More Like this

1. Zhuque: Failure is Not an Option, it's an Exception

   Hodgkins, George; Xu, Yi; Swanson, Steve; Izraelevitz, Joseph (July 2023, Proceedings of the 2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference)

   Lawall, Julia; Williams, Dan (Ed.)

   Persistent memory (PMEM) allows direct access to fast storage at byte granularity. Previously, processor caches backed by persistent memory were not persistent, complicating the design of persistent applications and reducing their performance. A new generation of systems with flush-on-fail semantics effectively offer persistent caches, offering the potential for much simpler, faster PMEM programming models. This work proposes Whole Process Persistence (WPP), a new programming model for systems with persistent caches. In the WPP model, all process state is made persistent. On restart after power failure, this state is reloaded and execution resumes in an application-defined interrupt handler. We also describe the Zhuque runtime, which transparently provides WPP by interposing on the C bindings for system calls in userspace. It requires little or no programmer effort to run applications on Zhuque. Our measurements show that Zhuque outperforms state of the art PMEM libraries, demonstrating mean speedups across all benchmarks of 5.24x over PMDK, 3.01x over Mnemosyne, 5.43x over Atlas, and 4.11x over Clobber-NVM. More important, unlike existing systems, Zhuque places no restrictions on how applications implement concurrency, allowing us to run a newer version of Memcached on Zhuque and gain more than 7.5x throughput over the fastest existing persistent implementations. 

   more » « less
2. What is... an Equivariant Neural Network?

   https://doi.org/10.1090/noti2666  

   Lim, Lek-Heng; Nelson, Bradley J (April 2023, Notices of the American Mathematical Society)
3. WHAT IS...an Acylindrical Group Action?

   https://doi.org/10.1090/noti1624  

   Koberda, Thomas (January 2018, Notices of the American Mathematical Society)
4. What is an Equitable Academic Makerspace?

   bravo, elisa; austin-breneman, jesse (November 2022, International symposium on academic makerspaces)
5. Where ethics is taught: an institutional epidemiology

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s40889-021-00121-7  

   Beever, Jonathan; Kuebler, Stephen M.; Collins, Jordan (March 2021, International Journal of Ethics Education)

   null (Ed.)

   The goal of this project is to argue for ethics as a necessary component of the institutional health. The authors offer an epidemiology of ethics for a large, metropolitan, very-high-research-activity (R1) university in the U.S. Where epidemiology of a pandemic looks at quantifiable data on infection and exposure rates, control, and broad implications for public health, an epidemiology of ethics looks to parallel data on those same themes. Their hypothesis is that knowing more about how undergraduates are exposed to ethics will help us understand to what extent they are infected with interest in ethics literacy, and potentially what immunity they develop against unethical and unprofessional conduct. These data also tell a story about the ethical health of institutions: to what extent its members are empowered to cultivate a culture of ethics and inoculated against ethical missteps. The authors argue that pro-ethics inoculation at research institutions is shaped by issues of complexity (space given to “hard” vs. “soft” skills within curricula), connotation (differences in meaning of “ethics” among and within disciplines), and collaboration (tensions between Ethics-Across-the-Curriculum and Ethics-In-the-Disciplines approaches to ethics). These issues make assessment of where ethics is taught all the more difficult. The methodology used in this project can readily be taken up by other institutions, with much to be learned from inter-institutional comparisons about the distribution of ethics across the curriculum and within the disciplines. 

   more » « less