A Modern Application of Hedonics for Valuing Irrigation

Land Economics/Use,

Bindings, Blades, and Bottlenecks: Finding Equilibrium in an In-House Digitization Project

Lightning Talk given at ACRL New England Conference 2021. Starting in fall 2019, we embarked on an in-house pilot project to digitize our entire thesis and dissertation collection and ingest these works to the institutional repository. With undergraduate student workers doing all of the scanning, we are removing the binding of one copy of each thesis/dissertation and digitizing the resulting loose pages using a sheet feeder scanner. Surprisingly little has been written about this approach to digitization in libraries, perhaps because destroying physical copies of books is not often desirable or feasible. But in certain situations, this workflow can provide a very low-cost and relatively fast option for digitizing a collection. The best information we were able to find about taking books apart came from YouTube. For advice about heavy-duty paper cutters (guillotines) we relied on book arts listservs. As a result, we are learning on the job and adjusting as we go. For example, the new paper cutter blade went dull after merely two months because of the unexpectedly high number of books students were able to get through. Also because of the high volume of scanning, staff working on other pieces of the project – such as uploading the files to the repository, editing the catalog records, and even discarding the large volume of empty bindings – encountered a large bottleneck. After recalibrating and redistributing the workloads amongst the collaborative team, we are finding a balance where the various elements of the project are keeping pace. Given the limited amount of information available about in-house “destructive” digitization projects, our talk will be aimed at sharing valuable lessons learned from the experience

Lessons Learned from a Decade of Providing Interactive, On-Demand High Performance Computing to Scientists and Engineers

For decades, the use of HPC systems was limited to those in the physical sciences who had mastered their domain in conjunction with a deep understanding of HPC architectures and algorithms. During these same decades, consumer computing device advances produced tablets and smartphones that allow millions of children to interactively develop and share code projects across the globe. As the HPC community faces the challenges associated with guiding researchers from disciplines using high productivity interactive tools to effective use of HPC systems, it seems appropriate to revisit the assumptions surrounding the necessary skills required for access to large computational systems. For over a decade, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has been supporting interactive, on-demand high performance computing by seamlessly integrating familiar high productivity tools to provide users with an increased number of design turns, rapid prototyping capability, and faster time to insight. In this paper, we discuss the lessons learned while supporting interactive, on-demand high performance computing from the perspectives of the users and the team supporting the users and the system. Building on these lessons, we present an overview of current needs and the technical solutions we are building to lower the barrier to entry for new users from the humanities, social, and biological sciences.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, First Workshop on Interactive High Performance Computing (WIHPC) 2018 held in conjunction with ISC High Performance 2018 in Frankfurt, German

Supercomputing in plain English : teaching high performance computing to inexperienced programmers

Oct 24 2002 Supercomputing in Plain English: Teaching High Performance Computing to Inexperienced Programmers (paper)The University of OklahomaN

Interactive Supercomputing on 40,000 Cores for Machine Learning and Data Analysis

Interactive massively parallel computations are critical for machine learning and data analysis. These computations are a staple of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) and has required the LLSC to develop unique interactive supercomputing capabilities. Scaling interactive machine learning frameworks, such as TensorFlow, and data analysis environments, such as MATLAB/Octave, to tens of thousands of cores presents many technical challenges - in particular, rapidly dispatching many tasks through a scheduler, such as Slurm, and starting many instances of applications with thousands of dependencies. Careful tuning of launches and prepositioning of applications overcome these challenges and allow the launching of thousands of tasks in seconds on a 40,000-core supercomputer. Specifically, this work demonstrates launching 32,000 TensorFlow processes in 4 seconds and launching 262,000 Octave processes in 40 seconds. These capabilities allow researchers to rapidly explore novel machine learning architecture and data analysis algorithms.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference 201

The Impact of Membrane Lipid Composition on Macrophage Activation in the Immune Defense against Rhodococcus equi and Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Nutritional fatty acids are known to have an impact on membrane lipid composition of body cells, including cells of the immune system, thus providing a link between dietary fatty acid uptake, inflammation and immunity. In this study we reveal the significance of macrophage membrane lipid composition on gene expression and cytokine synthesis thereby highlighting signal transduction processes, macrophage activation as well as macrophage defense mechanisms. Using RAW264.7 macrophages as a model system, we identified polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) of both the n-3 and the n-6 family to down-regulate the synthesis of: (i) the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1β, IL-6 and TNF-α; (ii) the co-stimulatory molecule CD86; as well as (iii) the antimicrobial polypeptide lysozyme. The action of the fatty acids partially depended on the activation status of the macrophages. It is particularly important to note that the anti-inflammatory action of the PUFA could also be seen in case of infection of RAW264.7 with viable microorganisms of the genera R. equi and P. aeruginosa. In summary, our data provide strong evidence that PUFA from both the n-3 and the n-6 family down-regulate inflammation processes in context of chronic infections caused by persistent pathogens