Modeling the conflicting demands of parallelism and Temporal/Spatial locality in affine scheduling

A way to minimize uncertainty and achieve the best possible project performance in construction project management can be achieved during the procurement process, which involves selecting an optimal contractor according to “the most economically advantageous tender.” As resources are limited, decision-makers are often pulled apart by conflicting demands coming from various stakeholders. The challenge of addressing them at the same time can be modelled as a multi-criteria decision-making problem. The aim of this paper is to show that the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) together with PROMETHEE could cope with such a problem. As a result of their synergy, a decision support concept for selecting the optimal contractor (DSC-CONT) is proposed that: (a) allows the incorporation of opposing stakeholders’ demands; (b) increases the transparency of decision-making and the consistency of the decision-making process; (c) enhances the legitimacy of the final outcome; and (d) is a scientific approach with great potential for application to similar decision-making problems where sustainable decisions are needed.

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The formation of a hatching line in the serosal cuticle confers multifaceted adaptive functions on the eggshell of a cicada

Zoological Letters ◽

10.1186/s40851-021-00178-8 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Minoru Moriyama ◽

Kouji Yasuyama ◽

Hideharu Numata

Keyword(s):

Protective Role ◽

Terminal Phase ◽

Embryonic Diapause ◽

Insect Eggs ◽

Ridge Structure ◽

Conflicting Demands ◽

Partial Degradation ◽

Egg Period ◽

Eggshell Structure

AbstractInsect eggshells must meet various demands of developing embryos. These demands sometimes conflict with each other; therefore, there are tradeoffs between eggshell properties, such as robustness and permeability. To meet these conflicting demands, particular eggshell structures have evolved in diverse insect species. Here, we report a rare eggshell structure found in the eggshell of a cicada, Cryptotympana facialis. This species has a prolonged egg period with embryonic diapause and a trait of humidity-inducible hatching, which would impose severe demands on the eggshell. We found that in eggs of this species, unlike many other insect eggs, a dedicated cleavage site, known as a hatching line, was formed not in the chorion but in the serosal cuticle. The hatching line was composed of a fine furrow accompanied by ridges on both sides. This furrow-ridge structure formed in the terminal phase of embryogenesis through the partial degradation of an initially thick and nearly flat cuticle layer. We showed that the permeability of the eggshell was low in the diapause stage, when the cuticle was thick, and increased with degradation of the serosal cuticle. We also demonstrated that the force required to cleave the eggshell was reduced after the formation of the hatching line. These results suggest that the establishment of the hatching line on the serosal cuticle enables flexible modification of eggshell properties during embryogenesis, and we predict that it is an adaptation to maximize the protective role of the shell during the long egg period while reducing the barrier to emerging nymphs at the time of hatching.

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Spatial locality of electronic correlations in LiFeAs

Physical Review B ◽

10.1103/physrevb.103.155107 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 103 (15) ◽

Author(s):

Minjae Kim ◽

Hu Miao ◽

Sangkook Choi ◽

Manuel Zingl ◽

Antoine Georges ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Electronic Correlations ◽

Spatial Locality

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Can politically oriented interventions in built heritage contribute to its authenticity? Erbil Citadel’s Babylonian Gate as a case study

Built Heritage ◽

10.1186/s43238-021-00030-0 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Mohammed Awadh Jasim ◽

Laura Hanks ◽

Katharina Borsi

Keyword(s):

Cultural Value ◽

Cultural Issues ◽

Built Heritage ◽

Projection Screen ◽

Conflicting Demands ◽

Existential Issue ◽

Over Time

AbstractToday, the concept of built heritage authenticity is a projection screen for conflicting demands and thus a ‘contested field’. Short-sighted readings started to drag the concept behind different ill-considered treatises, in which some heritage aspects loosely outweighed other aspects. Archaeological perspectives that tend to freeze heritage structures in time, such as those that are privileged upon other contemporary socio-cultural issues, while political takes also overshadowed other epistemological prospects, and vice versa. Repercussions have made inclusion of what is regarded as ‘inevitable changes’ within the built context problematic as to the re-interpretation and thus assessment of its authenticity. Despite their possible momentary threat to the latter, these changes may add to the cultural value of the context over time, granting new potential that may instead boost its authenticity. This paper investigates the potential continuity of Erbil Citadel’s Babylonian Gate as an inevitable change within the site’s built context by studying the Gate’s controversial political impacts on the context’s authenticity. This study affirms that authenticity is a transcendental value of an open-ended progressive nature, which cannot be reduced to a specific period or properties within the historical chronology of built heritage. Hence, authenticity should be approached as a meaningful existential issue, while revelation of its essence and thus its dimension entails precise scrutiny of both the tangibles and intangibles of the context. However, to be part of its authenticity, any change in the context should be adaptable and possibly incorporated as a new value within its cultural strata, thus enabling progressive support for site authenticity.

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Efficient local locking for massively multithreaded in-memory hash-based operators

The VLDB Journal ◽

10.1007/s00778-020-00642-5 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Bashar Romanous ◽

Skyler Windh ◽

Ildar Absalyamov ◽

Prerna Budhkar ◽

Robert Halstead ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Relational Databases ◽

Aggregation Operators ◽

Main Memory ◽

Paradigm Shifts ◽

Multithreaded Processors ◽

Cache Hierarchies ◽

Processor Architectures ◽

Spatial Locality ◽

Content Addressable Memories ◽

Multi Core Processor

AbstractThe join and group-by aggregation are two memory intensive operators that are affecting the performance of relational databases. Hashing is a common approach used to implement both operators. Recent paradigm shifts in multi-core processor architectures have reinvigorated research into how the join and group-by aggregation operators can leverage these advances. However, the poor spatial locality of the hashing approach has hindered performance on multi-core processor architectures which rely on using large cache hierarchies for latency mitigation. Multithreaded architectures can better cope with poor spatial locality by masking memory latency with many outstanding requests. Nevertheless, the number of parallel threads, even in the most advanced multithreaded processors, such as UltraSPARC, is not enough to fully cover the main memory access latency. In this paper, we explore the hardware re-configurability of FPGAs to enable deeper execution pipelines that maintain hundreds (instead of tens) of outstanding memory requests across four FPGAs-drastically increasing concurrency and throughput. We present two end-to-end in-memory accelerators for the join and group-by aggregation operators using FPGAs. Both accelerators use massive multithreading to mask long memory delays of traversing linked-list data structures, while concurrently managing hundreds of thread states across four FPGAs locally. We explore how content addressable memories can be intermixed within our multithreaded designs to act as a synchronizing cache, which enforces locks and merges jobs together before they are written to memory. Throughput results for our hash-join operator accelerator show a speedup between 2$$\times $$ × and 3.4$$\times $$ × over the best multi-core approaches with comparable memory bandwidths on uniform and skewed datasets. The accelerator for the hash-based group-by aggregation operator demonstrates that leveraging CAMs achieves average speedup of 3.3$$\times $$ × with a best case of 9.4$$\times $$ × in terms of throughput over CPU implementations across five types of data distributions.

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SLID: Exploiting Spatial Locality in Input Data as a Computational Reuse Method for Efficient CNN

IEEE Access ◽

10.1109/access.2021.3071409 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-1

Author(s):

Fatmah Alantali ◽

Yasmin Halawani ◽

Baker Mohammad ◽

Mahmoud Al-Qutayri

Keyword(s):

Input Data ◽

Spatial Locality

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Children’s outdoor active mobility behaviour and neighbourhood safety: a systematic review in measurement methods and future research directions

International Journal of Health Geographics ◽

10.1186/s12942-020-00254-w ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Roula Zougheibe ◽

Jianhong (Cecilia) Xia ◽

Ashraf Dewan ◽

Ori Gudes ◽

Richard Norman

Keyword(s):

Three Dimensional ◽

Measurement Methods ◽

Future Research ◽

Inclusion Criteria ◽

Eligibility Criteria ◽

Research Directions ◽

Spatial Locality ◽

Mobility Behaviour ◽

Health Studies ◽

Future Research Directions

Abstract Background Numerous studies have examined the association between safety and primary school-aged children’s forms of active mobility. However, variations in studies’ measurement methods and the elements addressed have contributed to inconsistencies in research outcomes, which may be forming a barrier to advancing researchers’ knowledge about this field. To assess where current research stands, we have synthesised the methodological measures in studies that examined the effects of neighbourhood safety exposure (perceived and measured) on children’s outdoor active mobility behaviour and used this analysis to propose future research directions. Method A systematic search of the literature in six electronic databases was conducted using pre-defined eligibility criteria and was concluded in July 2020. Two reviewers screened the literature abstracts to determine the studies’ inclusion, and two reviewers independently conducted a methodological quality assessment to rate the included studies. Results Twenty-five peer-reviewed studies met the inclusion criteria. Active mobility behaviour and health characteristics were measured objectively in 12 out of the 25 studies and were reported in another 13 studies. Twenty-one studies overlooked spatiotemporal dimensions in their analyses and outputs. Delineations of children’s neighbourhoods varied within 10 studies’ objective measures, and the 15 studies that opted for subjective measures. Safety perceptions obtained in 22 studies were mostly static and primarily collected via parents, and dissimilarities in actual safety measurement methods were present in 6 studies. The identified schematic constraints in studies’ measurement methods assisted in outlining a three-dimensional relationship between ‘what’ (determinants), ‘where’ (spatial) and ‘when’ (time) within a methodological conceptual framework. Conclusions The absence of standardised measurement methods among relevant studies may have led to the current diversity in findings regarding active mobility, spatial (locality) and temporal (time) characteristics, the neighbourhood, and the representation of safety. Ignorance of the existing gaps and heterogeneity in measures may impact the reliability of evidence and poses a limitation when synthesising findings, which could result in serious biases for policymakers. Given the increasing interest in children’s health studies, we suggested alternatives in the design and method of measures that may guide future evidence-based research for policymakers who aim to improve children’s active mobility and safety.

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