones. Validation of the result shows very high category predicted ~10%, high and moderate categories predicted 75.5% and ~14.5% of the existing debris-slide pixels respectively. This study successfully depicts the advantage and usefulness of the knowledge-driven method, which can save considerable amount of time and reduce complicated data analysis unlike statistical or physical based methods. However, the accuracy of the model highly depends on the researcher’s experience of the area and selection of respective geofactors

Implementation of a parallel unstructured Euler solver on shared and distributed memory architectures

An efficient three dimensional unstructured Euler solver is parallelized on a Cray Y-MP C90 shared memory computer and on an Intel Touchstone Delta distributed memory computer. This paper relates the experiences gained and describes the software tools and hardware used in this study. Performance comparisons between two differing architectures are made

Distributed Memory Compiler Methods for Irregular Problems -- Data Copy Reuse and Runtime Partitioning

This paper outlines two methods which we believe will play an important role in any distributed memory compiler able to handle sparse and unstructured problems. We describe how to link runtime partitioners to distributed memory compilers. In our scheme, programmers can implicitly specify how data and loop iterations are to be distributed between processors. This insulates users from having to deal explicitly with potentially complex algorithms that carry out work and data partitioning. We also describe a viable mechanism for tracking and reusing copies of off-processor data. In many programs, several loops access the same off-processor memory locations. As long as it can be verified that the values assigned to off-processor memory locations remain unmodified, we show that we can effectively reuse stored off-processor data. We present experimental data from a 3-D unstructured Euler solver run on an iPSC/860 to demonstrate the usefulness of our methods

Purification and biochemical characterization of a protein-palmitoyl acyltransferase from human erythrocytes

Protein palmitoylation involves the post-translational attachment of palmitate in thioester linkage to cysteine residues of proteins. The labile nature of the thioester linkage makes possible the palmitoylation-depalmitoylation cycles that have emerged in recent times as additions to the repertoire of cellular control mechanisms. However, detailed understanding of these cycles has been limited by the lack of knowledge of the transferases and thioesterases likely to be involved. Here, we describe the purification of a protein-palmitoyl acyltransferase (PAT) from human erythrocytes. PAT behaved as a peripheral membrane protein and catalyzed the attachment of palmitate in thioester linkage to the β-subunit of spectrin. On SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, PAT appeared as a 70-kDa polypeptide. Antibody against this polypeptide could immunodeplete PAT activity from the crude extract, confirming the assignment of the 70-kDa polypeptide as PAT. PAT-mediated spectrin palmitoylation could be inhibited by nonradioactive palmitoyl-, myristoyl-, or stearoyl-CoA. The apparent Km for palmitoyl-CoA was 16μM

Supporting Irregular Distributions in FORTRAN 90D/HPF Compilers

This paper presents methods that make it possible to efficiently support irregular problems using data parallel languages. The approach involves the use of a portable, compiler-independent, runtime support library called CHAOS. The CHAOS runtime support library contains procedures that (1) support static and dynamic distributed array partitioning, (2) partition loop iterations and indirection arrays, (3) remap arrays from one distribution to another, and (4) carry out index translation, buffer allocation and communication schedule generation. The CHAOS runtime procedures are used by a prototype Fortran 90D compiler as runtime support for irregular problems. This paper also presents performance results of compiler-generated and hand-parallelized versions of two stripped down applications codes. The first code is derived from an unstructured mesh computational fluid dynamics flow solver and the second is derived from the molecular dynamics code CHARMM. A method is described that makes it possible to emulate irregular distributions in HPF by reordering elements of data arrays and renumbering indirection arrays. The results suggest that HPF compiler could use reordering and renumbering extrinsic functions to obtain performance comparable to that achieved by a compiler for a language (such as Fortran 90D) that directly supports irregular distributions