Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MSc.(Anatomy)--Faculty of Health Sciences)-University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The recent shift toward multi-core chips has pushed the burden of extracting performance to the programmer. In fact, programmers now have to be able to uncover more coarse-grain parallelism with every new generation of processors, or the performance of their applications will remain roughly the same or even degrade. Unfortunately, parallel programming is still hard and error prone. This has driven the development of many new parallel programming models that aim to make this process efficient. This thesis first combines the skeleton-based and transactional memory programming models in a new framework, called OpenSkel, in order to improve performance and programmability of parallel applications. This framework provides a single skeleton that allows the implementation of transactional worklist applications. Skeleton or pattern-based programming allows parallel programs to be expressed as specialized instances of generic communication and computation patterns. This leaves the programmer with only the implementation of the particular operations required to solve the problem at hand. Thus, this programming approach simplifies parallel programming by eliminating some of the major challenges of parallel programming, namely thread communication, scheduling and orchestration. However, the application programmer has still to correctly synchronize threads on data races. This commonly requires the use of locks to guarantee atomic access to shared data. In particular, lock programming is vulnerable to deadlocks and also limits coarse grain parallelism by blocking threads that could be potentially executed in parallel. Transactional Memory (TM) thus emerges as an attractive alternative model to simplify parallel programming by removing this burden of handling data races explicitly. This model allows programmers to write parallel code as transactions, which are then guaranteed by the runtime system to execute atomically and in isolation regardless of eventual data races. TM programming thus frees the application from deadlocks and enables the exploitation of coarse grain parallelism when transactions do not conflict very often. Nevertheless, thread management and orchestration are left for the application programmer. Fortunately, this can be naturally handled by a skeleton framework. This fact makes the combination of skeleton-based and transactional programming a natural step to improve programmability since these models complement each other. In fact, this combination releases the application programmer from dealing with thread management and data races, and also inherits the performance improvements of both models. In addition to it, a skeleton framework is also amenable to skeleton-driven performance optimizations that exploits the application pattern and system information. This thesis thus also presents a set of pattern-oriented optimizations that are automatically selected and applied in a significant subset of transactional memory applications that shares a common pattern called worklist. These optimizations exploit the knowledge about the worklist pattern and the TM nature of the applications to avoid transaction conflicts, to prefetch data, to reduce contention etc. Using a novel autotuning mechanism, OpenSkel dynamically selects the most suitable set of these pattern-oriented performance optimizations for each application and adjusts them accordingly. Experimental results on a subset of five applications from the STAMP benchmark suite show that the proposed autotuning mechanism can achieve performance improvements within 2%, on average, of a static oracle for a 16-core UMA (Uniform Memory Access) platform and surpasses it by 7% on average for a 32-core NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) platform. Finally, this thesis also investigates skeleton-driven system-oriented performance optimizations such as thread mapping and memory page allocation. In order to do it, the OpenSkel system and also the autotuning mechanism are extended to accommodate these optimizations. The conducted experimental results on a subset of five applications from the STAMP benchmark show that the OpenSkel framework with the extended autotuning mechanism driving both pattern and system-oriented optimizations can achieve performance improvements of up to 88%, with an average of 46%, over a baseline version for a 16-core UMA platform and up to 162%, with an average of 91%, for a 32-core NUMA platform.

In an effort to determine if there is a specific conformational structure which is most effective at the appropriate active physiological site, the synthesis of a group of sterically restricted analogs was undertaken. A portion of the polymethylene carbon skeleton of glutaric acid was replaced by selected aromatic carbons in benzenedicarboxylic acids to produce a series of ridged conformers, and the relative plant growth regulating properties of these derivatives were determined.

The topic of this thesis is dissection of vertebrate skeletons while using available and appropriate methods. The theoretical part is prepared based on Czech and foreign sources. For this part, there were used print publications, articles from journals and some Internet sources. It summarizes theoretical knowledge of the occurrence and anatomical structure of vertebrates. The practical part includes methodology involving collection, preservation and actual processing of animals. In detail, there are described possible methods of work that are evaluated and compared in the closing part. These proposed procedures are used for the selected representatives of vertebrates, in the individual chapter called - Results. The outcome of this thesis is a detailed guide with the procedures of chosen methods and preserved skeletons with a description of their characteristics. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

1. Summary Identification of corpses and skeletal findings The topic of my graduation thesis is the identification of corpses and skeletal findings. In this work I have described methods which are currently being used for an individual identification of people, and I have also paid a special attention to methods that are regarded as predecessors of modern currently-used methods. In each chapter of my thesis, I described different kinds of methods and I have also attached some short cases, just to illustrate the real work of police forensic experts after location of the corpse or the skeleton. In the initial part of my work I have also attached the Glossary of Terms that explains some complicated technical terms. Although some of the methods which I have described in my work are used in many other branches, I have focused on the use of these methods in the forensic practice (criminal investigation) with the possible collaboration of experts in the identification work in mass accidents and disasters. Nowadays, one of the fastest growing and most accurate methods of the identification with the widest spectrum of applications is the DNA analysis method, so I decided to devote a substantial part of my work to this method. I have described her historical development, her practical use and how this method really...

Prolonged periods of non-weightbearing activity result in a significant loss of bone mass which increases the risk of fracture with the initiation of mechanical loading. The loss of bone mass is partially driven by declines in bone formation yet the mechanisms responsible for this decline are unclear. To investigate the limitations of osteoblasts during disuse, marrow ablation was superimposed on hindlimb unloaded mice. Marrow ablation is a useful model to study osteoblast functionality as new cancellous bone is rapidly formed throughout the marrow of a long bone while hindlimb unloading is the most common method used to produce skeletal unloading. The specific hypotheses of this study were aimed at determining if changes in osteoblast functionality, differentiation, and/or proliferation were compromised in non-weightbearing bone in response to a bone formation stimulus. Additionally, the influence of having compromised osteoblast functionality at the time of stimulation was assessed in non-weightbearing bones. Key outcome measures used to address these hypotheses included static and dynamic cancellous bone histomorphometry, bone densitometry, and real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analyses of gene expression. The results document similar ablation-induced increases of cancellous bone in both weightbearing and unloaded animals. Similarly, there was no influence of load on ablation-induced increases in cancellous bone forming surface or mineral apposition rate. Unloading did significantly attenuate the ablation-induced increase in bone formation rate, due to reduced levels of total surface mineralization. When osteoblast functionality was compromised prior to marrow ablation, bone formation rate increases were also attenuated in ablated animals due to reduced mineralization. Additionally, increases in forming surface were attenuated as compared to unloaded animals having normal osteoblast function at the time of ablation. Collectively, these data identify mineralization as the limiting step in new bone formation during periods of disuse. The caveat, however, is that when bone formation is stimulated after a period of unloading sufficient to compromise osteoblast functionality, increases in osteoblast recruitment to the bone surface are compromised.