A GPU-Computing Approach to Solar Stokes Profile Inversion

We present a new computational approach to the inversion of solar photospheric Stokes polarization profiles, under the Milne-Eddington model, for vector magnetography. Our code, named GENESIS (GENEtic Stokes Inversion Strategy), employs multi-threaded parallel-processing techniques to harness the computing power of graphics processing units GPUs, along with algorithms designed to exploit the inherent parallelism of the Stokes inversion problem. Using a genetic algorithm (GA) engineered specifically for use with a GPU, we produce full-disc maps of the photospheric vector magnetic field from polarized spectral line observations recorded by the Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun (SOLIS) Vector Spectromagnetograph (VSM) instrument. We show the advantages of pairing a population-parallel genetic algorithm with data-parallel GPU-computing techniques, and present an overview of the Stokes inversion problem, including a description of our adaptation to the GPU-computing paradigm. Full-disc vector magnetograms derived by this method are shown, using SOLIS/VSM data observed on 2008 March 28 at 15:45 UT

Attitudes of pediatric nurse practitioners towards parental use of corporal punishment

Abstract not availabl

Distribution-valued weak solutions to a parabolic problem arising in financial mathematics

We study distribution-valued solutions to a parabolic problem that arises from a model of the Black-Scholes equation in option pricing. We give a minor generalization of known existence and uniqueness results for solutions in bounded domains $Omega subset mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ to give existence of solutions for certain classes of distributions $fin mathcal{D}'(Omega)$. We also study growth conditions for smooth solutions of certain parabolic equations on $mathbb{R}^nimes (0,T)$ that have initial values in the space of distributions