Confucius School of Medicine: the way to great learning.

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Cache affinity optimization techniques for scaling software transactional memory systems on multi-CMP architectures

Software transactional memory (STM) enhances both ease-of-use and concurrency, and is considered one of the next-generation paradigms for parallel programming. Application programs may see hotspots where data conflicts are intensive and seriously degrade the performance. So advanced STM systems employ dynamic concurrency control techniques to curb the conflict rate through properly throttling the rate of spawning transactions. High-end computers may have two or more multicore processors so that data sharing among cores goes through a non-uniform cache memory hierarchy. This poses challenges to concurrency control designs as improper metadata placement and sharing will introduce scalability issues to the system. Poor thread-to-core mappings that induce excessive cache invalidation are also detrimental to the overall performance. In this paper, we share our experience in designing and implementing a new dynamic concurrency controller for Tiny STM, which helps keeping the system concurrency at a near-optimal level. By decoupling unfavourable metadata sharing, our controller design avoids costly inter-processor communications. It also features an affinity-aware thread migration technique that fine-tunes thread placements by observing inter-thread transactional conflicts. We evaluate our implementation using the STAMP benchmark suite and show that the controller can bring around 21% average speedup over the baseline execution. © 2015 IEEE.postprin

The role of the GP in helping patients stop smoking

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eXCloud: Transparent runtime support for scaling mobile applications in cloud

Cloud computing augments applications with ease-of-access to the enormous resources on the Internet. Combined with mobile computing technologies, mobile applications can exploit the Cloud everywhere by statically distributing code segments or dynamically migrating running processes onto cloud services. Existing migration techniques are however too coarse-grained for mobile devices, so the overheads often offset the benefits of migration. To build a truly elastic mobile cloud computing infrastructure, we introduce eXCloud (eXtensible Cloud) - a middleware system with multi-level mobility support, ranging from as coarse as a VM instance to as fine as a runtime stack frame, and allows resources to be integrated and used dynamically. In eXCloud, a stack-on-demand (SOD) approach is used to support computation mobility throughout the mobile cloud environment. The approach is fully adaptive, goal-driven and transparent. By downward task migration, applications running on the cloud nodes can exploit or take control of special resources in mobile devices such as GPS and cameras. With a restorable MPI layer, task migrations of MPI parallel programs can happen between cloud nodes or be initiated from a mobile device. Our evaluation shows that SOD outperforms several existing migration mechanisms in terms of migration overhead and latency. All our techniques result in better resource utilization through task migrations among cloud nodes and mobile nodes.published_or_final_versionThe 2011 International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC), Hong Kong, China, 12-14 December 2011. In Proceedings of CSC, 2011, p. 103-11

Serum beta-2 microglobulin concentration predicts cardiovascular and all-cause mortality.

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Exhaled nitric oxide predicts lung function but not quality of life in subjects with non-small cell lung cancer

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The effect of health-related quality of life on health service utilization and willingness to pay for treatment of Chinese with chronic hepatitis B infection

Conference Theme: Integrating HRQOL in Health Care Policy, Research, and PracticeOral Session: Measuring Health Outcomes in Chronic Disease: abstract no. 139

Non-invasive score identifies ultrasonography-diagnosed non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and predicts mortality in the USA

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Non-medical mental health referrals: a guide for general practice

The results of part of a survey of mental health practitioners in Hong Kong are discussed with reference to similarities and differences in roles, definitions, education, training and professional regulation in their countries of origin. The need for more monitoring and regulation of non-medical mental health practitioners is considered in light of the concerns of general practitioners who want to make suitable referrals.published_or_final_versio

The relationship between glucose metabolism, metabolic syndrome, and bone-specific alkaline phosphatase: A structural equation modeling approach.

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