Master of Science / Mercury is the most mysterious planet in the inner Solar System, suggested by observations from the MESSENGER mission. These observations shine a light on potential processes occurring within Mercury as it evolved over time. Scientific instruments aboard MESSENGER indicate that Mercury has a very thin surface layer of broken rocks, a thin crustal layer covered by lavas erupted from a melt formed in a relatively thin, FeO poor mantle, and a large metal rich core made from Fe and some quantity of a light element. These conditions are different than those seen on Earth: a thick crust covered by a layer of varied thickness made up of loose unconsolidated rocks and dust, a large mantle with more FeO, and a smaller core to planet ratio. To understand how these non-Earth like conditions affect how the planet's interior changes with time, a modified evolution model was created to track the changes in heat and chemistry within Mercury. This model accounts for complications like a dynamic core density that changes with a growing inner core, the formation method of the inner core, and the FeO poor mantle composition. Using this model offers illumination on the conditions Mercury experienced after it formed. This model is limited, but results suggest that Mercury's mantle began at an initial mantle temperature of 1600 K, and a mantle reference viscosity of 1021–1022 Pa s, indicating the mantle was less likely to flow easily. Model results also suggest the core contained some sulfur from 0.05–8.9 wt.% S, derived from the MESSENGER data. BepiColombo, a new Mercury mission, will provide some perspectives on the interior of Mercury, leading to more detailed information about conditions present after planetary formation and the effect of non-Earth like conditions on a planet's interior as it cools.

Extracting high-performance from Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) requires that the application be parallelized i.e., divided into threads which execute concurrently on multiple cores. To save programmer effort, difficult to parallelize program portions are often left as serial. We show that common serial portions, i.e., non-parallel kernels, critical sections, and limiter stages in a pipeline, become the critical path of the program when the number of cores increases, thereby limiting performance and scalability. We propose that instead of burdening the software programmers with the task of shortening the serial portions, we can accelerate the serial portions using hardware support. To this end, we propose the Asymmetric Chip-Multiprocessor (ACMP) paradigm which provides one (or few) fast core(s) for accelerated execution of the serial portions and multiple slow, small cores for high throughput on the parallel portions. We show a concrete example implementation of the ACMP which consists of one large, high-performance core and many small, power-efficient cores. We develop hardware/software mechanisms to accelerate the execution of serial portions using the ACMP, and further improve the ACMP by proposing mechanisms to tackle common overheads incurred by the ACMP. / text

<p>Using x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) in combination with density functional theory (DFT) the changes in electronic and geometric structure of hydrocarbons upon adsorption are determined. The chemical bonding is analyzed and the results provide new insights in the mechanisms responsible for dehydrogenation in heterogeneous catalysis.</p><p>In the case of alkanes, <i>n</i>-octane and methane are studied. XAS and XES show significant changes in the electronic structure upon adsorption. XES shows new adsorption induced occupied states and XAS shows quenching of CH*/Rydberg states in <i>n</i>-octane. In methane the symmetry forbidden gas phase lowest unoccupied molecular orbital becomes allowed due to broken symmetry. New adsorption induced unoccupied features with mainly metal character appear just above the Fermi level in XA spectra of both adsorbed methane and <i>n</i>-octane. These changes are not observed in DFT total energy geometry optimizations. Comparison between experimental and computed spectra for different adsorbate geometries reveals that the molecular structures are significantly changed in both molecules. The C-C bonds in <i>n</i>-octane are shortened upon adsorption and the C-H bonds are elongated in both <i>n</i>-octane and methane.</p><p>In addition ethylene and acetylene are studied as model systems for unsaturated hydrocarbons. The validity of both the Dewar-Chatt-Duncanson chemisorption model and the alternative spin-uncoupling picture is confirmed, as well as C-C bond elongation and upward bending of the C-H bonds.</p><p>The bonding of ethylene to Cu(110) and Ni(110) are compared and the results show that the main difference is the amount of back-donation into the molecular π* orbital, which allows the molecule to desorb molecularly from the Cu(110) surface, whereas it is dehydrogenated upon heating on the Ni(110) surface. </p><p>Acetylene is found to adsorb in two different adsorption sites on the Cu(110) surface at liquid nitrogen temperature. Upon heating the molecules move into one of these sites due to attractive adsorbate-adsorbate interaction and only one adsorbed species is present at room temperature, at which point the molecules start reacting to form benzene. The bonding of the two species is very similar in both sites and the carbon atoms are rehybridized essentially to sp².</p>

<p>Core self-evaluation (CSE) begreppet har i tidigare studier visat sig predicera prestation i arbetssammanhang. Antaganden har gjorts om att även andra personlighetsdrag borde ingå i detta begrepp för att ytterligare förstärka dess prediktionsförmåga. Det har dock ännu inte klarlagts exakt vilka personlighetsdrag detta skulle gälla. Tidigare forskning har föreslagit extraversion som en förstärkning av CSE-modellen. Hypotesen i föreliggande undersökning var att CSE är en prediktor för prestation, samt att extraversion förklarar varians i prestation utöver CSE och därmed stärker modellen. Vidare förutsätts motivation som visat sig vara en direkt prediktor för prestation, men även visat sig mediera samband mellan personlighetsdrag och prestation förklara varians i prestation utöver CSE och extraversion. En enkätundersökning med 80 deltagare genomfördes på ett privat svenskt företag i partihandelsbranschen. Resultaten visade att CSE predicerade prestation med en förklarad varians på 21 %. Denna ökade med 11 % när extraversion inkluderades, och motivation bidrog med ytterligare 10 %. Studiens resultat styrker därmed att personlighetsdraget extraversion borde ingå i CSE-modellen inom forskningen av arbetsprestation.</p>

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Traditional parallelism detection in compilers is performed by means of static analysis and more specifically data and control dependence analysis. The information that is available at compile time, however, is inherently limited and therefore restricts the parallelisation opportunities. Furthermore, applications written in C – which represent the majority of today’s scientific, embedded and system software – utilise many lowlevel features and an intricate programming style that forces the compiler to even more conservative assumptions. Despite the numerous proposals to handle this uncertainty at compile time using speculative optimisation and parallelisation, the software industry still lacks any pragmatic approaches that extracts coarse-grain parallelism to exploit the multiple processing units of modern commodity hardware. This thesis introduces a novel approach for extracting and exploiting multiple forms of coarse-grain parallelism from sequential applications written in C. We utilise profiling information to overcome the limitations of static data and control-flow analysis enabling more aggressive parallelisation. Profiling is performed using an instrumentation scheme operating at the Intermediate Representation (Ir) level of the compiler. In contrast to existing approaches that depend on low-level binary tools and debugging information, Ir-profiling provides precise and direct correlation of profiling information back to the Ir structures of the compiler. Additionally, our approach is orthogonal to existing automatic parallelisation approaches and additional fine-grain parallelism may be exploited. We demonstrate the applicability and versatility of the proposed methodology using two studies that target different forms of parallelism. First, we focus on the exploitation of loop-level parallelism that is abundant in many scientific and embedded applications. We evaluate our parallelisation strategy against the Nas and Spec Fp benchmarks and two different multi-core platforms (a shared-memory Intel Xeon Smp and a heterogeneous distributed-memory Ibm Cell blade). Empirical evaluation shows that our approach not only yields significant improvements when compared with state-of- the-art parallelising compilers, but comes close to and sometimes exceeds the performance of manually parallelised codes. On average, our methodology achieves 96% of the performance of the hand-tuned parallel benchmarks on the Intel Xeon platform, and a significant speedup for the Cell platform. The second study, addresses the problem of partially sequential loops, typically found in implementations of multimedia codecs. We develop a more powerful whole-program representation based on the Program Dependence Graph (Pdg) that supports profiling, partitioning and codegeneration for pipeline parallelism. In addition we demonstrate how this enhances conventional pipeline parallelisation by incorporating support for multi-level loops and pipeline stage replication in a uniform and automatic way. Experimental results using a set of complex multimedia and stream processing benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methodology that yields speedups up to 4.7 on a eight-core Intel Xeon machine.

Cretaceous continental extension was accommodated by the development of the Paparoa Metamorphic Core Complex, resulting in the separation of New Zealand from Gondwana. High grade (Lower Plate) and low grade (Upper Plate) rocks are separated by the Ohika and Pike Detachment Faults. The two detachment faults have distinctly different histories, with greater exhumation along the Pike Detachment Fault. The onset of crustal extension is proposed to have commenced along the Pike Detachment Fault at 116.2 ± 5.9 Ma (Rb/Sr dating). Both geochemical and geochronological approaches are adopted for this thesis, through the in situ analysis of oxygen and hafnium isotope ratios, trace metals and U-Pb content. Chemical changes are tracked during the petrogenesis of the Buckland Granite, with mafic replenishment observed in the later stages of crystallisation. Crystallisation temperatures of the Buckland Granite are calculated using zircon saturation thermometry, with an average Ti-in-zircon temperature of 697℃ (upper-amphibolite facies). Inherited zircons in Lower Plate rocks show distinct age peaks at c. 1000, 600 and 300 Ma, illustrating the incorporation of heterogeneous local crust (Greenland Group and Karamea Batholith). Model ages (TDM) are calculated for inherited zircons of the Lower Plate rocks, which record the time at which magma bodies (zircon host rocks) were extracted from the mantle. Maximum and minimum model ages for the Buckland Granite average at 3410 Ma and 2969 Ma, with the maximum TDM value of 3410 Ma coinciding with the proposed major crustal formation event of the Gondwana supercontinent at c. 3.4-3.5 Ga. Two distinct U-Pb zircon age peaks are observed in the Buckland Granite at 102.4 ± 0.7 and 110.3 ± 0.9 Ma. The 110.3 ± 0.9 Ma age is interpreted as the crystallisation age of the pluton, while the 102.4 ± 0.7 is proposed to represent a younger thermal (magmatic?) event associated with the 101-102 Ma Stitts Tuff.

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No description available.

No description available.