Recent advances in the modeling and remote sensing of droughts and floods Droughts and floods are causing increasing damage worldwide, often with devastating short- and long-term impacts on human society. Forecasting when they will occur, monitoring them as they develop, and learning from the past to improve disaster management is vital. Global Drought and Flood: Observation, Modeling, and Prediction presents recent advances in the modeling and remote sensing of droughts and floods. It also describes the techniques and products currently available and how they are being used in practice. Volume highlights include: Remote sensing approaches for mapping droughts and floods Physical and statistical models for monitoring and forecasting hydrologic hazards Features of various drought and flood systems and products Use by governments, humanitarian, and development stakeholders in recent disaster cases Improving the collaboration between hazard information provision and end users The American Geophysical Union promotes discovery in Earth and space science for the benefit of humanity. Its publications disseminate scientific knowledge and provide resources for researchers, students, and professionals.

This is the second volume of Morgan Kaufmann's "GPU Computing Gems," offering an all-new set of insights, ideas, and practical "hands-on" skills from researchers and developers worldwide. Each chapter gives you a window into the work being performed across a variety of application domains, and the opportunity to witness the impact of parallel GPU computing on the efficiency of scientific research.

"GPU Computing Gems: Jade Edition" showcases the latest research solutions with GPGPU and CUDA, including: Improving memory access patterns for cellular automata using CUDALarge-scale gas turbine simulations on GPU clustersIdentifying and mitigating credit risk using large-scale economic capital simulationsGPU-powered MATLAB acceleration with JacketBiologically-inspired machine visionAn efficient CUDA algorithm for the maximum network flow problem"30 more chapters" of innovative GPU computing ideas, written to be accessible to researchers from any industry

"GPU Computing Gems: Jade Edition" contains 100% new material covering a variety of application domains: algorithms and data structures, engineering, interactive physics for games, computational finance, and programming tools.
This second volume of "GPU Computing Gems "offers 100% new material of interest across industry, including finance, medicine, imaging, engineering, gaming, environmental science, green computing, and more Covers new tools and frameworks for productive GPU computing application development and offers immediate benefit to researchers developing improved programming environments for GPUsEven more hands-on, proven techniques demonstrating how general purpose GPU computing is changing scientific research Distills the best practices of the community of CUDA programmers; each chapter provides insights and ideas as well as 'hands on' skills applicable to a variety of fields

..".the perfect companion to "Programming Massively Parallel Processors" by Hwu & Kirk." -Nicolas Pinto, Research Scientist at Harvard & MIT, NVIDIA Fellow 2009-2010

Graphics processing units (GPUs) can do much more than render graphics. Scientists and researchers increasingly look to GPUs to improve the efficiency and performance of computationally-intensive experiments across a range of disciplines.

"GPU Computing Gems: Emerald Edition" brings their techniques to you, showcasing GPU-based solutions including: Black hole simulations with CUDAGPU-accelerated computation and interactive display of molecular orbitalsTemporal data mining for neuroscienceGPU -based parallelization for fast circuit optimizationFast graph cuts for computer visionReal-time stereo on GPGPU using progressive multi-resolution adaptive windowsGPU image demosaicingTomographic image reconstruction from unordered lines with CUDAMedical image processing using GPU -accelerated ITK image filters"41 more chapters" of innovative GPU computing ideas, written to be accessible to researchers from any domain

"GPU Computing Gems: Emerald Edition" is the first volume in Morgan Kaufmann's Applications of GPU Computing Series, offering the latest insights and research in computer vision, electronic design automation, emerging data-intensive applications, life sciences, medical imaging, ray tracing and rendering, scientific simulation, signal and audio processing, statistical modeling, and video / image processing.
Covers the breadth of industry from scientific simulation and electronic design automation to audio / video processing, medical imaging, computer vision, and moreMany examples leverage NVIDIA's CUDA parallel computing architecture, the most widely-adopted massively parallel programming solutionOffers insights and ideas as well as practical "hands-on" skills you can immediately put to use

As structural elements, anisotropic elastic plates find wide applications in modern technology. The plates here are considered to be subjected to not only inplane load but also transverse load. In other words, both plane and plate bending problems as well as the stretching-bending coupling problems are all explained in this book.

In addition to the introduction of the theory of anisotropic elasticity, several important subjects have are discussed in this book such as interfaces, cracks, holes, inclusions, contact problems, piezoelectric materials, thermoelastic problems and boundary element analysis.

Incorporates mixed-effects modeling techniques for more powerful and efficient methods
This book presents current and effective nonparametric regression techniques for longitudinal data analysis and systematically investigates the incorporation of mixed-effects modeling techniques into various nonparametric regression models. The authors emphasize modeling ideas and inference methodologies, although some theoretical results for the justification of the proposed methods are presented.
With its logical structure and organization, beginning with basic principles, the text develops the foundation needed to master advanced principles and applications. Following a brief overview, data examples from biomedical research studies are presented and point to the need for nonparametric regression analysis approaches. Next, the authors review mixed-effects models and nonparametric regression models, which are the two key building blocks of the proposed modeling techniques.
The core section of the book consists of four chapters dedicated to the major nonparametric regression methods: local polynomial, regression spline, smoothing spline, and penalized spline. The next two chapters extend these modeling techniques to semiparametric and time varying coefficient models for longitudinal data analysis. The final chapter examines discrete longitudinal data modeling and analysis.
Each chapter concludes with a summary that highlights key points and also provides bibliographic notes that point to additional sources for further study. Examples of data analysis from biomedical research are used to illustrate the methodologies contained throughout the book. Technical proofs are presented in separate appendices.
With its focus on solving problems, this is an excellent textbook for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in longitudinal data analysis. It is also recommended as a reference for biostatisticians and other theoretical and applied research statisticians with an interest in longitudinal data analysis. Not only do readers gain an understanding of the principles of various nonparametric regression methods, but they also gain a practical understanding of how to use the methods to tackle real-world problems.

Heterogeneous Systems Architecture - a new compute platform infrastructure presents a next-generation hardware platform, and associated software, that allows processors of different types to work efficiently and cooperatively in shared memory from a single source program. HSA also defines a virtual ISA for parallel routines or kernels, which is vendor and ISA independent thus enabling single source programs to execute across any HSA compliant heterogeneous processer from those used in smartphones to supercomputers. The book begins with an overview of the evolution of heterogeneous parallel processing, associated problems, and how they are overcome with HSA. Later chapters provide a deeper perspective on topics such as the runtime, memory model, queuing, context switching, the architected queuing language, simulators, and tool chains. Finally, three real world examples are presented, which provide an early demonstration of how HSA can deliver significantly higher performance thru C++ based applications. Contributing authors are HSA Foundation members who are experts from both academia and industry. Some of these distinguished authors are listed here in alphabetical order: Yeh-Ching Chung, Benedict R. Gaster, Juan Gomez-Luna, Derek Hower, Lee Howes, Shih-Hao HungThomas B. Jablin, David Kaeli,Phil Rogers, Ben Sander, I-Jui (Ray) Sung.

This book provides the theory of anisotropic elasticity with the computer program for analytical solutions as well as boundary element methods. It covers the elastic analysis of two-dimensional, plate bending, coupled stretching-bending, and three-dimensional deformations, and is extended to the piezoelectric, piezomagnetic, magnetic-electro-elastic, viscoelastic materials, and the ones under thermal environment. The analytical solutions include the solutions for infinite space, half-space, bi-materials, wedges, interface corners, holes, cracks, inclusions, and contact problems. The boundary element solutions include BEMs for two-dimensional anisotropic elastic, piezoelectric, magnetic-electro-elastic, viscoelastic analyses, and their associated dynamic analyses, as well as coupled stretching-bending analysis, contact analysis, and three-dimensional analysis. This book also provides source codes and examples for all the presenting analytical solutions and boundary element methods. The program is named as AEPH (Anisotropic Elastic Plates - Hwu), which contains 204 MATLAB functions.

As structural elements, anisotropic elastic plates find wide applications in modern technology. The plates here are considered to be subjected to not only inplane load but also transverse load. In other words, both plane and plate bending problems as well as the stretching-bending coupling problems are all explained in this book. In addition to the introduction of the theory of anisotropic elasticity, several important subjects have are discussed in this book such as interfaces, cracks, holes, inclusions, contact problems, piezoelectric materials, thermoelastic problems and boundary element analysis.

General-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU) have emerged as an important class of shared memory parallel processing architectures, with widespread deployment in every computer class from high-end supercomputers to embedded mobile platforms. Relative to more traditional multicore systems of today, GPGPUs have distinctly higher degrees of hardware multithreading (hundreds of hardware thread contexts vs. tens), a return to wide vector units (several tens vs. 1-10), memory architectures that deliver higher peak memory bandwidth (hundreds of gigabytes per second vs. tens), and smaller caches/scratchpad memories (less than 1 megabyte vs. 1-10 megabytes). In this book, we provide a high-level overview of current GPGPU architectures and programming models. We review the principles that are used in previous shared memory parallel platforms, focusing on recent results in both the theory and practice of parallel algorithms, and suggest a connection to GPGPU platforms. We aim to provide hints to architects about understanding algorithm aspect to GPGPU. We also provide detailed performance analysis and guide optimizations from high-level algorithms to low-level instruction level optimizations. As a case study, we use n-body particle simulations known as the fast multipole method (FMM) as an example. We also briefly survey the state-of-the-art in GPU performance analysis tools and techniques. Table of Contents: GPU Design, Programming, and Trends / Performance Principles / From Principles to Practice: Analysis and Tuning / Using Detailed Performance Analysis to Guide Optimization

Learning Spanish Grammar Through Everyday Conversational Comics helps students learn the most challenging Spanish grammar concepts and apply them in real-life situations. The text uses comics containing catchy and colorful graphics, humor, and contextualized short conversations on a wide variety of topics to enhance comprehension and keep learners motivated and engaged. The text provides students with a collection of pedagogical grammar rules and contextualized examples to encourage rule- and exemplar-based learning. It offers students an array of examples in context to help them develop a clearer understanding of Spanish language use and apply what they learn to new situations. Grammatical rules and explanations help readers activate their existing knowledge and also produce new utterances. The comics included throughout the text serve as both examples and attainment goals to make learning more relevant, purposeful, and enjoyable. Within each chapter, activities support students' concept formation, concept clarification, mental decision steps, hands-on learning, and creative self-expression. Developed to enhance comprehension and further students' speaking and writing abilities, Learning Spanish Grammar Through Everyday Conversational Comics is an ideal resource for intermediate and advanced courses in Spanish.