Understanding Supply Chain Complexity with Performance Measurement

Abstract: Despite the great number of complex systems existing in the real world, complexity is currently a poorly explored topic. In organizational settings, managers regularly apply to complex contexts classical approaches developed for simple systems, just because they do not know how to take into account companies' internal and external complexity. Nevertheless, before developing new managerial models, a deep knowledge about drivers and effects of complexity is needed. After defining the characteristics making supply chains complex systems, this paper discusses performance measurement as a methodology to analyze the effects of complexity on supply chain behavior. The results of a survey highlight that manufacturing companies usually evaluate isolated aspects of their supply chains, without considering the relationships between different performance indicators or dimensions. This work suggests System Dynamics as a valuable approach to understand the cause and effect connections among metrics and system elements affecting their values, thus clarifying the structure leading to a complex behavior. This research is the first step of a larger project aimed at providing companies with innovative tools to understand and manage supply chain complexit

Interaction of resveratrol analogues with biomembrane models: a calorimetric study on structural variations effects

Differential Scanning Calorimetry was used to study the interaction of new resveratrol derivatives using dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine (DMPC) multilamellar vesicles (MLV) as biomembrane models. MLV prepared in the presence of increasing molar fractions of the following compounds: (A) 3,5,3’,5’- tetramethoxystilbene, (B) 3,5,3’,4’-tetramethoxystilbene, (C) 3,4,5,4’-tetramethoxystilbene, (D) 3,4,5,3’,5’- pentamethoxystilbene and (E) 3,4,2’,4’,5’-pentamethoxystilbene were analyzed to study the effects exerted by the number and position of the substituents on the variations of thermotropic properties of the biomembrane model. The results showed that the number and the position of the substituent strongly affected the interaction between the compounds and the MLV based on DMPC. Kinetic experiments demonstrated that, the absorption of compounds A to E is limited in an aqueous medium. The presence of a lipophilic medium improves the absorption of the compounds by the biomembrane model

FSP: a Framework for Data Stream Processing Applications targeting FPGAs

The Data Stream Processing (DSP) paradigm studies novel algorithms and parallel processing techniques to gain valuable information from data streams. Accelerating DSP with FPGAs is a promising idea since such devices provide low latency, high energy efficiency, and low hardware engineering cost. Unfortunately, state-of-art DSP systems do not provide support for those devices. In this thesis, our aim is to determine if FPGAs can be considered a viable solution for accelerating DSP applications, and we propose a code generation approach which, starting from a high-level API in Python, allows programmer to easily instantiate streaming pipelines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, in terms of programmability and performance. We give a careful analysis of different ways to parallelize streaming operators, and we show the performance of the different techniques on a set of synthetic benchmarks

Work Project Report

The current LHCb detector uses both hardware and software for its High Level Trigger. The experiment will be upgraded around 2020, and as part of the upgrade, the Hardware Level Trigger will be removed, and as a consequence all events will be filtered solely on software. As an effect of this decision, and also due to the expected luminosity increase in Run 3, a big effort is being put into modernizing the software, targeting different architectures, rethinking design decisions and data formats. One possible solution is to use GPU architectures for the High Level Trigger 1, due to the highly parallel approach these allow us to apply. A project called “CUDA HLT 1” started with the aim of informally evaluate the consequences of incorporating GPUs in the early reconstruction process of LHCb