Dynamic power management: from portable devices to high performance computing

Electronic applications are nowadays converging under the umbrella of the cloud computing vision. The future ecosystem of information and communication technology is going to integrate clouds of portable clients and embedded devices exchanging information, through the internet layer, with processing clusters of servers, data-centers and high performance computing systems. Even thus the whole society is waiting to embrace this revolution, there is a backside of the story. Portable devices require battery to work far from the power plugs and their storage capacity does not scale as the increasing power requirement does. At the other end processing clusters, such as data-centers and server farms, are build upon the integration of thousands multiprocessors. For each of them during the last decade the technology scaling has produced a dramatic increase in power density with significant spatial and temporal variability. This leads to power and temperature hot-spots, which may cause non-uniform ageing and accelerated chip failure. Nonetheless all the heat removed from the silicon translates in high cooling costs. Moreover trend in ICT carbon footprint shows that run-time power consumption of the all spectrum of devices accounts for a significant slice of entire world carbon emissions. This thesis work embrace the full ICT ecosystem and dynamic power consumption concerns by describing a set of new and promising system levels resource management techniques to reduce the power consumption and related issues for two corner cases: Mobile Devices and High Performance Computing.

Ricerca di Escherichia coli produttori di verocitotossine e definizione di obiettivi di performance nella produzione primaria di alimenti di origine animale

La presenza di Escherichia coli produttori di verocitotossine (VTEC o STEC) rappresenta una tra le più importanti cause di malattia alimentare attualmente presenti in Europa. La sua presenza negli allevamenti di animali destinati alla produzione di alimenti rappresenta un importante rischio per la salute del consumatore. In conseguenza di comuni contaminazioni che si realizzano nel corso della macellazione, della mungitura i VTEC possono essere presenti nelle carni e nel latte e rappresentano un grave rischio se la preparazione per il consumo o i processi di lavorazione non comportano trattamenti in grado d’inattivarli (es. carni crude o poco cotte, latte non pastorizzato, formaggi freschi a latte crudo). La contaminazione dei campi coltivati conseguente alla dispersione di letame o attraverso acque contaminate può veicolare questi stipiti che sono normalmente albergati nell’intestino di ruminanti (domestici e selvatici) e anche prodotti vegetali consumati crudi, succhi e perfino sementi sono stati implicati in gravi episodi di malattia con gravi manifestazioni enteriche e complicazioni in grado di causare quadri patologici gravi e anche la morte. Stipiti di VTEC patogeni ingeriti con gli alimenti possono causare sintomi gastroenterici, con diarrea acquosa o emorragica (nel 50% dei casi), crampi addominali, febbre lieve e in una percentuale più bassa nausea e vomito. In alcuni casi (circa 5-10%) l’infezione gastroenterica si complica con manifestazioni tossiemiche caratterizzate da Sindrome Emolitico Uremica (SEU o HUS) con anemia emolitica, insufficienza renale grave e coinvolgimento neurologico o con una porpora trombotica trombocitopenica. Il tasso di mortalità dei pazienti che presentano l’infezione da E. coli è inferiore all’1%. I dati forniti dall’ECDC sulle infezioni alimentari nel periodo 2006-2010 hanno evidenziato un trend in leggero aumento del numero di infezioni a partire dal 2007. L’obiettivo degli studi condotti è quello di valutare la prevalenza ed il comportamento dei VTEC per una analisi del rischio più approfondita.

The Impact Of Inward Licensing On New Venture’s Performance. Is inward licensing a winning strategy?

The original idea of the thesis draws on interrelated assumptions: 1) among the tools used, in the markets for technology, for the acquisition of external knowledge, the licensing agreements are acknowledged as one of the most important contractual mechanisms; 2) the liabilities of newness and the liabilities of smallness force new venture to strongly rely on external knowledge sources. Albeit the relevance of this topic, little attention has been paid so far to its investigation, especially in the licensing context; 3) nowadays there is an increasing trend in licensing practices, but the literature on markets for technology focuses almost exclusively on the incentives and rationales that foster firms’ decisions to trade their technologies, under-investigating the role of the acquiring firm, the licensee, overlooking the demand side of the market. Therefore, the thesis investigates the inward licensing phenomenon within the context of new ventures. The main questions that new venture licensee has to address if it decides to undertake an inward licensing strategy, can be summarized as follows: 1) Is convenient for a new venture to choose, as initial technology strategy, the implementation of an inward licensing ? 2) Does this decision affect its survival probabilities? 3) Does the age, at which a new venture becomes a licensee, affect its innovative capabilities? Is it better to undertake a licensing-in strategy soon after founding or to postpone this strategy until the new venture has accumulated significant resources? The findings suggest that new ventures licensees survive less than their non-licensee counterparts; the survival rates are directly connected to the time taken by firms to reach the market;being engaged in licensing-in deals some years after its inception allows a new venture licensee to increase its subsequent capacity to produce innovations.