Seventeen glacially sheared stumps in growth position and abundant detrital wood fragments were exposed by stream avulsion at the terminus of the Saskatchewan Glacier in 1999. The stumps lay buried beneath the glacier and over 5 m of glacial sediment until historical recession and stream incision exposed the 225- to 262-year-old stand of subalpine fir, Englemann spruce and whitebark pine trees. Crossdating and construction of two radiocarbon-controlled floating tree-ring chronologies showed that all the subfossil stumps and boles exposed at this location were killed during a Neoglacial advance of the Saskatchewan Glacier 2,910 ± 60 to 2,730 ± 60 ¹⁴C years B.P. These findings support the Peyto Advance as a regional glaciological response to changing mass balance conditions.

The IEEE standard of decimal floating-point arithmetic was officially released in 2008. The new decimal floating-point (DFP) format and arithmetic can be applied to remedy the conversion error caused by representing decimal floating-point numbers in binary floating-point format and to improve the computing performance of the decimal processing in commercial and financial applications. Nowadays, many architectures and algorithms of individual arithmetic functions for decimal floating-point numbers are proposed and investigated (e.g., addition, multiplication, division, and square root). However, because of the less efficiency of representing decimal number in binary devices, the area consumption and performance of the DFP arithmetic units are not comparable with the binary counterparts. IBM proposed a binary fused multiply-add (FMA) function in the POWER series of processors in order to improve the performance of floating-point computations and to reduce the complexity of hardware design in reduced instruction set computing (RISC) systems. Such an instruction also has been approved to be suitable for efficiently implementing not only stand-alone addition and multiplication, but also division, square root, and other transcendental functions. Additionally, unconventional number systems including digit sets and encodings have displayed advantages on performance and area efficiency in many applications of computer arithmetic. In this research, by analyzing the typical binary floating-point FMA designs and the design strategy of unconventional number systems, ``a high performance decimal floating-point fused multiply-add (DFMA) with redundant internal encodings" was proposed. First, the fixed-point components inside the DFMA (i.e., addition and multiplication) were studied and investigated as the basis of the FMA architecture. The specific number systems were also applied to improve the basic decimal fixed-point arithmetic. The superiority of redundant number systems in stand-alone decimal fixed-point addition and multiplication has been proved by the synthesis results. Afterwards, a new DFMA architecture which exploits the specific redundant internal operands was proposed. Overall, the specific number system improved, not only the efficiency of the fixed-point addition and multiplication inside the FMA, but also the architecture and algorithms to build up the FMA itself. The functional division, square root, reciprocal, reciprocal square root, and many other functions, which exploit the Newton's or other similar methods, can benefit from the proposed DFMA architecture. With few necessary on-chip memory devices (e.g., Look-up tables) or even only software routines, these functions can be implemented on the basis of the hardwired FMA function. Therefore, the proposed DFMA can be implemented on chip solely as a key component to reduce the hardware cost. Additionally, our research on the decimal arithmetic with unconventional number systems expands the way of performing other high-performance decimal arithmetic (e.g., stand-alone division and square root) upon the basic binary devices (i.e., AND gate, OR gate, and binary full adder). The proposed techniques are also expected to be helpful to other non-binary based applications.

Methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are two important greenhouse gases. Recent studies have shown that lakes, although they cover a small area of the globe, can be very important natural sources of atmospheric CH4 and CO2. It is therefore important to monitor the fluxes of these gases between lakes and the atmosphere in order to understand the processes that govern the exchange. By using the eddy covariance method for lake flux studies, the resolution in time and in space of the fluxes is increased, which gives more information on the governing processes. Eddy covariance measurements at a Swedish lake revealed a diel cycle in the fluxes of both CH4 and CO2, with higher fluxes during nighttime than daytime. The high nighttime CO2 fluxes could to a large extent be explained with enhanced transfer velocities due to waterside convection. For the diel cycle of CH4 flux it was suggested that waterside convection could enhance the transfer velocity, transport CH4 rich water to the surface, as well as trigger ebullition. Simultaneous flux measurements of CH4 and CO2 have been presented using both the eddy covariance method and the floating chambers method of which the latter is the traditional measuring method for lake fluxes. For CO2 the two methods agreed well during some periods but differed considerably during others. Disagreement between the methods might be due to horizontal heterogeneity in partial pressure of CO2 in the lake. The methods agreed better for the CH4 flux measurements. However, it is clear that due to the discontinuous nature of the floating chambers, this method will likely miss important high flux events. The main conclusions of this thesis are: 1) the two gas flux methods are not directly comparable and should be seen as supplementary to each other 2) waterside convection enhances the fluxes of both CH4 and CO2 over the water-air surface. If gas flux measurements are not conducted during nighttime, potential high flux periods might be missed and estimates of the total amount of gas released from lakes to the atmosphere may be biased.

This thesis describes a software implementation of the IEEE Floating-Point Standard (IEEE Task P754), which is believed to be an effective system for reliable, accurate computer arithmetic. The standard is implemented as a set of procedures written in Motorola 6809 assembly language. Source listings of the procedures are contained in appendices.

The project suggests an alternative means for living in Qatar. It proposes the development of a transient, floating community a man-made, transitory archipelago of floating housing units located at the ‘soon to be abandoned’ docks a short distance from the Museum of Islamic Art and the Doha Corniche. The design, through a variety of bespoke dwelling options, can provide both more and less nomadic housing to accommodate a variety of dif- ferent lifestyles and social units. Clustered around three permanent islands (containing a cultural/activity center, three adaptable ‘work-unit’ towers, and a park/commercial area), the design provides a wide set of adaptive layout patterns within which the mobile units can be arrayed. Directly plugged into the city, the community functions as a floating appendix to downtown Doha: an adaptable and flexible city-supplement that can expand or contract ac- cording to need, whether to aid in the accommodation of guests for various large-scale sporting or other events, or merely to provide an alternative locale for long or short stay visitors to Doha alike.

La vérification de programmes avec des calculs sur les nombres à virgule flottante est une étape très importante dans le développement de logiciels critiques. Les calculs sur les nombres flottants sont généralement imprécis, et peuvent dans certains cas diverger par rapport au résultat attendu sur les nombres réels. L’objectif de cette thèse est de concevoir un solveur de contraintes sur les nombres à virgule flottante dédié à la vérification de programmes. Nous présentons dans ce manuscrit une nouvelle méthode de résolution de contraintes sur les flottants. Cette méthode se base principalement sur la sur-approximation des contraintes sur les flottants par des contraintes sur les réels. Cette sur-approximation doit être conservative des solutions sur les flottants. Les contraintes obtenues sont ensuite résolues par un solveur de contraintes sur les réels. Nous avons proposé un algorithme de filtrage des domaines sur les flottants basé sur le concept de la sur-approximation qui utilise des techniques de programmation linéaire. Nous avons aussi proposé une méthode de recherche de solutions basée sur des heuristiques. Cette méthode offre aussi la possibilité de comparer le comportement des programmes par rapport à une spécification sur les réels. Ces méthodes ont été implémentées et expérimentées sur un ensemble de programmes avec du calcul sur les nombres flottants. / The verification of programs with floating-point numbers computation is an important issue in the development of critical software systems. Computations over floating-point numbers are not accurate, and the results may be very different from the expected results over real numbers. The aim of this thesis is to design a constraint solver over floating-point numbers for program verification purposes. We introduce a new method for solving constraints over floating-point numbers. This method is based on an over-approximation of floating-point constraints using constraints over real numbers. This overapproximation is safe, that’s to say it doesn’t loose any solution over the floats. The generated constraints are then solved with a constraint solver over real numbers. We propose a new filtering algorithm using linear programming techniques, which takes advantage of these over-approximations of floating-point constraints. We introduce also new search methods and heuristics to find floating-point solutions of these constraints. Using our implementation, we show on a set of counter-examples the difference of the execution of programs over the floats with the specification over real numbers.

One seemingly lost aspect of working-class life in antebellum New Orleans stems from the effort of entrepreneurs to provide bathing and swimming facilities for the city's working poor. In exchange for a relatively inexpensive fee per use, working-class New Orleanians served as the customer base for “floating pools” moored along the Mississippi riverfront. Beginning in 1836, these pools represented a transitional phase between the long extant tradition of bathing and swimming for free in the river and the development of commercialized, waterfront pleasure resorts for the masses in the late 1800s. Close proximity of working class neighborhoods to the river allowed New Orleans entrepreneurs to capitalize on restrictions city official began to place on bathing in the river. The floating pools represented an early stage in the commercialization of recreation as well as public hygiene.

Wind power is a rapidly growing industry worldwide, both on- andoffshore. Most of the good locations onshore in continental Europeare in use today, which has prompted a move offshore in recentyears. Europe has by far the most offshore wind turbinesinstalled, mostly located in the North sea.The low hanging fruits are locations with relatively shallowwaters (up to 45-50 meters), a high and steady wind speed and isclose to grid connections onshore. Big parts of the North Sea aresuitable for this, but many places with good wind conditionsworldwide are too deep. The next step for the industry is to moveto these deeper waters, with the help of floating wind turbines.The first prototype floating turbines have been running for acouple of years, with even larger, albeit still pretty small, windfarms in the planning stage.This thesis looks on the possibility of building large floatingwind farms in the future, specifically in the eastern most part ofthe North Sea - Skagerrak. Several different factors andstakeholders have been mapped out and important factors such aswater depth, wind speed and seabed conditions considered to createfour different future scenarios. Each scenario has been evaluatedtechnically and Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) has beencalculated to be able to compare the different locations.Since the technology is very new and under development, theinitial costs are high. This gives the lower LCOE of 149 €/MWh.Many new developments are however expected in the years to come,which would lower the investment cost considerably, by up to 40%according to some sources. This would lower the LCOE to under 100€/MWh.It is however also found that these investments carry many otherpositive effects, such as developing a new carbon neutraltechnology in Scandinavia which could become a big exportworldwide. The social acceptance of bottom fixed foundationoffshore (close to shore) and onshore wind power is also falling,and this would also be a big plus for floating offshore wind as itcan be built so far offshore it can't be seen from land. BothSweden and Denmark have big power plants closing in the comingdecades, nuclear power in Sweden and coal fired power plants inDenmark. These need to be replaced either by import or by newcarbon neutral power production.

The ever shrinking size of the MOS transistors brings the promise of scalable Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures containing hundreds of processing elements with on-chip communication, all integrated into a single die. Such a computational fabric will provide high levels of performance in an energy efficient manner. To mitigate emerging wire-delay problem and to address the need for substantial interconnect bandwidth, packet switched routers are fast replacing shared buses and dedicated wires as the interconnect fabric of choice. With on-chip communication consuming a significant portion of the chip power and area budgets, there is a compelling need for compact, low power routers. While applications dictate the choice of the compute core, the advent of multimedia applications, such as 3D graphics and signal processing, places stronger demands for self-contained, low-latency floating-point processors with increased throughput. Therefore, this work focuses on two key building blocks critical to the success of NoC design: high performance, area and energy efficient router and floating-point processor architectures. This thesis first presents a six-port four-lane 57 GB/s non-blocking router core based on wormhole switching. The router features double-pumped crossbar channels and destinationaware channel drivers that dynamically configure based on the current packet destination. This enables 45% reduction in crossbar channel area, 23% overall router area, up to 3.8X reduction in peak channel power, and 7.2% improvement in average channel power, with no performance penalty over a published design. In a 150nm six-metal CMOS process, the 12.2mm2 router contains 1.9 million transistors and operates at 1GHz at 1.2V. We next present a new pipelined single-precision floating-point multiply accumulator core (FPMAC) featuring a single-cycle accumulate loop using base 32 and internal carry-save arithmetic, with delayed addition techniques. Combined algorithmic, logic and circuit techniques enable multiply-accumulates at speeds exceeding 3GHz, with single-cycle throughput. Unlike existing FPMAC architectures, the design eliminates scheduling restrictions between consecutive FPMAC instructions. The optimizations allow removal of the costly normalization step from the critical accumulate loop and conditionally powered down using dynamic sleep transistors on long accumulate operations, saving active and leakage power. In addition, an improved leading zero anticipator (LZA) and overflow detection logic applicable to carry-save format is presented. In a 90nm seven-metal dual-VT CMOS process, the 2mm2 custom design contains 230K transistors. The fully functional first silicon achieves 6.2 GFLOPS of performance while dissipating 1.2W at 3.1GHz, 1.3V supply. It is clear that realization of successful NoC designs require well balanced decisions at all levels: architecture, logic, circuit and physical design. Our results from key building blocks demonstrate the feasibility of pushing the performance limits of compute cores and communication routers, while keeping active and leakage power, and area under control. / Report code: LiU-TEK-LIC-2006:36.

A preocupação com o impacto ambiental decorrente da implantação e operação de novas linhas metroferroviárias faz com que na elaboração dos projetos de via permanente sejam frequentemente adotados sistemas amortecedores de vibrações e ruídos secundários. As vibrações em vias de metrô são causadas principalmente pelo contato roda-trilho e são propagadas pela estrutura do túnel e pelas distintas camadas de solo podendo chegar às edificações lindeiras, onde, dependendo da intensidade, provocam desconforto aos usuários da edificação e mau funcionamento de equipamentos. Uma solução de atenuação largamente empregada atualmente em locais críticos é o \"sistema massa mola\". O sistema \"massa mola\" é composto por lajes de concreto armado, denominadas lajes flutuantes, apoiadas sobre materiais resilientes. De forma geral, quanto menor a frequência natural deste sistema, maior a atenuação das vibrações. No entanto, a utilização de apoios excessivamente flexíveis para obtenção de baixas frequências pode acarretar problemas operacionais em função de deslocamentos e acelerações excessivos das lajes flutuantes. Este projeto tem como objetivo o estudo do comportamento dinâmico das lajes flutuantes de concreto armado utilizadas em sistemas \"massa mola\" principalmente com relação à atenuação de vibrações e nível de vibrações na via permanente durante a passagem dos trens metropolitanos. A avaliação foi realizada utilizando modelos numéricos calibrados com dados experimentais obtidos nas linhas do Metrô de São Paulo. / Deploying and operating subway lines cause growing concern about environmental impact, making necessary in new lines projects the adoption of damping systems for no propagation of noise and vibration arising from traffic from trains. The vibrations in a subway track are mainly caused by wheel-rail contact and are propagated by tunnel structure and soil layers, reaching the neighboring buildings and causing annoyance residents in building. Equipment failures represent a consequence as well. A mitigation solution widely employed in critical locations is the known \"mass spring system\". The \"mass spring system\" system is composed of reinforced concrete slabs, so called floating slabs, resting on resilient materials. In general, greater attenuation of vibrations can be attained with lower natural frequency of system. However, the use of flexible supports for obtaining excessively low frequencies can cause operational problems due to excessive accelerations and displacements of the floating slab. This project aims to study the dynamic behavior of reinforced concrete floating slabs used in systems\' mass spring particularly with respect to mitigating vibrations and level of vibrations during the passage of the commuter trains. The evaluation was performed using numerical models calibrated with experimental data obtained in the lines of the São Paulo Metro.