Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

Cytoadhesion of Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes to the microvascular endothelial lining shares striking similarities to cytoadhesion of leukocytes. In both cases, adhesins are presented in structures that raise them above the cell surface. Another similarity is the enhancement of adhesion under physical force (catch bonding). Here, we review recent advances in our understanding of the molecular and biophysical mechanisms underlying cytoadherence in both cellular systems. We describe how imaging, flow chamber experiments, single-molecule measurements, and computational modeling have been used to decipher the relevant processes. We conclude that although the parasite seems to induce processes that resemble the cytoadherence of leukocytes, the mechanics of erythrocytes is such that the resulting behavior in shear flow is fundamentally different. © 2016 The Authors. FEBS Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Federation of European Biochemical Societies.

World University root node

Department of Physics

FEBS Letters

Modeling cytoadhesion of Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes and leukocytes—common principles and distinctive features

In network function virtualization (NFV), the placement of the virtual network function (VNF) significantly affects the load on switches and the efficiency of bandwidth utilization. Suboptimal placement of VNFs in service chains increases the flow rules in the switches and the ping-pong traffic among the VNFs. This paper presents LightChain, an efficient polynomial run time approach for optimizing VNF placement and service chaining in NFV. LightChain forms the directed acyclic graph of the given service chains and applies topological sorting to the graph. The significance of the proposed approach is as follows: 1) The minimum hop-count in each service chain, 2) Reduction of flow rules on SDN switches, and 3) Elimination of ping-pong traffic. Evaluation results show that LightChain can determine the placement locations of the VNFs in a reasonably short time. Our comparison results with other approach show that LightChain installs a lower number of flow rules in the switches. © 2016 IEEE.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

IEEE NETSOFT 2016 - 2016 IEEE NetSoft Conference and Workshops: Software-Defined Infrastructure for Networks, Clouds, IoT and Services

LightChain: A lightweight optimisation of VNF placement for service chaining in NFV

The effective utilization of pseudo‐ductile materials like Fibre Reinforced Concrete (FRC) depends on the incorporation of suitable material parameters in appropriate design approaches. A design methodology has been developed for slabs‐on‐grade addressing various failure patterns and giving a performance requirement as the design output. This opens up the choice of fibres, allowing the use of combinations of fibres to suit the service requirements. In this context, the current study explores the use of hybrid combinations of conventional steel fibres (SF) and a genre of corrosionresistant amorphous metallic fibres (AMF) that have the ability to significantly enhance the flexural strength of concrete, even at relatively low dosages. It is shown that AMF, when used in combination with SF, results in a synergistic response with respect to toughness; mixes with 15 kg/m3 of SF and 20 kg/m3 of AMF exhibit about 50% higher characteristic flexural strength and more than double the characteristic equivalent flexural strength than the mix with 15 kg/m3 of SF alone, in the concrete considered here. Consequently, when FRC with a hybrid combination of fibres (AMF+SF) was considered in design, a significant reduction in thickness of slab was possible, in comparison to FRC with only SF.

Environmental Sciences and Sustainable Engineering Centre (ESSENCE)

Fulltext

RILEM Technical Letters

Benefits of using amorphous metallic fibres in concrete slabs‐on‐grade

Technology scaling has enabled fast increase in the number of cores integrated in many-core systems. However, feature size shrinking also makes large-scale many-core systems vulnerable to thermal failures. Thermal-aware task scheduling is an efficient technique to reduce the run-time temperatures of many-core processors. Most existing thermal-aware task scheduling algorithms leverage centralized scheduling schemes to gather the overall information and generate the task schedule at a center scheduler. Although that scheme can achieve the optimal temperature reduction, however, it faces severe computation bottleneck and communication congestion when the many-core processors evolve to large-scale with hundreds or thousands of cores. In this paper, we propose a decentralized thermal-aware scheduling algorithm to address this problem in large-scale systems. Experiment results on various benchmarks show that our decentralized algorithm achieves significant improvement on scalability (up to 84.3% reduction in monitoring traffic) and similar benefits on temperature reduction (by 5%) when compared with the state-of-the-art thermal-aware scheduling algorithm. © 2015 IEEE.

IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems

Decentralized Thermal-Aware Task Scheduling for Large-Scale Many-Core Systems

Three-dimensional network-on-chip (3D-NoC) emerges as a potential multi-core architecture delivering high performance, high energy efficiency and great scalability. However, 3D-NoC suffers from severe thermal problems due to its high power density. To solve this problem, thermal-aware scheduling is an effective solution. However, the high complexity of the thermal model of 3D-NoC becomes a major hurdle for developing efficient thermal-aware scheduling algorithms for 3D-NoC. In this paper, we propose a novel thermal-aware task scheduling scheme named as the Bottom-to-Top (B2T) approach to address this challenge. This heuristic-based method performs task allocation on processing units to efficiently minimize the peak temperature and improve the execution time of the tasks with low complexity. The algorithm is first designed for two-layer 3D-NoC and then extended to 3D-NoC with an arbitrary number of layers. When compared to traditional thermal-aware scheduling algorithms designed for 2D-NoC, our B2T algorithm can achieve significant peak temperature reduction (up to 11.9C) and performance improvement (up to 4%) on two-layer 3D-NoC. The improvement becomes more significant as the number of layers in 3D-NoC increases. For four-layer 3D-NoC, the improvement is up to 13.23C peak temperature reduction. © 2016 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers

Thermal-Aware Task Scheduling for 3D-Network-on-Chip: A Bottom to Top Scheme

Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has emerged as a critical challenge to lifetime reliability of computing systems. Traditionally, temperature-aware methodologies are used to mitigate the impact of NBTI on aging and degradation of computing systems. However, in the presence of process variation, which is the norm in manycore processors, temperature-aware techniques are inefficient in improving lifetime reliability and can result in poor performance. In this paper, we propose a novel performance constraint-aware task mapping technique to improve lifetime reliability by mitigating NBTI considering on-chip process variation. Our approach consists of two phases, namely design-time and run-time. During design time, we generate Pareto-optimal mappings. Following which, our run-time technique judiciously intervenes to perform workload migration to save the weakest processing core. We compare our approach with performance-greedy and thermal-aware task mapping techniques. The experiment results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other two techniques and improves lifetime reliability of a manycore system as much as 54% without violating the throughput constraint. © 2016 ACM.

Proceedings of the ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI, GLSVLSI

Performance constraint-aware task mapping to optimize lifetime reliability of manycore systems

Drilled shaft foundations supporting mast arm assemblies are subjected to significant torsion and lateral load during severe wind loading (e.g., hurricane). Past centrifuge studies in granular soils suggest that the design of such foundations should be performed for a coupled load case, since the lateral resistance is considerably reduced by the concurrent application of torsion. However, current design practice still considers lateral load and torsion independently due to the lack of field verification of centrifuge results. This paper reports on a full-scale test program to investigate the coupled load behavior of drilled shafts. A novel load test setup (with a heavy-duty mast arm assembly) and instrumentation were used for the combined torsion and lateral loading (e.g., wind loading). The study revealed a significant reduction in lateral resistance due to the influence of torque as observed from previous centrifuge studies. Torsional resistance was reduced (approximately 20%) by the impact of lateral load when compared with the anticipated torsional resistance based on unit skin friction values, derived from the axial load test results (i.e., no influence of lateral load). A comparison of measured torsional resistance during the combined loading with the predicted values using different approaches was also made. O’Neill and Hassan’s beta (β) method (sand) and alpha method (clay) are found to predict the torsional resistance reasonably well (±10%), while all other methods based on the standard penetration test and cone penetration test considered in the study overpredicted or underpredicted the resistance. © 2016, Canadian Science Publishing. All rights reserved.

Department of Civil Engineering

Canadian Geotechnical Journal

Full-scale coupled torsion and lateral response of mast arm drilled shaft foundations

A D-disc around a vertex v of a graph G = (V,E) is the subgraph induced by all vertices of distance at most D from v. We show that the structure of an outerplanar graph on n vertices is determined, up to modification (insertion or deletion) of at most ϵn edges, by a set of D-discs around the vertices, for D = D(ϵ) that is independent of the size of the graph. Such a result was already known for planar graphs (and any hyperfinite graph class), in the limited case of bounded degree graphs (that is, their maximum degree is bounded by some fixed constant, independent of |V |). We prove this result with no assumption on the degree of the graph. A pure combinatorial consequence of this result is that two outerplanar graphs that share the same local views are close to be isomorphic. We also obtain the following property testing results in the sparse graph model: graph isomorphism is testable for outerplanar graphs by poly(log n) queries. every graph property is testable for outerplanar graphs by poly(log n) queries. We note that we can replace outerplanar graphs by a slightly more general family of k-edgeouterplanar graphs. The only previous general testing results, as above, where known for forests (Kusumoto and Yoshida), and for some power-law graphs that are extremely close to be bounded degree hyperfinite (by Ito).

Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs

Every property of outerplanar graphs is testable

The present work proposes a design procedure along with guidelines for the choice of initial clearance of a typical rotating gas turbine seal in a secondary air system. The basis for the design is to prevent seal rubbing against stator, by ensuring that the centrifugal and thermal growths of the seal are within the safe operating limits. As a case study, a six-tooth straight-through rotating labyrinth seal configuration is considered with wide ranging seal parameters, namely the seal inner radius (25-700 mm), speed (1000-5000 rad/s), temperature (200-650 °C) and pressure ratio (1.1-2.5). By means of an iterative process, which involves computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis techniques, and with a choice of initial clearance, an extensive database is generated. The results are presented in terms of non-dimensional variables, namely seal clearance ratio, centrifugal growth ratio, thermal growth ratio, operating clearance ratio due to centrifugal growth and operating clearance ratio due to thermal growth. It is found that the value of clearance ratio depends significantly on the dimensionless radial position. For a seal clearance ratio of 0.01, at 3000 rad/s, the leakage flow rate gets reduced by 18 and 4%, respectively for pressure ratios of 1.1 and 2.5, when the centrifugal growth alone is considered. When both centrifugal and thermal growths are considered, the percentage reduction becomes about 70% for the same seal operating at 3000 rad/s and 204 °C, and it is as high as 95% at 426 °C. © 2016 Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C: Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science

On the choice of initial clearance and prediction of leakage flow rate for a rotating gas turbine seal

A major part of the domestic and the industrial thermal energy requirement for the heating purpose is achieved by the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels using burners. The present study reveals that thermal characterisation of impinging flame jets can be performed with a steady state technique similar to thin metal foil technique used for impinging air jets. The target surface impinged by the premixed methane-air flame jet is simultaneously cooled from the rear side by impinging air jets at different Reynolds number. One dimensional energy balance across the thickness of the plate is performed. The Nusselt number and the effectiveness distributions for a tube burner with the present technique matched reasonably well with the two-equation technique proposed in our previous work. Maximum deviations of 12% and 15% are observed for Nu and η respectively. Correlations are developed for the local Nusselt number and effectiveness in terms of flame jet parameters. The burner is analysed for the thermal efficiency. For premixed cone flames, it is observed that the thermal efficiency increases with the Reynolds number and equivalence ratio and decreases with the burner tip to plate spacing. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.