Speedup and scalability analysis of Master-Slave applications on large heterogeneous clusters

Although cluster environments have an enormous potential processing power, real applications that take advantage of this power remain an elusive goal. This is due, in part, to the lack of understanding about the characteristics of the applications best suited for these environments. This paper focuses on Master/Slave applications for large heterogeneous clusters. It defines application, cluster and execution models to derive an analytic expression for the execution time. It defines speedup and derives speedup bounds based on the inherent parallelism of the application and the aggregated computing power of the cluster. The paper derives an analytical expression for efficiency and uses it to define scalability of the algorithm-cluster combination based on the isoefficiency metric. Furthermore, the paper establishes necessary and sufficient conditions for an algorithm-cluster combination to be scalable which are easy to verify and use in practice. Finally, it covers the impact of network contention as the number of processors grow. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A REACHABILITY TREE FOR STATECHARTS AND ANALYSIS OF SOME PROPERTIES

Statecharts are an extension to finite state machines with capability for expressing hierarchical decomposition and parallelism. They also have a mechanism called history, to remember the last visit to a superstate. An algorithm to create a reachability tree for statecharts is presented. Also shown is how to use this tree to analyse dynamic properties of statecharts; reachability from any state configuration, usage of transitions, reinitiability, deadlocks, and valid sequence of events. Owing to its powerful notation, building a reachability tree for statecharts presents some difficulties, and we show how these problems were solved in the tree we propose.

Enhanced ERbeta immunoexpression and apoptosis in the germ cells of cimetidine-treated rats

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Petri nets teaching in the Mechatronics Engineering course

The current solutions implanted in the majority of manufacturing systems controlled by PLCs were developed through the language of programming known as ladder. Such a language, easily learned and handled, shows to be efficient whenever the system to be implanted does not demand greater complexity of analyses. Bigger systems, presenting characteristics in which resource compartments, parallelism and synchronizing among processes are more frequent, demand the adoption of solutions differentiation. This article presents a teaching experience and practical application of Petri nets in a Mechatronics Engineering graduation course. Copyright © 2007 IFAC.

Pulse treatments to extend the postharvest life of Ctenanthe setosa cut foliage

Marantaceae leaves have a contrasting color pattern and a decorative design which are interesting traits for its use as cut foliage. No postharvest research has been carried out on the potential as cut foliage for species of Ctenanthe, a member of the Marantaceae. Grey-maranta (Ctenathe setosa) is an herbaceous ornamental plant native of Brazil whose cut foliage has potential to be used as new crop product for local and international ornamental markets. The objective of this study was to evaluate pulse treatments to extend the longevity of foliage. The experiment was conducted in a complete randomized design with three replications and eight treatments: distilled water; pulsing cut petioles-ends in citric acid (pH = 2.8/1h); 2% sucrose (4h); 1% sucrose plus 200 mg L-1 citric acid (4h); 0.01% Tween® 20 (4h); 100 mg L -1 benzyladenine plus 0.01% Tween® 20 (4h); 100 mg L-1 gibberellic acid plus 0.01% Tween® 20 (4h); and maintenance of cut petiole in holding solution with commercial sodium hypochlorite (0.5 mL L-1). The senescence symptoms were mainly characterized by leaf rolling and by a decrease in the angle formed between leaf and petiole as a response to water deficit stress. Gibberellic acid or benzyladenine pulse treatments significantly extended longevity (6 days compared to control) and maintained leaves' green coloration and brightness for a longer time compared to control. However, only the benzyladenine plus Tween® 20 pulse maintained leaves in an erect form for a longer time, showing a significantly higher angle between leaf and petiole compared to control. Also, foliage pulsed with benzyladenine plus Tween® 20 showed a significant smallest loss of accumulated fresh mass percentage compared to control by the T test as to parallelism of treatments lines.

Using GPUs for beamforming acceleration on SAFT imaging

SAFT techniques are based on the sequential activation, in emission and reception, of the array elements and the post-processing of all the received signals to compose the image. Thus, the image generation can be divided into two stages: (1) the excitation and acquisition stage, where the signals received by each element or group of elements are stored; and (2) the beamforming stage, where the signals are combined together to obtain the image pixels. The use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which are programmable devices with a high level of parallelism, can accelerate the computations of the beamforming process, that usually includes different functions such as dynamic focusing, band-pass filtering, spatial filtering or envelope detection. This work shows that using GPU technology can accelerate, in more than one order of magnitude with respect to CPU implementations, the beamforming and post-processing algorithms in SAFT imaging. ©2009 IEEE.

Evaluation of a new intraoral paralleling device for creating guiding planes: A pilot study

Aim: The aim of the study was to assess the accuracy of a new intraoral paralleling device for creating proximal guiding planes for removable partial dental prostheses. Methods and Materials: Thirty gypsum casts were divided into two groups in which the proximal surfaces of selected teeth were prepared using either a surveying device (Group 1) or the new ParalAB paralleling device (Group 2). In each cast guiding planes were prepared on the distal surface of the maxillary left canine (A), on the mesial and distal surfaces of the maxillary left second molar (B and C), and on the distal surface of the maxillary right canine (D). Each prepared surface formed an angle related to the occlusal plane that was measured five times and averaged by one operator using a tridimensional coordinate machine. Results: The mean guiding plane angles (± standard deviation) for the prepared surfaces were A=91.82° (±0.48°, B=90.47° (±0.47°, C=90.21° (±0.76°, and D=90.50° (±0.73°) for the dental surveyor (Group 1) and A=92.18° (±0.87°), B=90.90° (±0.85°), C=90.07° (±0.92°), and D=90.66° (±0.76°) for the ParalAB paralleling device (Group 2). A two-way ANOVA, Tukey's, and Levène's tests (at p<0.05) revealed statistically significant differences among surfaces prepared by both groups and that one surface Conclusions: The ParalAB device was able to prepare parallel surfaces and despite significant difference between groups, the ParalAB presented a small deviation from absolute parallelism and can be considered a valid method to transfer guide plans in the fabrication of removable partial dentures. Clinical Significance: The preparation of suitable guiding planes on abutment teeth during the fabrication of removable partial dentures is dependent on the ability of the operator and requires considerable chair time. When multiple teeth are involved, achieving parallelism between abutment surfaces can be technically challenging, especially in posterior regions of the mouth. The ParalAB prototype intraoral paralleling device can aid the clinician during the preparation of accurate guiding planes with a minimum degree of occlusal divergence. © 2010 Seer Publishing LLC.

Validação de radioimunoensaio para quantificação de leptina plasmática bovina

Due necessity of better understanding leptin and reproduction relations, a specific radioimmunoassay (RIA) to bovine leptin was avalidated. First, an antibody production protocol was developed using recombinant equine leptin inoculated in a rabbit, that results in 28,05% of maximum binding (MB) 105 days after the protocol beginning. The tests of validations verified parallelism between standard curve and dilutions of high and low controls (P < 0,01). Antibody against equine leptin showed specificity to bovine leptin (P < 0,01). The recuperation tax of bovine leptin by antibody against recombinant equine leptin was from 98,4 to 101,6% (P < 0, 01). When the samples were stored in ambient temperature or refrigerated to 4°C, ligation stability was verified (P > 0,2), however, temperatures above 37°C impaired the bovine leptin recuperation. The use of assay buffer with or without bovine plasma did not show any difference (P > 0,3). These results showed that the antibody produced in rabbit against equine leptin were able to detect plasmatic bovine leptin, and that the RIA to bovine leptin quantification had adequate characteristics to the development of a valid assay.

LUTS: A lightweight user-level transaction scheduler

Software Transactional Memory (STM) systems have poor performance under high contention scenarios. Since many transactions compete for the same data, most of them are aborted, wasting processor runtime. Contention management policies are typically used to avoid that, but they are passive approaches as they wait for an abort to happen so they can take action. More proactive approaches have emerged, trying to predict when a transaction is likely to abort so its execution can be delayed. Such techniques are limited, as they do not replace the doomed transaction by another or, when they do, they rely on the operating system for that, having little or no control on which transaction should run. In this paper we propose LUTS, a Lightweight User-Level Transaction Scheduler, which is based on an execution context record mechanism. Unlike other techniques, LUTS provides the means for selecting another transaction to run in parallel, thus improving system throughput. Moreover, it avoids most of the issues caused by pseudo parallelism, as it only launches as many system-level threads as the number of available processor cores. We discuss LUTS design and present three conflict-avoidance heuristics built around LUTS scheduling capabilities. Experimental results, conducted with STMBench7 and STAMP benchmark suites, show LUTS efficiency when running high contention applications and how conflict-avoidance heuristics can improve STM performance even more. In fact, our transaction scheduling techniques are capable of improving program performance even in overloaded scenarios. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Immunoexpression of aromatase and estrogen receptors β in stem spermatogonia of bullfrogs indicates a role of estrogen in the seasonal spermatogonial mitotic activity

Bullfrog stem spermatogonia, also named primordial germ cells (PGCs), show strong testosterone immunolabeling in winter, but no or weak testosterone immunoexpression in summer. Thus, the role of testosterone in these cells needs to be clarified. In this study, we proposed to evaluate whether PGCs express aromatase and estrogen receptors, and verify a possible role of estrogen in PGCs seasonal proliferation. Testes of male adult bullfrogs, collected in winter (WG) and summer (SG), were fixed and embedded in historesin, for quantitative analysis, or paraffin for immunohistochemistry (IHC). The number of haematoxylin/eosin stained PGCs/lobular area was obtained. Proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), aromatase, estrogen receptor β (ERβ) and PCNA/ERβ double immunolabeling were detected by IHC. The number of PCNA-positive PGCs and the histological score (HSCORE) of aromatase and ERβ immunolabeled PGCs were obtained. Although the number of PGCs increased significantly in WG, a high number of PCNA-positive PGCs was observed in summer. Moreover, aromatase and ERβ HSCORE was higher in SG than WG. The results indicate that PGCs express a seasonal proliferative activity; the low mitotic activity in winter is related to the maximal limit of germ cells which can be supported in the large lobules. In SG, the increased ERβ and aromatase HSCORE suggests that testosterone is converted into estrogen from winter to summer. Moreover, the parallelism between the high PGCs mitotic activity and ERβ immunoexpression suggest a participation of estrogen in the control of the PGCs seasonal proliferative activity which guarantee the formation of new germ cysts from summer to next autumn. © 2012 Elsevier Inc.

NF-kB overexpression and decreased immunoexpression of AR in the muscular layer is related to structural damages and apoptosis in cimetidine-treated rat vas deferens

Background: Cimetidine, histamine H2 receptors antagonist, has caused adverse effects on the male hormones and reproductive tract due to its antiandrogenic effect. In the testes, peritubular myoid cells and muscle vascular cells death has been associated to seminiferous tubules and testicular microvascularization damages, respectively. Either androgen or histamine H2 receptors have been detected in the mucosa and smooth muscular layer of vas deferens. Thus, the effect of cimetidine on this androgen and histamine-dependent muscular duct was morphologically evaluated.Methods: The animals from cimetidine group (CMTG; n=5) received intraperitoneal injections of 100 mg/kg b.w. of cimetidine for 50 days; the control group (CG) received saline solution. The distal portions of vas deferens were fixed in formaldehyde and embedded in paraffin. Massońs trichrome-stained sections were subjected to morphological and the following morphometrical analyzes: epithelial perimeter and area of the smooth muscular layer. TUNEL (Terminal deoxynucleotidyl-transferase mediated dUTP Nick End Labeling) method, NF-kB (nuclear factor kappa B) and AR (androgen receptors) immunohistochemical detection were also carried out. The birefringent collagen of the muscular layer was quantified in picrosirius red-stained sections under polarized light. The muscular layer was also evaluated under Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM).Results: In CMTG, the mucosa of vas deferens was intensely folded; the epithelial cells showed numerous pyknotic nuclei and the epithelial perimeter and the area of the muscular layer decreased significantly. Numerous TUNEL-labeled nuclei were found either in the epithelial cells, mainly basal cells, or in the smooth muscle cells which also showed typical features of apoptosis under TEM. While an enhanced NF-kB immunoexpression was found in the cytoplasm of muscle cells, a weak AR immunolabeling was detected in these cells. In CMTG, no significant difference was observed in the birefringent collagen content of the muscular layer in comparison to CG.Conclusions: Cimetidine induces significant damages in the epithelium; a possible antiandrogenic effect on the basal cells turnover should be considered. The cimetidine-induced muscle cells apoptosis confirms the susceptibility of these cells to this drug. The parallelism between enhanced cytoplasmic NF-kB immunolabeling in the damaged muscular tissue and muscle cell apoptosis suggests that this drug may avoid the translocation of NF-kB to the nucleus and interfere in the control of NF-kB-mediated smooth muscle cell apoptosis. The decreased immunoexpression of ARs verified in the damaged muscular tissue reinforces this possibility. © 2013 Koshimizu et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

A variação de pluralidade nas estruturas predictaivas da variedade falada na região de São José do Rio Preto

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Hesitações em deslizamentos do dizer de sujeitos parkinsonianos e não-parkinsonianos: um estudo comparativo

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

A concordância verbal na língua falada na região noroeste do Estado de São Paulo

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Célula de comutação de três estados aplicada ao pré-regulador boost de estágio único e elevado fator de potência

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)