Kinetic study of the decompositions involved in the thermal degradation of commercial azodicarbonamide

The transitions and reactions involved in the thermal treatment of several commercial azodicarbonamides (ADC) in an inert atmosphere have been studied by dynamic thermogravimetry analysis (TGA), mass spectrometry and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. A pseudo‐mechanistic model, involving several competitive and non‐competitive reactions, has been suggested and applied to the correlation of the weight loss data. The model applied is capable of accurately representing the different processes involved, and can be of great interest in the understanding and quantification of such phenomena, including the simulation of the instantaneous amount of gases evolved in a foaming process. In addition, a brief discussion on the methodology related to the mathematical modeling of TGA data is presented, taking into account the complex thermal behaviour of the ADC. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2008     

DSC study of transitions involved in thermal treatment of foamable mixtures of PE and EVA copolymer with azodicarbonamide

The transitions and reactions involved in the thermal processing of binary mixtures of polyethylene and poly(ethylene‐co‐vinyl acetate) copolymers with different concentrations of a foaming agent (azodicarbonamide) were studied using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The effect of ZnO as a kicker also was discussed. The temperature at the maximum rate and the heat evolved were measured for all the processes—melting, transitions, and reactions—all the mixtures prepared were measured and compared. Azodicarbonamide decomposed differently depending on the polymeric matrix. These data can be very useful for the plastic processing industry. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 102: 2015–2025, 2006     

Effects of the magnetic field on the relaxation of small particle systems

We study the effect of a magnetic field on the thermal relaxation of non-interacting small monodomain particles with a distribution of anisotropy constants and random easy-axes directions. Numerical calculations of the relaxation curves for different distribution widths, and under different magnetic fields H and temperatures T, have been performed in the framework of a two-state approximation. We show how the obtained data can be analyzed in terms of an modified Tln(t/τ₀) scaling from which the field dependence of the mean relaxing energy barriers can be extracted, a microscopic information which is not easily obtainable by other methods.     

Hints to improve automatic load balancing with LeWI for hybrid applications

The DLB (Dynamic Load Balancing) library and LeWI (LEnd When Idle) algorithm provide a runtime solution to deal with the load imbalance of parallel applications independently of the source of imbalance. DLB relies on the usage of hybrid programming models and exploits the malleability of the second level of parallelism to redistribute computation power across processes.     

Nanoparticle-mediated local and remote manipulation of protein aggregation

The local heat delivered by metallic nanoparticles selectively attached to their target can be used as a molecular surgery to safely remove toxic and clogging aggregates. We apply this principle to protein aggregates, in particular to the amyloid beta protein (Abeta) involved in Alzheimer's disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease where unnaturally folded Abeta proteins self-assemble and deposit forming amyloid fibrils and plaques. We show the possibility to remotely redissolve these deposits and to interfere with their growth, using the local heat dissipated by gold nanoparticles (AuNP) selectively attached to the aggregates and irradiated with low gigahertz electromagnetic fields. Simultaneous tagging and manipulation by AuNP of Abeta at different stages of aggregation allow both, noninvasive exploration and dissolution of molecular aggregates.     

A Proposal to Extend the OpenMP Tasking Model with Dependent Tasks

Tasking in OpenMP 3.0 has been conceived to handle the dynamic generation of unstructured parallelism. New directives have been added allowing the user to identify units of independent work (tasks) and to define points to wait for the completion of tasks (task barriers). In this document we propose extensions to allow the runtime detection of dependencies between generated tasks, broading the range of applications that can benefit from tasking or improving the performance when load balancing or locality are critical issues for performance. The proposed extensions are evaluated on a SGI Altix multiprocessor architecture using a couple of small applications and a prototype runtime system implementation.     

Page Migration with Dynamic Space-Sharing Scheduling Policies: The Case of the SGI O2000

In this paper, we claim that memory migration mechanism is a useful approach to improve the execution of parallel applications in dynamic execution environments, but that their performance depends on related system components such as the processor scheduling. To show that, we evaluate the automatic memory migration mechanism provided by IRIX in Origin systems, under different dynamic processor allocation policies when executing OpenMP parallel multiprogrammed workloads. We have focused the evaluation on the effects of the page migration mechanism on the CPU time consumed by each application, the processor allocation received, and the speedup. Results demonstrate that, if the processor scheduler is memory conscious, that is, it maintains as much as possible the system stable, the automatic memory page migration mechanism provided by IRIX improves the CPU time consumed by OpenMP applications.     

A Proposal for Error Handling in OpenMP

OpenMP has been focused in performance applied to numerical applications, but when we try to move this focus to other kind of applications, like Web servers, we detect one important lack. In these applications, performance is important, but reliability is even more important, and OpenMP does not have any recovery mechanism. In this paper we present a novel proposal to address this lack. In order to add error handling to OpenMP we propose some extensions to the current OpenMP specification. A directive and a clause are proposed, defining a scope for the error handling (where the error can occur) and specifying a behaviour for handling the specific errors. Some examples of use are presented, and we present also an evaluation showing the impact of this proposal in OpenMP applications. We show that this impact is low enough to consider the proposal worthwhile for OpenMP.