Performance Evaluation of a Multi-Zone Application in Different OpenMP Approaches

We describe a performance study of a multi-zone application benchmark implemented in several OpenMP approaches that exploit multi-level parallelism and deal with unbalanced workload. The multi-zone application was derived from the well-known NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) suite that involves flow solvers on collections of loosely coupled discretization meshes. Parallel versions of this application have been developed using the Subteam concept and Workqueuing model as extensions to the current OpenMP. We examine the performance impact of these extensions to OpenMP and compare with hybrid and nested OpenMP approaches on several large parallel systems.     

Effects of double-muscling on carcass quality, beef tenderness and myofibrillar protein degradation in Belgian Blue White bulls

Carcass properties and meat quality characteristics of 32 Belgian Blue White double-muscled bulls (DM) were compared with those of 59 bulls of the same breed with normal conformation (N). DM showed superior carcass quality as revealed in increased dressing percentage, meat production yield, conformation grade, muscle/fat and muscle/bone ratios (all P < 0·001). Longissimus dorsi (LD) shear force values, drip and cooking losses at 8 days post mortem (pm) were significantly higher (P < 0·001) for DM, whereas sarcomere lengths were not different. Calpain 1 and calpastatin levels at 1 h and 24 h pm were tremendously decreased in DM as were also cathepsin B and L levels at 1 and 8 days pm (P < 0·001). As evident from semi-quantitative SDS-PAGE, these differences were accompanied by higher titin and lower 30 kDa levels (P < 0·001) in DM. Troponin-t levels were not different, but very low. Intramuscular collagen content was significantly lower in DM (P < 0·001). This suggests that lower background toughness in DM was compensated for by reduced post-mortem proteolytic tenderization. Discrepancy with literature reports regarding tenderness of DM might be related to the extreme muscularity of the Belgian Blue White breed, compared to other DM breeds. The results also suggest that reduced protein turnover might be involved in the muscle hypertrophy phenomenon within this breed, because of likely reduced levels of calpains and cathepsins in living DM animals.     

Nuclear fuels for low-beta fusion reactors: Lithium resources revisited

In searching to attain optimum conditions for the controlled release of nuclear energy by fusion processes, the stationary confinement of low-pressure ring-shaped plasmas by strong magnetic fields is now regarded as the most promising approach. We consider a number of fuel combinations that could be operated in such low-beta reactor systems and look upon the relevant fuel reserves. The classical D-T-Li cycle will be used as a standard and is extensively discussed therefore. It could supply most of mankind's future long-term power needs—but only on condition that the required lithium fuel can be extracted from seawater at reasonable expenses. The estimated landbound lithium reserves are too small to that end, they will last for about 500 years at most, depending on forecasts of future energy consumption and on assumptions about exploitable resources. Recovery of lithium from seawater would extend the possible range by a factor of 300 or so, provided that extraction technologies which are at present available in the laboratory, could be extended to a very large and industrial scale. Deuterium is abundant on earth but D-D fusion is difficult, if not impossible, to be achieved in the low-beta systems presently investigated for D-T fusion. The same arguments apply to so-called advanced concepts, such as the D-³He and the D-⁶Li cycles.     

Characterization of laser hardened steels by laser induced ultrasonic surface waves

Ultrasonic surface waves are suitable for the characterization of surface hardened materials. This is shown on laser hardened turbine blades. The martensitic microstructure within the surface layer of surface hardened steels has a lower surface wave propagation velocity than the annealed or normalized substrate material. Because the propagation velocity depends on the ratio of layer thickness to wavelengthd/, its measurement allows the determination of the hardening depth. If the surface wave frequency is high enough, the surface wave propagates mainly within the hardened layer. A correlation of the surface wave velocity to the surface hardness has been found. Because the variation of the surface velocity in hardened steels is small, a high measurement accuracy is necessary to obtain the interesting hardening parameters with sufficient certainty. Therefore, a measuring arrangement has been developed where laser pulses, guided by optical fibers to the surface hardened structure, generate simultaneously surface wave pulses at two different positions. The two ultrasonic pulses are received by a piezoelectric transducer. The surface wave velocity is obtained from the time delay between these pulses which is determined by the cross-correlation method. To evaluate simultaneously surface waves with different penetration depths from the same signal acquisition, digital filtering has been used in connection with the cross-correlation.     

A non-autonomous optimal control model of renewable energy production under the aspect of fluctuating supply and learning by doing

Given the constantly raising world-wide energy demand and the accompanying increase in greenhouse gas emissions that pushes the progression of climate change, the possibly most important task in future is to find a carbon-low energy supply that finds the right balance between sustainability and energy security. For renewable energy generation, however, especially the second aspect turns out to be difficult as the supply of renewable sources underlies strong volatility. Further on, investment costs for new technologies are so high that competitiveness with conventional energy forms is hard to achieve. To address this issue, we analyze in this paper a non-autonomous optimal control model considering the optimal composition of a portfolio that consists of fossil and renewable energy and which is used to cover the energy demand of a small country. While fossil energy is assumed to be constantly available, the supply of the renewable resource fluctuates seasonally. We further on include learning effects for the renewable energy technology, which will underline the importance of considering the whole life span of such a technology for long-term energy planning decisions.     

Marking student programs using graph similarity

We present a novel approach to the automated marking of student programming assignments. Our technique quantifies the structural similarity between unmarked student submissions and marked solutions, and is the basis by which we assign marks. This is accomplished through an efficient novel graph similarity measure (AssignSim). Our experiments show good correlation of assigned marks with that of a human marker.     

A visual digital library approach for time-oriented scientific primary data

Digital Library support for textual and certain types of non-textual documents has significantly advanced over the last years. While Digital Library support implies many aspects along the whole library workflow model, interactive and visual retrieval allowing effective query formulation and result presentation are important functions. Recently, new kinds of non-textual documents which merit Digital Library support, but yet cannot be fully accommodated by existing Digital Library technology, have come into focus. Scientific data, as produced for example, by scientific experimentation, simulation or observation, is such a document type. In this article we report on a concept and first implementation of Digital Library functionality for supporting visual retrieval and exploration in a specific important class of scientific primary data, namely, time-oriented research data. The approach is developed in an interdisciplinary effort by experts from the library, natural sciences, and visual analytics communities. In addition to presenting the concept and to discussing relevant challenges, we present results from a first implementation of our approach as applied on a real-world scientific primary data set. We also report from initial user feedback obtained during discussions with domain experts from the earth observation sciences, indicating the usefulness of our approach.     

On the number of higher order Delaunay triangulations

Higher order Delaunay triangulations are a generalization of the Delaunay triangulation that provides a class of well-shaped triangulations, over which extra criteria can be optimized. A triangulation is order-k Delaunay if the circumcircle of each triangle of the triangulation contains at most k points. In this paper we study lower and upper bounds on the number of higher order Delaunay triangulations, as well as their expected number for randomly distributed points. We show that arbitrarily large point sets can have a single higher order Delaunay triangulation, even for large orders, whereas for first order Delaunay triangulations, the maximum number is 2ⁿ⁻³. Next we show that uniformly distributed points have an expected number of at least 2^{ρ₁n(1+o(1))} first order Delaunay triangulations, where ρ₁ is an analytically defined constant (ρ₁≈0.525785), and for k>1, the expected number of order-k Delaunay triangulations (which are not order-i for any i<k) is at least 2^{ρ_kn(1+o(1))}, where ρ_k can be calculated numerically.     

In vivo interactive visualization of four-dimensional blood flow patterns

In this paper we give an overview over a series of experiments to visualize and measure flow fields in the human vascular system with respect to their diagnostic capabilities. The experiments utilize a selection of GPU-based sparse and dense flow visualization algorithms to show the diagnostic opportunities for volumetric cardiovascular phase contrast magnetic resonance imaging data sets. Besides classical hardware accelerated particle and line-based approaches, an extensible tublet-based visualization, a four-dimensional volumetric line integral convolution and a new two-dimensional cutting plane tool for three-dimensional velocity data sets have been implemented. To evaluate the results, several hearts of human subjects have been investigated and a flow phantom was built to artificially simulate distinctive flow features. Our results demonstrate that we are able to provide an interactive tool for cardiovascular diagnostics with complementary hardware accelerated visualizations. Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this article () contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.