Analysis and Implementation of Room Assignment Problem and Cannon\u27s Algorithm on General Purpose Programmable Graphical Processing Units with CUDA

General-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GP-GPU) has emerged as a popular computing paradigm for high-performance computing over the last few years. The increased interest in GP-GPUs for parallel computing mirrors the trend in general computing with the rise of multi-core processors as an alternative approach to increase processor performance. Many applications that were previously accelerated on distributed processing platforms with MPI or multithreaded techniques such as OpenMP are now being investigated to assess their performance on GP-GPU platforms. Since the GP-GPU platform is designed to give higher performance for parallel problems, applications on other parallel architectures are good candidates for performance studies on GP-GPUs. The first case study in this research is a GP-GPU implementation of a Simulated Annealing-based solution of the Room Assignment problem using CUDA. The Room Assignment problem attempts to arrange N people in N/2 rooms, taking into consideration each person\u27s preference for a roommate. To evaluate the implementation, it was compared against the serial implementation for problem sizes 5000, 10000, 15000 and 20000 people. The GP-GPU implementation achieved as much as 78% higher improvement ratio than the serial version in comparable execution time. The second case study is a GP-GPU implementation of Cannon\u27s Algorithm using CUDA. The GP-GPU implementation is compared with a serial implementation of a conventional matrix multiplication O(n3). The GP-GPU implementation achieved upto 6.2x speedup over the conventional serial multiplication. The results for both applications with varying problem sizes are presented and discussed

Design of JPEG Compressor

Images are generated, edited and transmitted on a very regular basis in a vast number of systems today. The raw image data generated by the sensors on a camera is very voluminous to store and hence not very efficient. It becomes especially cumbersome to move it around in bandwidth constrained systems or where bandwidth is to be conserved for cost purposes such as the World Wide Web. Such scenarios demand use of efficient image compressing techniques such as the JPEG algorithm technique which compresses the image to a high degree with little loss in perceived quality of the image. Today JPEG algorithm has become the de facto standard in image compression. MATLAB was used to write code for a program which could output a quantized DCT version of the input image and techniques for hardware implementation of JPEG algorithm in a speedy way were investigated

Mechanisms of NLRP3 inflammasome-mediated hepatic stellate cell activation: Therapeutic potential for liver fibrosis

The liver injury leads to an inflammatory response, which causes the activation of hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) that further secrete ECM proteins and play an important role in liver fibrosis. Moreover, the inflammatory response is a driving force for fibrogenesis, which is triggered by many types of injuries. Exaggerated inflammatory immune responses are mediated by cytoplasmic protein complexes known as inflammasomes, which are involved in many chronic liver diseases. Inflammasomes are pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) that can sense any microbial motifs known as pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), and host- or environmental-derived stress signals known as damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs). The inflammasomes cause caspase-mediated proteolytic cleavage of pro-IL-1β and pro-IL-18 into active IL-1β and IL-18. In this review, we provide a comprehensive summary of the important roles of NLRP3 inflammasome in the pathogenesis of liver fibrosis with an emphasis on several direct and indirect pathways responsible for the NLRP3 inflammasome-mediated HSCs activation and fibrogenesis. In addition, we discuss the general pharmacological and genetics strategies for the inhibition of NLRP3 inflammasome activation and its downstream signaling with examples of emerging pharmacotherapeutics, targeting the NLRP3 inflammasome signaling as well as a possible way to develop effective and safer NLRP3 inflammasome inhibitors