Black Hole with Quantum Potential

In this work, we investigate black hole (BH) physics in the context of quantum corrections. These quantum corrections were introduced recently by replacing classical geodesics with quantal (Bohmian) trajectories and hence form a quantum Raychaudhuri equation (QRE). From the QRE, we derive a modified Schwarzschild metric, and use that metric to investigate BH singularity and thermodynamics. We find that these quantum corrections change the picture of Hawking radiation greatly when the size of BH approaches the Planck scale. They prevent the BH from total evaporation, predicting the existence of a quantum BH remnant, which may introduce a possible resolution for the catastrophic behavior of Hawking radiation as the BH mass approaches zero. Those corrections also turn the spacelike singularity of the black hole to be timelike, and hence this may ameliorate the information loss problem.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures; Accepted in Nucl.Phys.

A Proposal for Testing Gravity's Rainbow

Various approaches to quantum gravity such as string theory, loop quantum gravity and Horava-Lifshitz gravity predict modifications of the energy-momentum dispersion relation. Magueijo and Smolin incorporated the modified dispersion relation (MDR) with the general theory of relativity to yield a theory of gravity's rainbow. In this paper, we investigate the Schwarzschild metric in the context of gravity's rainbow. We investigate rainbow functions from three known modified dispersion relations that were introduced by Amelino-Camelia, et el. in [arXiv:hep-th/9605211, arXiv:0806.0339v2, arXiv:astro-ph/9712103] and by Magueijo-Smolin in [arXiv:hep-th/0112090]. We study the effect of the rainbow functions on the deflection of light, photon time delay, gravitational red-shift, and the weak equivalence principle. We compare our results with experiments to obtain upper bounds on the parameters of the rainbow functions.Comment: 6 pages, no figures, to appear in Europhysics Letter

rDLB: A Novel Approach for Robust Dynamic Load Balancing of Scientific Applications with Parallel Independent Tasks

Scientific applications often contain large and computationally intensive parallel loops. Dynamic loop self scheduling (DLS) is used to achieve a balanced load execution of such applications on high performance computing (HPC) systems. Large HPC systems are vulnerable to processors or node failures and perturbations in the availability of resources. Most self-scheduling approaches do not consider fault-tolerant scheduling or depend on failure or perturbation detection and react by rescheduling failed tasks. In this work, a robust dynamic load balancing (rDLB) approach is proposed for the robust self scheduling of independent tasks. The proposed approach is proactive and does not depend on failure or perturbation detection. The theoretical analysis of the proposed approach shows that it is linearly scalable and its cost decrease quadratically by increasing the system size. rDLB is integrated into an MPI DLS library to evaluate its performance experimentally with two computationally intensive scientific applications. Results show that rDLB enables the tolerance of up to (P minus one) processor failures, where P is the number of processors executing an application. In the presence of perturbations, rDLB boosted the robustness of DLS techniques up to 30 times and decreased application execution time up to 7 times compared to their counterparts without rDLB

Efficient Generation of Parallel Spin-images Using Dynamic Loop Scheduling

High performance computing (HPC) systems underwent a significant increase in their processing capabilities. Modern HPC systems combine large numbers of homogeneous and heterogeneous computing resources. Scalability is, therefore, an essential aspect of scientific applications to efficiently exploit the massive parallelism of modern HPC systems. This work introduces an efficient version of the parallel spin-image algorithm (PSIA), called EPSIA. The PSIA is a parallel version of the spin-image algorithm (SIA). The (P)SIA is used in various domains, such as 3D object recognition, categorization, and 3D face recognition. EPSIA refers to the extended version of the PSIA that integrates various well-known dynamic loop scheduling (DLS) techniques. The present work: (1) Proposes EPSIA, a novel flexible version of PSIA; (2) Showcases the benefits of applying DLS techniques for optimizing the performance of the PSIA; (3) Assesses the performance of the proposed EPSIA by conducting several scalability experiments. The performance results are promising and show that using well-known DLS techniques, the performance of the EPSIA outperforms the performance of the PSIA by a factor of 1.2 and 2 for homogeneous and heterogeneous computing resources, respectively

Performance Reproduction and Prediction of Selected Dynamic Loop Scheduling Experiments

Scientific applications are complex, large, and often exhibit irregular and stochastic behavior. The use of efficient loop scheduling techniques in computationally-intensive applications is crucial for improving their performance on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. A number of dynamic loop scheduling (DLS) techniques have been proposed between the late 1980s and early 2000s, and efficiently used in scientific applications. In most cases, the computing systems on which they have been tested and validated are no longer available. This work is concerned with the minimization of the sources of uncertainty in the implementation of DLS techniques to avoid unnecessary influences on the performance of scientific applications. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the DLS techniques employed in scientific applications today adhere to their original design goals and specifications. The goal of this work is to attain and increase the trust in the implementation of DLS techniques in present studies. To achieve this goal, the performance of a selection of scheduling experiments from the 1992 original work that introduced factoring is reproduced and predicted via both, simulative and native experimentation. The experiments show that the simulation reproduces the performance achieved on the past computing platform and accurately predicts the performance achieved on the present computing platform. The performance reproduction and prediction confirm that the present implementation of the DLS techniques considered both, in simulation and natively, adheres to their original description. The results confirm the hypothesis that reproducing experiments of identical scheduling scenarios on past and modern hardware leads to an entirely different behavior from expected

Remnants of Black Rings from Gravity's Rainbow

In this paper, we investigate a spinning black ring and a charged black ring in the context of gravity's rainbow. By incorporating rainbow functions proposed by Amelino-Camelia, et al. in [arXiv:hep-th/9605211, arXiv:0806.0339v2] in the metric of the black rings, a considerable modification happens to their thermodynamical properties. We calculate corrections to the temperature, entropy and heat capacity of the black rings. These calculations demonstrate that the behavior of Hawking radiation changes considerably near the Planck scale in gravity's rainbow, where it is shown that black rings do not evaporate completely and a remnant is left as the black rings evaporate down to Planck scale.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Remnant for all Black Objects due to Gravity's Rainbow

We argue that a remnant is formed for all black objects in gravity's rainbow. This will be based on the observation that a remnant depends critically on the structure of the rainbow functions, and this dependence is a model independent phenomena. We thus propose general relations for the modified temperature and entropy of all black objects in gravity's rainbow. We explicitly check this to be the case for Kerr, Kerr-Newman-dS, charged-AdS, and higher dimensional Kerr-AdS black holes. We also try to argue that a remnant should form for black Saturn in gravity's rainbow. This work extends our previous results on remnants of Schwarzschild black holes [ arXiv:1402.5320] and black rings [arXiv:1409.5745].Comment: 21 pages, 13 figures, Accepted in Nucl.Phys.

Community Knowledge, Perceptions, and Practices Associated with Urogenital Schistosomiasis among School-Aged Children in Zanzibar, United Republic of Tanzania

Background: On the Zanzibar islands, United Republic of Tanzania, elimination of urogenital schistosomiasis is strived for in the coming years. This qualitative study aimed to better understand community knowledge, perceptions, and practices associated with schistosomiasis among school-aged children on Unguja and Pemba islands, in order to inform the development of behavior change interventions contributing to eliminate urogenital schistosomiasis. Methodology: In 2011, we conducted 35 children’s discussion groups, 41 in-depth interviews with parents and teachers, and 5 focus group discussions with community members in Zanzibar. Using a modified-grounded theory approach, we transcribed and coded the narrative data followed by thematic analysis of the emergent themes. Principal Findings: Urogenital schistosomiasis is a common experience among children in Zanzibar and typically considered a boys’ disease. Children engage in multiple high-risk behaviors for acquiring schistosomiasis because of poor knowledge on disease transmission, lack of understanding on severity of disease-associated consequences, and lack of alternative options for water related activities of daily living and recreational play. Local primary school teachers had little to no training about the disease and no teaching tools or materials for students. Conclusions/Significance: Conducting activities in open natural freshwater contaminated by S. haematobium larvae compromises the health of school-aged children in Zanzibar. The perception of urogenital schistosomiasis as a minor illness rather than a serious threat to a child’s well-being contributes to the spread of disease. Understanding community perceptions of disease along with the barriers and facilitators to risk reduction behaviors among children can inform health promotion activities, campaigns, and programs for the prevention, control, and elimination of urogenital schistosomiasis in Zanzibar

The equity of admissions to the university hospital of Brasilia

Background: Brazil has a highly stratified population with large socioeconomic disparities, as evidenced by marked differentiation in health status and access to health services by the population. In addition, the fact that the universal national health care system and a liberalised private care model exist side by side leads to increasingly inequitable health outcomes. Aims: This study aims to appraise the equity of access to the University Hospital in Brasilia, Brazil, in 2013. Methods: This study was a quantitative analysis of hospital admissions data. The sample included all patients admitted over a six-month period in 2013. Patient data was crossed with socioeconomic data (income and private health insurance status). Frequency tabulations and chi-square calculations were used to describe the patient mix, observe trends and appraise equity of admissions. Results: Analysis of the data showed that the number of patients from each neighbourhood relative to the neighbourhood population was equitable. However, when assessed on the basis of insurance status (i.e., deducting the population covered by private health insurance), a high level of inequity was detected (chi-square 71.828, df 3, p<0,0001) whereby patients from wealthier neighbourhoods were over represented compared to those from poorer neighbourhoods. Conclusion: This study has shown that access to the University Hospital in Brasilia is not equitable when individual access to private health care is accounted for. The results show that dual access to both public and private health care is likely to be common, increasing some of the population’s access to health care while decreasing access for others, and therefore contributing to inequity of access to health care services