106 research outputs found

    Influence of Modularity and Regularity on Disparity of Atelostomata Sea Urchins

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    A modularity approach is used to study disparity rates and evolvability of sea urchins belonging to the Atelostomata superorder. For this purpose, the pentameric sea urchin architecture is partitioned into modular spatial components and the interference between modules is quantified using areas and a measurement of the regularity of the spatial partitions. This information is used to account for the variability through time (disparity) and potential for morphological variation and evolution (evolvability) in holasteroid echinoids. We obtain that regular partitions of the space produce modules with high modular integrity, whereas irregular partitions produce low modular integrity; the former ones are related with high morphological disparity (facilitation hypothesis). Our analysis also suggests that a pentameric body plan with low regularity rates in Atelostomata reflects a stronger modular integration among modules than within modules, which could favors bilaterality against radial symmetry. Our approach constitutes a theoretical platform to define and quantify spatial organization in partitions of the space that can be related to modules in a morphological analysis

    Rendering Elimination: Early Discard of Redundant Tiles in the Graphics Pipeline

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    GPUs are one of the most energy-consuming components for real-time rendering applications, since a large number of fragment shading computations and memory accesses are involved. Main memory bandwidth is especially taxing battery-operated devices such as smartphones. Tile-Based Rendering GPUs divide the screen space into multiple tiles that are independently rendered in on-chip buffers, thus reducing memory bandwidth and energy consumption. We have observed that, in many animated graphics workloads, a large number of screen tiles have the same color across adjacent frames. In this paper, we propose Rendering Elimination (RE), a novel micro-architectural technique that accurately determines if a tile will be identical to the same tile in the preceding frame before rasterization by means of comparing signatures. Since RE identifies redundant tiles early in the graphics pipeline, it completely avoids the computation and memory accesses of the most power consuming stages of the pipeline, which substantially reduces the execution time and the energy consumption of the GPU. For widely used Android applications, we show that RE achieves an average speedup of 1.74x and energy reduction of 43% for the GPU/Memory system, surpassing by far the benefits of Transaction Elimination, a state-of-the-art memory bandwidth reduction technique available in some commercial Tile-Based Rendering GPUs

    Trust when financial implications are not the aim: the integration of sustainability into management education

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    [EN] Literature has paid detailed attention to the positive financial implications of considering the stakeholders’ environmental concerns. This paper contributes by using a trust framework to delimitate how stakeholders may influence managers’ environmental decisions even if they are not focused on financial objectives. Specifically, we analyse how perceptions of academic department heads about their stakeholders’ ability and benevolence influence the head’s willingness to integrate sustainability issues into the syllabus of the courses. We also investigate the direct and moderating role of the heads’ interest in financial aims and the direct influence of the school environmental proactivity. Our analysis includes a sample of 74 deans in 46 different business and engineering schools and a sample of 95 department heads in the field of management studies of 25 Spanish universities. The hierarchical moderated regression results confirm the positive influence of the ability and benevolence of the stakeholders and the heads’ interest in the financial aims, but not the moderating effects and the influence of the school proactivity. The paper provides research implications on the stakeholders’ dimensions influencing environmental decisions and practical implications showing that managers of organisations who wish to advance their environmental approaches may use partnerships with their stakeholders based upon trust.S

    DeSC: Decoupled Supply-Compute Communication Management for Heterogeneous Architectures

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    ABSTRACT Today's computers employ significant heterogeneity to meet performance targets at manageable power. In adopting increased compute specialization, however, the relative amount of time spent on memory or communication latency has increased. System and software optimizations for memory and communication often come at the costs of increased complexity and reduced portability. We propose Decoupled Supply-Compute (DeSC) as a way to attack memory bottlenecks automatically, while maintaining good portability and low complexity. Drawing from Decoupled Access Execute (DAE) approaches, our work updates and expands on these techniques with increased specialization and automatic compiler support. Across the evaluated workloads, DeSC o↵ers an average of 2.04x speedup over baseline (on homogeneous CMPs) and 1.56x speedup when a DeSC data supplier feeds data to a hardware accelerator. Achieving performance very close to what a perfect cache hierarchy would o↵er, DeSC o↵ers the performance gains of specialized communication acceleration while maintaining useful generality across platforms

    DeSC: Decoupled Supply-Compute Communication Management for Heterogeneous Architectures

    Get PDF
    ABSTRACT Today's computers employ significant heterogeneity to meet performance targets at manageable power. In adopting increased compute specialization, however, the relative amount of time spent on memory or communication latency has increased. System and software optimizations for memory and communication often come at the costs of increased complexity and reduced portability. We propose Decoupled Supply-Compute (DeSC) as a way to attack memory bottlenecks automatically, while maintaining good portability and low complexity. Drawing from Decoupled Access Execute (DAE) approaches, our work updates and expands on these techniques with increased specialization and automatic compiler support. Across the evaluated workloads, DeSC offers an average of 2.04x speedup over baseline (on homogeneous CMPs) and 1.56x speedup when a DeSC data supplier feeds data to a hardware accelerator. Achieving performance very close to what a perfect cache hierarchy would offer, DeSC offers the performance gains of specialized communication acceleration while maintaining useful generality across platforms

    Tabaquismo y trastorno mental grave: conceptualización, abordaje teórico y estudios de intervención.

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    El hábito tabáquico es un grave problema de salud en los pacientes con trastorno mental grave. Este trabajo realiza una revisión actualizada de sus bases neurofisiológicas y abordaje terapéutico. Existe una vinculación conocida entre neurotransmisión nicotínica y esquizofrenia sin una propuesta de modelo etiológico. El abordaje terapéutico del tabaquismo en enfermos psiquiátricos requiere formación específica y unidades de tabaquismo o servicios de salud mental preparados. La asociación con consumo de sustancias tóxicas, psicofármacos, comorbilidad psiquiátrica y falta de motivación profesional constituyen factores limitantes. La intervención breve aprovecha el contacto sanitario para explorar la presencia de tabaquismo y valorar la predisposición del paciente a dejar de fumar. El tratamiento utiliza terapia sustitutiva con nicotina, antidepresivos, agonistas del receptor nicotínico y/o intervenciones psicosociales. El tratamiento con bupropion es el más efectivo y seguro, mientras la terapia sustitutiva con nicotina y la vareniclina son también útiles. En la práctica clínica la utilización de farmacoterapia y psicoterapia puede ser la opción más razonable

    Comparison of GPS analysis strategies for high-accuracy vertical land motion

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    Tide gauges measure sea level changes relative to land. To separate absolute changes in sea level from vertical land movements tide gauges are often co-located with Continuous GPS (CGPS). In order to achieve an accuracy of better than 1 mm/yr, as required for sea level studies in the global change context, vertical land motion needs to be determined with the same accuracy. This is an ambitious goal for CGPS and needs a carefully designed analysis strategy. We have compared the independent results from six different analysis centres, using three different GPS processing softwares and a number of different analysis strategies. Based on the comparison, we discuss the achieved accuracy and the quality of the different strategies. The data analysed are from the CGPS network of the European Sea Level Service and cover the time window from the beginning of 2000 until the end of 2003. The comparison reveals large differences in the day-to-day variations of the coordinate time series and also in the seasonal cycle contained in these. The trends show systematic differences, depending on software and strategy used. To a large extent, the latter deviations can be explained by differences in the realisation of the reference frame, while some parts may be due to other, as yet, unidentified contributions. The results suggest that the reference frame and its relation to the center of mass of the Earth system may be the main limitation in achieving the accuracy goal for the secular velocity of vertical land motion.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
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