Scalable Phylogeny Reconstruction with Disaggregated Near-memory Processing

Disaggregated computer architectures eliminate resource fragmentation in next-generation datacenters by enabling virtual machines to employ resources such as CPUs, memory, and accelerators that are physically located on different servers. While this paves the way for highly compute- and/or memory-intensive applications to potentially deploy all CPUs and/or memory resources in a datacenter, it poses a major challenge to the efficient deployment of hardware accelerators: input/output data can reside on different servers than the ones hosting accelerator resources, thereby requiring time- and energy-consuming remote data transfers that diminish the gains of hardware acceleration. Targeting a disaggregated datacenter architecture similar to the IBM dReDBox disaggregated datacenter prototype, the present work explores the potential of deploying custom acceleration units adjacently to the disaggregated-memory controller on memory bricks (in dReDBox terminology), which is implemented on FPGA technology, to reduce data movement and improve performance and energy efficiency when reconstructing large phylogenies (evolutionary relationships among organisms). A fundamental computational kernel is the Phylogenetic Likelihood Function (PLF), which dominates the total execution time (up to 95%) of widely used maximum-likelihood methods. Numerous efforts to boost PLF performance over the years focused on accelerating computation; since the PLF is a data-intensive, memory-bound operation, performance remains limited by data movement, and memory disaggregation only exacerbates the problem. We describe two near-memory processing models, one that addresses the problem of workload distribution to memory bricks, which is particularly tailored toward larger genomes (e.g., plants and mammals), and one that reduces overall memory requirements through memory-side data interpolation transparently to the application, thereby allowing the phylogeny size to scale to a larger number of organisms without requiring additional memory.

An Industry 4.0: Strategy Direction Of An Airline Operations Performance

Air transport is an industry 4.0 sector of priority that continues to evolve as the era becomes the backbone of a country's economy. The opening of the economic market in all regions of the world has increased the complexity of air transportation, including in Indonesia. In this decade as the development of technology and the 4.0 industry, the air plane remains the choice of people to explore the world and also the movement of people from one place to another is rapidly secured funds. The strategy to compete with the airline is to improve flight image in Indonesia by improving the performance of aviation operations. This research aims to analyse and evaluate the performance of aviation operations in Indonesia from the company's perspective. The survey method was conducted through the dissemination of questionnaires to respondents with purposive sampling techniques netted 200 aviation employees in Indonesia. The data collected is processed using the Structural Equation Model - Partial Least Square. The results showed; Strategy direction proved to affect process management, process management proved no effect on operation performance, strategy direction has no effect on Operation performance, strategy direction proved to affect human resources management, human resource management proved to be no impact on Operation performance, Process management proved unable to fully mediation the relationship between strategy direction with operating performance, HR management proved not to fully mediation the relationship between strategy direction to operating performance. So it can be said the strategy direction of the company directly affects the flight operation performance. Keywords— Strategy direction; process management; human resource management; operation performance

Thermochromic Materials for Smart Windows: A State-of-Art Review

Smart windows that regulate solar energy by changing optical characteristics have recently gained tremendous interest for energy-saving and indoor-comfort applications. Among them, thermochromic smart windows are promising because of their simplicity for industrial production and ease of implementation. Although significant advancements have been reported on thermochromic materials, both optical and transition properties remain unsatisfactory. This review focuses on the recent advancement of thermochromic materials for smart windows in terms of operation, performance, and potential for commercialization. It discusses the parameters typically used for gauging performance and provides a summary and comparison of various promising thermochromic materials, including vanadium dioxide, hydrogels, and perovskites. The article also points the challenges in the practical implementation of these materials and provides an outlook for future development.

Experimental Study on Operation Performance of Two-Body Wave Energy Generator

The two-body oscillating type wave energy converter (WEC) is a hot research topic at present. A two-body device with damping disc was taken as the test model in this paper. The two bodies were connected by a hydraulic piston cylinder to realize the relative motion energy conversion. Physical experiments were carried out in a wave-making flume to study the operation performance. The effects of wave elements and load on the hydrodynamic characteristics and capture width ratio (CWR) of the model were analysed respectively. The results showed that wave frequency and external load were the main factors affecting the motion response and energy conversion of the device. With the increase of wave frequency and external load, the response amplitude operator (RAO) and the capture width ratio both increase first and then decrease. Wave height has little effect on system characteristics. There exists a best-matching wave period condition, and the optimal motion response and energy conversion are obtained.

Current Protection Applicability Analysis of Flexible DC Power Supply Network

In the flexible AC/DC distribution system supplying passive network, when the modular multi-level converter (MMC) inverter AC line fault occurs, the MMC short-circuit current amplitude is greatly affected by the control strategy, which may affect the operation performance of three-stage current protection. In view of this, a flexible AC/DC distribution network system supplying power to the passive network is built on the RTDS platform, and then the AC fault traverse strategy is designed in the MMC controller. Based on the thinking of coordinated control and protection of the fault through the strategy into two cases with no input to higher current protections performance simulation contrast, the simulation results show that asymmetric fault occurred when MMC inverter AC line, under the effect of communication failure through the strategy, the current main protection I, II period of refusing action, only by this line nearly backup protection current section III delay removal of fault. The three-stage current protection based on the fault current characteristics of pure AC system has poor action performance and is no longer suitable for the AC line of MMC inverter station.