Recent developments in the Suzuki-Miyaura reaction: 2010-2014

The Suzuki-Miyaura reaction (SMR), involving the coupling of an organoboron reagent and an organic halide or pseudo-halide in the presence of a palladium or nickel catalyst and a base, has arguably become one of most utilized tools for the construction of a C-C bond. This review intends to be general account of all types of catalytic systems, new coupling partners and applications, including the literature between September 2010 and December 2014

An Analysis of the Poetry of Past Pandemics Through the Perspective of Today’s COVID-19 Times

Treballs Finals del Grau d'Estudis Anglesos, Facultat de Filologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2020-2021, Tutor: William Charles Phillips MockfordThis paper aims to analyse and compare the connections between the experience of those who lived during past pandemics, epidemics, and notable diseases to what we are currently experiencing with today’s COVID-19 pandemic by analysing and interpreting their poetry and our news and collective experience. The analysis of the poems from Lucretius, Nashe, Montagu, Little, Young and Dixon, clearly shows that what our ancestors experienced centuries ago resembles what we are experiencing now. From the solitude of facing death along with the difficulty of breathing, to the distrust of vaccines. This paper demonstrates that through the analysis of poems we can describe tragic events that are currently happening. Therefore, the study of poetry is a credible method to describe and compare the past and the present, especially if they are tragic topics since poets tend to go deep into those matters and transform traumatic experiences into words.Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar y comparar las conexiones entre la experiencia de aquellos que vivieron durante épocas de pandemia u otras enfermedades con lo que estamos actualmente experimentando con la pandemia del COVID-19, a partir del análisis e interpretación de sus poemas y nuestras noticias y experiencia colectiva. El análisis de los poemas de Lucrecio, Nashe, Montagu, Little, Young y Dixon, claramente muestran que lo que nuestros antepasados experimentaron hace centenares de años se parece a lo que estamos experimentando hoy. Desde la soledad de enfrentarse a la muerte junto con la dificultad de respirar, hasta la desconfianza de las vacunas. Este trabajo demuestra que mediante el análisis de los poemas podemos describir eventos trágicos que están sucediendo actualmente. Por lo tanto, el estudio de la poesía es un método fiable para describir y comparar el pasado y el presente, especialmente cuando se trata de asuntos trágicos, ya que los poetas suelen adentrarse profundamente en estos temas y transformar la experiencia traumática en palabras

Improvements in Hardware Transactional Memory for GPU Architectures

In the multi-core CPU world, transactional memory (TM)has emerged as an alternative to lock-based programming for thread synchronization. Recent research proposes the use of TM in GPU architectures, where a high number of computing threads, organized in SIMT fashion, requires an effective synchronization method. In contrast to CPUs, GPUs offer two memory spaces: global memory and local memory. The local memory space serves as a shared scratch-pad for a subset of the computing threads, and it is used by programmers to speed-up their applications thanks to its low latency. Prior work from the authors proposed a lightweight hardware TM (HTM) support based in the local memory, modifying the SIMT execution model and adding a conflict detection mechanism. An efficient implementation of these features is key in order to provide an effective synchronization mechanism at the local memory level. After a quick description of the main features of our HTM design for GPU local memory, in this work we gather together a number of proposals designed with the aim of improving those mechanisms with high impact on performance. Firstly, the SIMT execution model is modified to increase the parallelism of the application when transactions must be serialized in order to make forward progress. Secondly, the conflict detection mechanism is optimized depending on application characteristics, such us the read/write sets, the probability of conflict between transactions and the existence of read-only transactions. As these features can be present in hardware simultaneously, it is a task of the compiler and runtime to determine which ones are more important for a given application. This work includes a discussion on the analysis to be done in order to choose the best configuration solution.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Towards a Software Transactional Memory for heterogeneous CPU-GPU processors

The heterogeneous Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) integrate a multi-core CPU and a GPU within the same chip. Modern APUs provide the programmer with platform atomics, used to communicate the CPU cores with the GPU using simple atomic datatypes. However, ensuring consistency for complex data types is a task delegated to programmers, who have to implement a mutual exclusion mechanism. Transactional Memory (TM) is an optimistic approach to implement mutual exclusion. With TM, shared data can be accessed by multiple computing threads speculatively, but changes are only visible if a transaction ends with no conflict with others in its memory accesses. TM has been studied and implemented in software and hardware for both CPU and GPU platforms, but an integrated solution has not been provided for APU processors. In this paper we present APUTM, a software TM designed to work on heterogeneous APU processors. The design of APUTM focuses on minimizing the access to shared metadata in order to reduce the communication overhead via expensive platform atomics. The main objective of APUTM is to help us understand the tradeoffs of implementing a sofware TM on an heterogeneous CPU-GPU platform and to identify the key aspects to be considered in each device. In our experiments, we compare the adaptability of APUTM to execute in one of the devices (CPU or GPU) or in both of them simultaneously. These experiments show that APUTM is able to outperform sequential execution of the applications.This work has been supported by projects TIN2013-42253-P and TIN2016-80920-R, from the Spanish Government, P11-TIC8144 and P12- TIC1470, from Junta de Andalucía, and Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech