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Where does AI hardware/software stand today? 1. The computational diversity needed to support AI is increasing2. The software user experience expectations is increasing3. GPU software maturity* is unrivalled in completeness and hence allows near complete dominance among AI industry deployment and researchers.4. This support for model diversity is fuelling these trends and increasing GPU adoption!* NVIDIA DL stack - cuDNN, TensorRT, etc.

Aim This study aims to identify perceptions of nurses practicing in four adult inpatient units regarding their actions to provide quality end of life care for dying patients, their definitions of dying well, and their symptoms of distress and actions they took for relief. Background Nurses caring for patients who are dying want them to have the best death possible; however, many nurses are not prepared for every death which may occur. Methods Qualitative questionnaire data were collected from 49 nurses on four adult inpatient nursing units to analyze nurse perceptions of distressing death and dying well. Results Three main concepts emerged describing the nurses' definition of dying well: emotional and spiritual support for the patient and family, patient and family control, and promotion of a peaceful environment. Eight categories of nursing actions to promote dying well were identified, which include communication with disciplinary team/nursing staff, provision of optimal physical care, demonstration of caring and compassion, supporting dignity in death for patient/family, education of patient/family to support dying well, emotional support for patient/family, advocacy for dying well, and fostering a peaceful environment. Symptoms of distress among nurses, and actions for relief were also indicated by participants. Conclusion Future research is indicated to expand the sample to more hospitals and more disciplines. Administrators need to enhance their policies such as event debriefing or shifting workloads to support nurses caring for dying patients. They also need to offer nurses education in providing end of life care and how to become more resilient in the face of trauma. Nurses need to be aware of their symptoms and practices to relieve their stress such as crisis debriefing. They also need to seek education on how to educate patients and families about the process of dying and the value of comfort care.

Domain-specific accelerators (DSAs), which sacrifice programmability for efficiency, are a reaction to the waning benefits of device scaling. This article demonstrates that there are commonalities between DSAs that can be exploited with programmable mechanisms. The goals are to create a programmable architecture that can match the benefits of a DSA and to create a platform for future accelerator investigations.

Long-term surveys are useful in understanding trends in connecting channel fish communities; a gill net assessment in the Saint Marys River performed periodically since 1975 is the most comprehensive connecting channels sampling program within the Laurentian Great Lakes. We assessed efficiency of that survey, with intent to inform development of assessments at other connecting channels. We evaluated trends in community composition, effort versus estimates of species richness, ability to detect abundance changes for four species, and effects of subsampling yellow perch catches on size and age-structure metrics. Efficiency analysis revealed low power to detect changes in species abundance, whereas reduced effort could be considered to index species richness. Subsampling simulations indicated that subsampling would have allowed reliable estimates of yellow perch ( Perca flavescens ) population structure, while greatly reducing the number of fish that were assigned ages. Analyses of statistical power and efficiency of current sampling protocols are useful for managers collecting and using these types of data as well as for the development of new monitoring programs. Our approach provides insight into whether survey goals and objectives were being attained and can help evaluate ability of surveys to answer novel questions that arise as management strategies are refined.

A kinetic profile revealing calcification progression is a powerful method for assessing the anti-calcification efficacy of various tissue treatments compared to the traditional analysis of a single time point in studies with rabbits.Tissue calcification was compared between test and control discs in rabbits. Test groups received either ThermaFix-processed bovine pericardium, or porcine leaflets processed with Linx, or alpha-amino oleic acid (AOA). Control groups received glutaraldehyde-treated porcine valve leaflets, and bovine pericardium. Tissue discs were implanted intramuscularly in rabbits and explanted every five days until day 75. Levels of calcium and phosphorus were then monitored in the rabbit tissues.Calcium concentrations were plotted over time, with a sigmoidal curve being used for each kinetic profile. The ThermaFix group exhibited a lower calcium plateau level compared to the bovine control (107 ± 24 versus 258 ± 120 μg Ca2+ per mg dry tissue, respectively), while the Linx group exhibited a lower calcium plateau compared to porcine controls (130 ± 34 μg versus 280 ± 80 μg Ca2+ per mg dry tissue, respectively). The AOA group showed a low level of calcification through 40 days, but this was subsequently increased to a plateau of 258 ± 135 μg Ca2+ per mg dry tissue.The study results showed that effects on the rate and level of calcification of anti-calcification technologies can be modulated. In particular, time is important when assessing tissue technology effectiveness.

We examined trends in species composition and abundance of the St. Marys River fish community. Abundance data were available approximately once every six years from 1975 through 2006, and size and age data were available from 1995 through 2006. We also compared survey data in 2006 with results of a concurrent creel survey that year, as well as data from prior surveys spanning a 69 year time frame. The St. Marys River fish community was best characterized as a coolwater fish community with apparent little variation in species composition, and only slight variation in overall fish abundance since 1975. However, we did find recent trends in abundance among target species sought by anglers: centrarchids increased, percids appeared stable, and both northern pike Esox lucius and cisco Coregonus artedii declined. Survey results suggested that walleye ( Sander vitreus ) and yellow perch ( Perca flavescens ) experienced moderate exploitation but benefited from recent strong recruitment and faster growth. Mechanisms underlying declines of northern pike and cisco were not clear; reduced abundance could have resulted from high exploitation, variation in recruitment, or a combination of both factors. Despite these challenges, the St. Marys River fish community appears remarkably stable. We suggest that managers insure that creel surveys occur simultaneously with assessments, but periodic gill net surveys may no longer provide adequate data in support of recent, more complex management objectives. While additional surveys would add costs, more frequent data might ensure sustainability of a unique fish community that supports a large proportion of angler effort on Lake Huron.

Adult lake whitefish were tagged and released from the Big Bay de Noc (BBN) and Naubinway (NAB) stocks in northern Lake Michigan, and the Detour (DET) and Cheboygan (CHB) stocks in northern Lake Huron during 2003–2006 to describe their spatial and temporal distributions. The contemporary spatial distributions were compared with past distributions of the BBN and NAB stocks. Sixty-two percent of BBN tag recoveries occurred in Wisconsin waters during winter, spring and summer, but 83% of fall tag recoveries were made near the tagging site. Eighty-eight percent of the NAB tag recoveries were made in the management unit of tagging and 7% occurred into northern Lake Huron. Over 90% of the DET stock remained in the vicinity of the tagging sites regardless of the season, while 75% of the CHB tag recoveries were made in northwestern Lake Huron and 17% were made in Ontario. Based on regression tree analysis, there were strong stock, season, and year effects on movement distances, with weaker effects due to sex and length at tagging. Spatial distribution of the BBN stock changed from 1978–1982 to 2003–2008, but spatial distribution of the NAB stock did not. Substantial differences in movement and distribution existed among the four stocks, large seasonal differences in spatial distribution were found within some stocks, and lake whitefish exhibited strong spawning site fidelity. Present management unit boundaries are inappropriate for managing three of our four stocks, and agencies should consider developing single harvest limits for both northern Lake Huron and western Lake Michigan.

Despite its dominance, object-oriented computation has received scant attention from the architecture community. We propose a novel memory architecture that supports objects and garbage collection (GC). Our architecture is co-designed with a Java™ Virtual Machine (JVM™)11Java and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc., in the United States and other countries. to improve the functionality and efficiency of heap memory management. The architecture is based on an address space for objects accessed using object IDs mapped by a translator to physical addresses. To support this, the system includes object-addressed caches, a hardware GC barrier to allow in-cache GC of objects, and an exposed cache structure cooperatively managed by the JVM. These extend a conventional architecture, without compromising compatibility or performance for legacy binaries.Our innovations enable various improvements such as: a novel technique for parallel and concurrent garbage collection, without requiring any global synchronization; an in-cache garbage collector, which never accesses main memory; concurrent compaction of objects; and elimination of most GC store barrier overheads. We compare the behavior of our system against that of a conventional generational garbage collector, both with and without an explicit allocate-in-cache operation which eliminates many write misses. Our scheme additionally trades L2 misses for in-cache operations, and provides the mapping indirection required for concurrent compaction.

The waning benefits of device scaling have caused a push towards domain specific accelerators (DSAs), which sacrifice programmability for efficiency. While providing huge benefits, DSAs are prone to obsoletion due to domain volatility, have recurring design and verification costs, and have large area footprints when multiple DSAs are required in a single device. Because of the benefits of generality, this work explores how far a programmable architecture can be pushed, and whether it can come close to the performance, energy, and area efficiency of a DSA-based approach. Our insight is that DSAs employ common specialization principles for concurrency, computation, communication, data-reuse and coordination, and that these same principles can be exploited in a programmable architecture using a composition of known microarchitectural mechanisms. Specifically, we propose and study an architecture called LSSD, which is composed of many low-power and tiny cores, each having a configurable spatial architecture, scratchpads, and DMA. Our results show that a programmable, specialized architecture can indeed be competitive with a domain-specific approach. Compared to four prominent and diverse DSAs, LSSD can match the DSAs' 10× to 150× speedup over an OOO core, with only up to 4x more area and power than a single DSA, while retaining programmability.

Review of literature Patient satisfaction is an important outcome measurement in the emergency department (ED). When unavoidable, the negative effect of patient wait time may be lessened by communicating expected wait time, affective support, health information, decisional control, and competent providers. Methods This controlled quasi-experimental design used a convenience sample. The patient questionnaire included demographics, expected and perceived wait time, receiving of comfort items, information and engaging activities and their perceived helpfulness for coping with waiting, and the Consumer Emergency Care Satisfaction Scale measure of patient satisfaction with nursing. Systematic offering of comfort items, clinical information, and engaging activities were statistically analyzed for impact on perceived wait times, helpfulness in waiting, and satisfaction with nursing care. Results Interventions were supported by the data as helpful for coping with waiting and were significantly related to nursing care satisfaction. Interventions were less helpful for suburban patients who were also less satisfied. Conclusion Nurses can influence patient satisfaction in the ED through communication and caring behaviors.

2044 Background: Patients (pts) with recurrent GBM have few treatment options and a poor prognosis. Selinexor is an oral inhibitor of XPO1 mediated nuclear export resulting in nuclear retention of ...

The JAMAICA system combines a multithreaded single-chip multiprocessor with a dynamic thread distribution mechanism, to provide hardware support for finegrained Java threads. This paper gives an overview of the threading mechanism, and investigates the granularity of parallelism which can be exploited in this way. Simulations demonstrate that the current system gives good performance with a wide range of granularities, down to as low as 1000 cycles. Experiments with two real Java applications, exhibiting coarse and medium-grained parallelism, confirm that the technique can also be used in place of more traditional load balancing methods.

The Jamaica project is concerned with the design of a single-chip multi-processor aimed specifically at multi-threaded Java implementation. It has wide ranging aims that require research in a variety of hardware and software areas. In order to perform a comprehensive evaluation of the Jamaica approach, it was thought necessary to perform detailed instruction level simulation. A single CPU structure was therefore required to form the basic building block of the system and hence the simulator. One of the first decisions needed was the basic Instruction Set Architecture of the CPU. The reasons behind the choice are examined using results obtained by detailed instrumentation of the Java Virtual Machine and the running of a variety of Java benchmarks. The choice is further validated by developing a Java translator and tuning its register windows allocation taking into consideration many implementation details, including a finite register set and argument passing overheads.

The main component in environmentally acceptable lubricants and grease is the base fluid. Typically it comprises greater than 70% of grease and 90% of a lubricant. Many biodegradable fluids have specific characteristics, which make formulating finished products difficult. Through a stepwise approach these characteristics will be discussed. The fluids for testing will comprise natural and synthetic esters and some petroleum based synthetics. The testing will find the extremes of performance at high and low temperatures and the effects of common additives to improve performance. Testing will include pour point, elastomer compatibility, oxidation and thermal stability. Based on the testing a blended fluid will be made to offset the drawbacks of the individual fluids and the performance discussed. This blend will serve as the base fluid to formulate an environmentally acceptable lubricating grease.

Follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) plays a major role in the maturation of ovarian follicles. FSH, a member of the glycoprotein hormone family produced in the anterior pituitary, is a 32-kD heterodimer consisting of 2 noncovalently linked subunits, α and β. Each subunit contains 2 asparagine-linked carbohydrate complexes that are required for full biological activity of the hormone (e.g., metabolic clearance rate, signal transduction, etc.). Variation in glycosylation patterns at these sites results in multiple hormone isoforms that possess differing biological activities.