"Skills and Qualifications at the Core of the Relationship between Resources and Employment"

This chapter examines the relations between training, skills, credentials and the wage in France, Spain and the United Kingdom. It focuses on recent changes in the different systems of vocational training and certification and their connections with the occupational classifications and remunerative systems of each country. From a perspective considering the total reproduction of labour, we concentrate on the articulation between the processes shaping the productive characteristics of labour and the processes resulting in the purchase of labour by companies.skills; credentials; wage; Spain; France; United Kingdom; occupational hierarchy;

ERASE: Energy Efficient Task Mapping and Resource Management for Work Stealing Runtimes

Parallel applications often rely on work stealing schedulers in combination with fine-grained tasking to achieve high performance and scalability. However, reducing the total energy consumption in the context of work stealing runtimes is still challenging, particularly when using asymmetric architectures with different types of CPU cores. A common approach for energy savings involves dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) wherein throttling is carried out based on factors like task parallelism, stealing relations, and task criticality. This article makes the following observations: (i) leveraging DVFS on a per-task basis is impractical when using fine-grained tasking and in environments with cluster/chip-level DVFS; (ii) task moldability, wherein a single task can execute on multiple threads/cores via work-sharing, can help to reduce energy consumption; and (iii) mismatch between tasks and assigned resources (i.e., core type and number of cores) can detrimentally impact energy consumption. In this article, we propose EneRgy Aware SchedulEr (ERASE), an intra-application task scheduler on top of work stealing runtimes that aims to reduce the total energy consumption of parallel applications. It achieves energy savings by guiding scheduling decisions based on per-task energy consumption predictions of different resource configurations. In addition, ERASE is capable of adapting to both given static frequency settings and externally controlled DVFS. Overall, ERASE achieves up to 31% energy savings and improves performance by 44% on average, compared to the state-of-the-art DVFS-based schedulers

Coordinated management of DVFS and cache partitioning under QoS constraints to save energy in multi-core systems

Reducing the energy expended to carry out a computational task is important. In this work, we explore the prospects of meeting Quality-of-Service requirements of tasks on a multi-core system while adjusting resources to expend a minimum of energy. This paper considers, for the first time, a QoS-driven coordinated resource management algorithm (RMA) that dynamically adjusts the size of the per-core last-level cache partitions and the per-core voltage–frequency settings to save energy while respecting QoS requirements of every application in multi-programmed workloads run on multi-core systems. It does so by doing configuration-space exploration across the spectrum of LLC partition sizes and Dynamic Voltage–Frequency Scaling (DVFS) settings at runtime at negligible overhead. We show that the energy of 4-core and 8-core systems can be reduced by up to 18% and 14%, respectively, compared to a baseline with even distribution of cache resources and a fixed mid-range core voltage–frequency setting. The energy savings can potentially reach 29% if the QoS targets are relaxed to 40% longer execution time

Design space explorations for streaming accelerators using streaming architectural simulator

In the recent years streaming accelerators like GPUs have been pop-up as an effective step towards parallel computing. The wish-list for these devices span from having a support for thousands of small cores to a nature very close to the general purpose computing. This makes the design space very vast for the future accelerators containing thousands of parallel streaming cores. This complicates to exercise a right choice of the architectural configuration for the next generation devices. However, accurate design space exploration tools developed for the massively parallel architectures can ease this task. The main objectives of this work are twofold. (i) We present a complete environment of a trace driven simulator named SArcs (Streaming Architectural Simulator) for the streaming accelerators. (ii) We use our simulation tool-chain for the design space explorations of the GPU like streaming architectures. Our design space explorations for different architectural aspects of a GPU like device a e with reference to a base line established for NVIDIA's Fermi architecture (GPU Tesla C2050). The explored aspects include the performation effects by the variations in the configurations of Streaming Multiprocessors Global Memory Bandwidth, Channles between SMs down to Memory Hierarchy and Cache Hierarchy. The explorations are performed using application kernels from Vector Reduction, 2D-Convolution. Matrix-Matrix Multiplication and 3D-Stencil. Results show that the configurations of the computational resources for the current Fermi GPU device can deliver higher performance with further improvement in the global memory bandwidth for the same device.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Kilo-instruction processors: overcoming the memory wall

Historically, advances in integrated circuit technology have driven improvements in processor microarchitecture and led to todays microprocessors with sophisticated pipelines operating at very high clock frequencies. However, performance improvements achievable by high-frequency microprocessors have become seriously limited by main-memory access latencies because main-memory speeds have improved at a much slower pace than microprocessor speeds. Its crucial to deal with this performance disparity, commonly known as the memory wall, to enable future high-frequency microprocessors to achieve their performance potential. To overcome the memory wall, we propose kilo-instruction processors-superscalar processors that can maintain a thousand or more simultaneous in-flight instructions. Doing so means designing key hardware structures so that the processor can satisfy the high resource requirements without significantly decreasing processor efficiency or increasing energy consumption.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Evaluating polymer-supported isothiourea catalysis in industrially-preferable solvents for the acylative kinetic resolution of secondary and tertiary heterocyclic alcohols in batch and flow

The authors thank the Royal Society and the Science and Engineering Board of India (SERB) for the award of a Royal Society-SERB Newton International Fellowship (N.R.G.). The authors also thank the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Critical Resource Catalysis (CRITICAT, grant code EP/L016419/1, R.M.N.P.) for funding. Financial support from the EPSRC (EP/K000411/1) is gratefully acknowledged (R.C.). The authors thank the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) ERC grant agreement no. 279850 (A.D.S). A.D.S. thanks the Royal Society for a Wolfson Research Merit Award. C.R.-E. and M.A.P. acknowledge the financial support from CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya, MINECO (CTQ2015-69136-R, AEI/MINECO/FEDER, UE and Severo Ochoa Excellence Accreditation 2014–2018, SEV-2013-0319) and DEC Generalitat de Catalunya (Grant 2014SGR827).Polymer-supported Lewis base catalysts, based on the homogeneous isothioureas HyperBTM and BTM, have been synthesised and applied for the acylative kinetic resolution of secondary and tertiary heterocyclic alcohols. In batch, the use of industrially-preferable solvents was investigated, with dimethyl carbonate proving to be most generally-applicable. Significantly, the HyperBTM-derived immobilised catalysts were readily recycled, with no loss in either activity or selectivity. In addition to the kinetic resolution of secondary benzylic, propargylic, allylic and cycloalkanol derivatives, a range of 21 tertiary heterocyclic alcohols, based on privileged 3-hydroxyoxindole and 3-hydroxypyrrolidinone substructures, were resolved with up to excellent selectivity (s = 7–190). Finally, the immobilised isothiourea catalysts were applied in a packed bed reactor to demonstrate the first example of the kinetic resolution of tertiary heterocyclic alcohols in a continuous flow process. High selectivities were obtained for the resolution of 3-hydroxyoxindole derivatives in ethyl acetate (s up to 70); and for 3-hydroxypyrrolidinones derivatives in toluene (s up to 42).PostprintPeer reviewe

Medicamentos y alimentos on line: cuestiones éticas en torno al acceso a alimentos y medicamentos a través de Internet

Este artículo plantea cuestiones éticas relevantes pero aun poco debatidas relativas a la accesibilidad de los alimentos y medicamentos a través de Internet, tomando como punto de partida su incidencia de esta situación en la salud colectiva. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es identificar conflictos bioéticos derivados de la utilización de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación para adquirir medicamentos y alimentos. El artículo distingue entre los riesgos derivados del acceso fácil a medicamentos y alimentos ilegales en Internet, y las implicaciones bioéticas que plantea la adquisición on line de medicamentos y alimentos a través de portales legales.This article describes the ethical implications that arise when buying food and drugs online. The main goal is to identify relevant bioethical conflicts that derive from using information and communication technologies, but which have been overlooked by academia and legislators. The article distinguishes between the risks that easy access to illegal products entails, and the bioethical implications that arise when buying legal food and drugs online

Food and drugs online: ethics of internet-based access to food and medicines

This article describes the ethical implications that arise when buying food and drugs online. The main goal is to identify relevant bioethical conflicts that derive from using information and communication technologies, but which have been overlooked by academia and legislators. The article distinguishes between the risks that easy access to illegal products entails, and the bioethical implications that arise when buying legal food and drugs online.Este artículo plantea cuestiones éticas relevantes pero aun poco debatidas relativas a la accesibilidad de los alimentos y medicamentos a través de Internet, tomando como punto de partida su incidencia de esta situación en la salud colectiva. El objetivo principal de este trabajo es identificar conflictos bioéticos derivados de la utilización de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación para adquirir medicamentos y alimentos. El artículo distingue entre los riesgos derivados del acceso fácil a medicamentos y alimentos ilegales en Internet, y las implicaciones bioéticas que plantea la adquisición on line de medicamentos y alimentos a través de portales legales.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version