An Innovative Approach to Achieve Compositionality Efficiently using Multi-Version Object Based Transactional Systems

In the modern era of multicore processors, utilizing cores is a tedious job. Synchronization and communication among processors involve high cost. Software transaction memory systems (STMs) addresses this issues and provide better concurrency in which programmer need not have to worry about consistency issues. Another advantage of STMs is that they facilitate compositionality of concurrent programs with great ease. Different concurrent operations that need to be composed to form a single atomic unit is achieved by encapsulating them in a single transaction. In this paper, we introduce a new STM system as multi-version object based STM (MVOSTM) which is the combination of both of these ideas for harnessing greater concurrency in STMs. As the name suggests MVOSTM, works on a higher level and maintains multiple versions corresponding to each key. We have developed MVOSTM with the unlimited number of versions corresponding to each key. In addition to that, we have developed garbage collection for MVOSTM (MVOSTM-GC) to delete unwanted versions corresponding to the keys to reduce traversal overhead. MVOSTM provides greater concurrency while reducing the number of aborts and it ensures compositionality by making the transactions atomic. Here, we have used MVOSTM for the list and hash-table data structure as list-MVOSTM and HT- MVOSTM. Experimental results of list-MVOSTM outperform almost two to twenty fold speedup than existing state-of-the-art list based STMs (Trans-list, Boosting-list, NOrec-list, list-MVTO, and list-OSTM). HT-MVOSTM shows a significant performance gain of almost two to nineteen times better than existing state-of-the-art hash-table based STMs (ESTM, RWSTMs, HT-MVTO, and HT-OSTM). MVOSTM with list and hash-table shows the least number of aborts among all the existing STM algorithms. MVOSTM satisfies correctness-criteria as opacity.Comment: 35 pages, 23 figure

Who wants to conserve remaining forest fragments in the Manompana corridor?

Contiguous forests in Madagascar are continuously converted into forest fragments due to deforestation, and dispersed into landscape mosaics dominated by agriculture. These fragments are of increasing importance for biodiversity conservation as well as for the well being of rural inhabitants, providing a high diversity of timber and non - timber forest products. An increasing number of international projects are therefore trying to preserve remaining forests and to transfer the management of these forests to local communities. However, it is not known how important the preservation of forest fragments are to local people. We therefore explore the importance of forest fragments as a source of cash income to different groups separated by wealth level and access to forest resources. A multi - method research approach was taken, based on score application exercises as well as interviews with individual households and focus groups. Our study site was located at the east coast of Madagascar in the Manompana corridor. Results show that some groups are significantly more interested in the preservation of forest fragments than others. Interest is significantly related to the wealth of local inhabitants as well as to the walking distance between villages and forest resources. Nevertheless, interest in resource preservation does not depend on how important fragments are to local people, but rather on the awareness about resource scarcity

Concurrent TNFRSF1A R92Q and pyrin E230K mutations in a child with multiple sclerosis

We report a 16-year-old female patient with a severe course of multiple sclerosis and concomitant symptoms suggestive of a hereditary autoinflammatory disease. Genetic analyses revealed that she inherited a TNFRSF1A R92Q mutation from her mother and a pyrin E230K mutation from her father. To our knowledge, this is the first report of a patient with severe childhood multiple sclerosis and mutations in two genes which predispose to hereditary autoinflammatory disorders. We speculate that these mutations contribute to early multiple sclerosis manifestation and enhance the inflammatory damage inflicted by the autoimmune response

Tuning the Level of Concurrency in Software Transactional Memory: An Overview of Recent Analytical, Machine Learning and Mixed Approaches

Synchronization transparency offered by Software Transactional Memory (STM) must not come at the expense of run-time efficiency, thus demanding from the STM-designer the inclusion of mechanisms properly oriented to performance and other quality indexes. Particularly, one core issue to cope with in STM is related to exploiting parallelism while also avoiding thrashing phenomena due to excessive transaction rollbacks, caused by excessively high levels of contention on logical resources, namely concurrently accessed data portions. A means to address run-time efficiency consists in dynamically determining the best-suited level of concurrency (number of threads) to be employed for running the application (or specific application phases) on top of the STM layer. For too low levels of concurrency, parallelism can be hampered. Conversely, over-dimensioning the concurrency level may give rise to the aforementioned thrashing phenomena caused by excessive data contention—an aspect which has reflections also on the side of reduced energy-efficiency. In this chapter we overview a set of recent techniques aimed at building “application-specific” performance models that can be exploited to dynamically tune the level of concurrency to the best-suited value. Although they share some base concepts while modeling the system performance vs the degree of concurrency, these techniques rely on disparate methods, such as machine learning or analytic methods (or combinations of the two), and achieve different tradeoffs in terms of the relation between the precision of the performance model and the latency for model instantiation. Implications of the different tradeoffs in real-life scenarios are also discussed

Bouncing Neutrons and the Neutron Centrifuge

The recent observation of the quantum state of the neutron bouncing freely under gravity allows some novel experiments. A method of purifying the ground state is given, and possible applications to the measurement of the electric dipole moment of the neutron and the short distance behaviour of gravity are discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Event Systems : How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

This paper addresses the fundamental tradeoffs in event systems between scalability (of event filtering, routing, and delivery mechanisms), expressiveness (when describing interests in events), and event safety (ensuring encapsulation and type-safe interaction with polymorphic events). We point out some ramifications underlying these tradeoffs and we propose a pragmatic approach to handle them. We achieve scalability using a multi-stage filtering strategy that combines approximate and perfect matching techniques for the purpose of event routing and filtering. We achieve expressiveness and event safety by viewing events as objects; instances of application-defined abstract types