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Verso una nuova sociologia dei disastri italiani
No full textLa sociologia dei disastri, come disciplina che indaga la relazione tra società ed eventi estremi, pur avendo avuto i suoi inizi in ritardo rispetto ad altri paesi, vanta ormai una tradizione solida, a partire sugli studi del terremoto del Friuli del 1976. Il capitolo ricostruisce gli studi svolti nel nostro paese sulle calamità naturali ed antropiche, evidenziando anche l'evoluzione delle politiche e dei dispositivi per la gestione dell'emergenza, che si è prodotta parallelamente. In seguito si sofferma a tratteggiare i contributi che possono provenire dalla sociologia territorialista tanto all'analisi delle conseguenze sociali degli eventi catastrofici, quanto alla definizione di politiche ed interventi sia in sede preventiva, sia in emergenza e, soprattutto, nella fase di ricostruzione
Energy-efficient hardware design based on high-level synthesis
No full textThis dissertation describes research activities broadly concerning the area of High-level synthesis (HLS), but more specifically, regarding the HLS-based design of energy-efficient hardware (HW) accelerators. HW accelerators, mostly implemented on FPGAs, are integral to the heterogeneous architectures employed in modern high performance computing (HPC) systems due to their ability to speed up the execution while dramatically reducing the energy consumption of computationally challenging portions of complex applications. Hence, the first activity was regarding an HLS-based approach to directly execute an OpenCL code on an FPGA instead of its traditional GPU-based counterpart. Modern FPGAs offer considerable computational capabilities while consuming significantly smaller power as compared to high-end GPUs. Several different implementations of the K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm were considered on both FPGA- and GPU-based platforms and their performance was compared. FPGAs were generally more energy-efficient than the GPUs in all the test cases. Eventually, we were also able to get a faster (in terms of execution time) FPGA implementation by using an FPGA-specific OpenCL coding style and utilizing suitable HLS directives. The second activity was targeted towards the development of a methodology complementing HLS to automatically derive power optimization directives (also known as "power intent") from a system-level design description and use it to drive the design steps after HLS, by producing a directive file written using the common power format (CPF) to achieve power shut-off (PSO) in case of an ASIC design. The proposed LP-HLS methodology reduces the design effort by enabling designers to infer low power information from the system-level description of a design rather than at the RTL. This methodology required a SystemC description of a generic power management module to describe the design context of a HW module also modeled in SystemC, along with the development of a tool to automatically produce the CPF file to accomplish PSO. Several test cases were considered to validate the proposed methodology and the results demonstrated its ability to correctly extract the low power information and apply it to achieve power optimization in the backend flow
Method for the recognition of the fuel composition in CNG engines fed with natural gas/biofuel/hydrogen blends
No full textThe production of biofuels from biomass gasification results in a wide range of fuel mixture compositions, which have a notable impact on performance and emissions of internal combustion engines. Thus, it is crucial that the composition of the blend being used is automatically identified by the engine control unit, after refueling. Standard ECU hardware is not able to recognize which fuel is actually present in the vehicle tank, hence combustion parameters cannot be changed accordingly. A methodology to perform an estimation of the composition of natural gas/biofuel/hydrogen blends, as it is fueled into CNG engines, is here presented and assessed. Experimental data have been collected in an SI engine, working under different steady-state conditions. Five different fuel blends of known composition have been tested with the same ECU calibration, relative to CNG. The injector has been characterized by means of a linear regression model aiming to predict the injection duration from data readily available in the ECU. A candidate set of 10 different sample blends, representative of the possible wide variety of blends that can be fed to the engine at the fuel pump station, was given as input to the regression model and an error in terms of injection duration has been evaluated. The method has proved to correctly recognize the actual fuel blend within the candidate set, with a maximum error of 5% on hydrogen volume content when HCNG mixtures are considered. The recognition algorithm converges after less than 10 different engine working conditions, in terms of speed and load. The candidate set has been extended to a full factorial set of 2 million blends, to validate the ability of the recognition method to correctly match the real fuel
Direct steam generation in parabolic-trough collectors: A review about the technology and a thermo-economic analysis of a hybrid system
No full textTraffic Analysis with Off-the-Shelf Hardware: Challenges and Lessons Learned
No full textIn recent years, the progress in both hardware and software allows user-space applications to capture packets at 10 Gb/s line rate or more, with cheap COTS hardware. However, processing packets at such rates with software is still far from being trivial. In the literature, this challenge has been extensively studied for network intrusion detection systems, where per-packet operations are easy to parallelize with support of hardware acceleration. Conversely, the scalability of statistical traffic analyzers (STAs) is intrinsically complicated by the need to track per-flow state to collect statistics. This challenge has received less attention so far, and it is the focus of this work. We present and discuss design choices to enable a STA to collects hundreds of per-flow metrics at a multi-10-Gb/s line rate. We leverage a handful of hardware advancements proposed over the last years (e.g., RSS queues, NUMA architecture), and we provide insights on the trade-offs they imply when combined with state-of-the-art packet capture libraries and the multi-process paradigm. We outline the principles to design an optimized STA, and we implement them to engineer DPDKStat, a solution combining the Intel DPDK framework with the traffic analyzer Tstat. Using traces collected from real networks, we demonstrate that DPDKStat achieves 40 Gb/s of aggregated rate with a single COTS PC
Evaluation of transient errors in GPGPUs for safety critical applications: An effective simulation-based fault injection environment
No full textGeneral Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) are increasingly adopted thanks to their high computational capabilities. GPGPUs are preferable to CPUs for a large range of computationally intensive applications, not necessarily related to computer graphics. Within the high performance computing context, GPGPUs must require a large amount of resources and have plenty execution units. GPGPUs are becoming attractive for safety-critical applications where the phenomenon of transient errors is a major concern. In this paper we propose a novel transient error fault injection simulation methodology for the accurate simulation of GPGPUs applications during the occurrence of transient errors. The developed environment allows to inject transient errors within all the memory area of GPGPUs and into not user-accessible resources such as in streaming processors combinational logic and sequential elements. The capability of the fault injection simulation platform has been evaluated testing three benchmark applications including mitigation approaches such as Duplication With Comparison, Triple Modular Redundancy and Algorithm Based Fault Tolerance. The amount of computational costs and time measured is minimal thus enabling the usage of the developed approach for effective transient errors evaluation
An Assessment of the Impact of a Collaborative Didactic Approach and Students' Background in Teaching Computer Animation
No full textThe purpose of this study was to compare different students' backgrounds and two different didactic methodologies to profitably teach computer animation in Italian schools of design and engineering. Teachers and instructors have long been engaged in discussions to define effective curricula for teaching computer animation. Various multidisciplinary and collaborative methodologies have been proposed. This manuscript assesses both the impact of a collaborative teaching approach and the curriculum. Two equivalent learning paths are compared; both of them encompass courses of photography, storytelling and computer animation and require prerequisites in 3D modeling and rendering. The learning path of the "Systemic Design" degree is taught by the collaborative Open Space Technology (OST) approach, whereas the path of "Cinema and Media Engineering" is taught more conventionally (independent courses). The results clearly show how effective teaching methodologies cannot completely compensate for a nontechnical background; on the other hand, as expected, students appreciate and can take advantage of collaborative forms of teaching
Interventi su intonaci esterni e su cementi decorativi
No full textIl contributo riprende in modo sintetico alcuni principi di formulazione, nonché criteri di scelta e di applicazione, per malte, intonaci e cementi decorativi, utili per interventi di manutenzione e conservazione
Caratterizzazione degli intonaci di alcune cappelle del Sacro Monte di Varallo, formulazione di miscele compatibili e sintesi di prodotti consolidanti adeguati
No full textIl contributo illustra sinteticamente i principi formulativi adottati per riproporre alcune miscele di intonaco per specifiche applicazioni al Sacro Monte di Varallo Sesia. Le speciali caratteristiche degli intonaci in opera esposti da secoli a condizioni atmosferiche difficili, sono state riprodotte in termini di prestazioni tecniche ed estetiche utilizzando sia materiali propri della tradizione locale, sia prodotti innovativi. Questo filone di indagine fa parte di un programma di ricerca finanziato (Progetto di ricerca Re-Frescos, 2010-2013, su fondi della Regione Piemonte), che fonda le sue radici in altre attività di ricerca applicata precedenti e che continua attualmente (2017) su analoghi beni dei Sacri Monti (patrimonio UNESCO). Il volume fa parte della collana Esempi di Architettura - EDA
