366 research outputs found
Wealth distribution in an ancient Egyptian society
Modern excavations yielded a distribution of the house areas in the ancient
Egyptian city Akhetaten, which was populated for a short period during the 14th
century BC. Assuming that the house area is a measure of the wealth of its
inhabitants allows us to make a comparison of the wealth distributions in
ancient and modern societies
Lonely adatoms in space
There is a close relation between the problems of second layer nucleation in
epitaxial crystal growth and chemical surface reactions, such as hydrogen
recombination, on interstellar dust grains. In both cases standard rate
equation analysis has been found to fail because the process takes place in a
confined geometry. Using scaling arguments developed in the context of second
layer nucleation, I present a simple derivation of the hydrogen recombination
rate for small and large grains. I clarify the reasons for the failure of rate
equations for small grains, and point out a logarithmic correction to the
reaction rate when the reaction is limited by the desorption of hydrogen atoms
(the second order reaction regime)
Parallel Implementations of Cellular Automata for Traffic Models
The Biham-Middleton-Levine (BML) traffic model is a simple two-dimensional,
discrete Cellular Automaton (CA) that has been used to study self-organization
and phase transitions arising in traffic flows. From the computational point of
view, the BML model exhibits the usual features of discrete CA, where the state
of the automaton are updated according to simple rules that depend on the state
of each cell and its neighbors. In this paper we study the impact of various
optimizations for speeding up CA computations by using the BML model as a case
study. In particular, we describe and analyze the impact of several parallel
implementations that rely on CPU features, such as multiple cores or SIMD
instructions, and on GPUs. Experimental evaluation provides quantitative
measures of the payoff of each technique in terms of speedup with respect to a
plain serial implementation. Our findings show that the performance gap between
CPU and GPU implementations of the BML traffic model can be reduced by clever
exploitation of all CPU features
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