The Physical, environmental, and evolutionary determinants of biological structure

Doctoral Dissertation Defense entitled: "The Physical, environmental, and evolutionary determinants of biological structure" by Chris Kempes

MIT, Boston, 26 de Noviembre 9:30a–10:30a
Building: 54-915

THE GOVERNMENT IS PROFILING YOU

William Binney, 

Former National Security Agency, 

Technical Director of the World Geopolitical

Date: Monday, November 19 2012, Boston

Time: 6:00PM to 7:30PM

Location: 32-141

Host: MIT CIS Group and The Computers,Relevant 

URL: http://www.whistleblower.org/program-areas/homeland-security-a-human-rights/surveillance/nsa-whistleblowers-bill-binney-a-j-kirk-wiebe

Interesante Charla sobre como nos espían, buenos les espían a los amaericanos

 Mr. Binney contó anecdotas muy curiosas. la primera es que cuando empezói a cuestionarse sobre la legalidad de todos los pinchazos y escuchas, recibio un día una amable visita de un señor que llamó al timbre, abrió la puerta su hijo y le preguntó donde estaba su padre, el niño dijo que en la ducha. El caballero subió metió la mano en la ducha y le apuntó con una pistola en la cabeza. Luego se marchó. Era solo un mensaje. Dos años después recibó un acarta en la que se le decía que no había hecho nada malo.

Se le preguntó también sobre porqué las escuchas se centran entre americanos cuando parece logico que si alguien quiere atentar lo haga con conexiones desde fuera. La respuesta es que es lo que se había pensado y no había que cambiarlo, igual que se hizo con la guerra del golfo, no había plan B. Sie iluminado de turno decidía una cosa nos se cambiaba aunque no tuviera sentido.

Una crítica dura a Bush.

Aquí teneis un resumen de la charla

While spreading an atmosphere of fear after 9/11, our government has violated our laws, prevented the Congress and courts from doing  their Constitutional duty, created a surveillance state and concentrated power in the executive, all in the name of keeping us safe. In an effort to reverse these ongoing unconstitutional activities, William Binney revealed the National Security Agency's massive domestic spying program, Stellar Wind, which intercepts domestic communications without protections for US citizens. Binney disclosed that NSA sought and received access to telecommunications companies' domestic and international billing records.

He told the public that, since 9/11, the agency has intercepted between 15 and 20 trillion communications. Binney also revealed that the NSA concealed Stellar Wind under the patriotic-sounding "Terrorist Surveillance Program," in order to give cover to the warrantless surveillance program's violations of Americans' constitutional rights.

Here are two related Wired magazine articles by James Bamford:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/

Emergent Design: Opportunities for Agent-based Computation.

En esta ocasión se trata de una entrada que habla de una conferencia virtual y en diferido: Como parte de mi  preparación para el próximo viaje a Boston, he visto una conferencia de la Profesora Una-May O'Reilly en MIT-TV. Muy interesante su forma de presentar la charla, contándonos su vida y adaptando el nivel de la misma a la audiencia. En la charla hace un repaso de su vida, su historia, las diferentes alternativas que ha tenido en la vida y sus elecciones y luego pasa a hablar de como utilizar los ACO para generar Arte, sin que el artista sienta que no está creando.

Puedes ver la charla completa aquí

UNA TÉCNICA PARA LA OPTIMIZACIÓN DE LOS PARÁMETROS DE INDICADORES TÉCNICOS BURSÁTILES MEDIANTE ALGORITMOS EVOLUTIVOS MULTI-OBJETIVO

Hace casi un año que no he recogido nada de las distintas charlas a las que he asistido, pero voy a retomar estas páginas con una Tesis de la que estoy muy orgulloso, la de Diego Bodas-Sagi, que he codirigido con Pablo Fernández Blanco. La defensa se produjo el pasado 20 de septiembre de 2012 en la Sala de Grados de la Facultad de Informática, de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

En esta tesis  Se ha presentado la técnica Multi-Objective Technical Indicator Optimization iNitiative I (MOTION I) para la optimización de parámetros de indicadores técnicos bursátiles y así obtener recomendaciones de acción (comprar / vender / mantener) en inversiones en bolsa. Con esto se establecen las bases teóricas para la implementación de una herramienta de toma de decisiones de inversión en los mercados financieros. MOTION I  es una técnica que:

• Permite la escalabilidad de la estrategia de inversión: se puede aplicar a una gran variabilidad de mercados financieros e indicadores.
• Es adaptable al usuario: permite elegir el MOEA que se desea emplear así como introducir nuevos objetivos o modificar los propuestos en este trabajo.
• Realiza un proceso de optimización continuo por lo que se adapta mejor que otras técnicas a la variabilidad de los mercados bursátiles 

DiDi: Mitigating the Performance Impact of TLB Shootdowns Using a Shared TLB

Carlos Villavieja, UPC

@PACT 2011

Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs) are ubiquitously used in modern architectures to cache virtual-to-physical mappings and, as they are looked up on every memory access, are paramount to performance scalability. The emergence of chipmultiprocessors (CMPs) with per-core TLBs, has brought the problem of TLB coherence to front stage. TLBs are kept coherent at the software-level by the operating system (OS). Whenever the OS modifies page permissions in a page table, it must initiate a coherency transaction among TLBs,a process known as a TLB shootdown. Current CMPs rely on the OS to approximate the set of TLBs caching a mapping and synchronize TLBs using costly Inter-Proceessor Interrupts (IPIs) and software handlers. In this paper, we characterize the impact of TLB shootdowns on multiprocessor performance and scalability, and present the design of a scalable TLB coherency mechanism. First, we show that both TLB shootdown cost and frequency increase with the number of processors and project that softwarebased TLB shootdowns would thwart the performance of large multiprocessors. We then present a scalable architectural mechanism that couples a shared TLB directory with load/store queue support for lightweight TLB invalidation, and thereby eliminates the need for costly IPIs. Finally, we show that the proposed mechanism reduces the fraction of machine cycles wasted on TLB shootdowns by an order of magnitude.

Optimizing Data Layouts for Parallel Computation on Multicores

Yuanrui Zhang, Wei Ding, Jun Liu, and Mahmut Kandemir

The Pennsylvania State University

@PACT 2011

The emergence of multicore platforms offers several opportunities for boosting application performance. These opportunities, which include parallelism and data locality benefits,require strong support from compilers as well as operating systems. Current compiler research targeting multicores mostly focuses on code restructuring and mapping. In this work,we explore automatic data layout transformation targeting multithreaded applications running on multicores. Our transformation considers both data access patterns exhibited by different threads of a multithreaded application and the on chip cache topology of the target multicore architecture. It automatically determines a customized memory layout foreach target array to minimize potential cache conflicts acrossthreads. Our experiments show that, our optimization brings significant benefits over state-of-the-art data locality optimization strategies when tested using 30 benchmark programs on an Intel multicore machine. The results also indicate that this strategy is able to scale to larger core counts and it performs better with increased data set sizes.

Phase-Based Application-Driven Hierarchical Power Managementon the Single-chip Cloud Computer

Nikolas Ioannou @ PACT 2011

University of Edinburgh

To improve energy efficiency processors allow for Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), which enables changing their performance and power consumption on-thefly.Many-core architectures, such as the Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) experimental processor from Intel Labs,have DVFS infrastructures that scale by having many more independent voltage and frequency domains on-die than today’smulti-cores.This paper proposes a novel, hierarchical, and transparent client-server power management scheme applicable to such architectures. The scheme tries to minimize energy consumption within a performance window taking into consideration not only the local information for cores within frequency domains but also information that spans multiple frequency and voltage domains.We implement our proposed hierarchical power control using a novel application-driven phase detection and prediction approach for Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications, a natural choice on the SCC with its fast on-chip network and its non-coherent memory hierarchy. This phase predictor operates as the front-end to the hierarchical DVFS controller,providing the necessary DVFS scheduling points.Experimental results with SCC hardware show that our approach provides significant improvement of the EnergyDelayProduct (EDP) of as much as 27.2%, and 11.4% on average,with an average increase in execution time of 7.7% over a baseline version without DVFS. These improvements come from both improved phase prediction accuracy and more effectiveDVFS control of the domains, compared to existing approaches.