Department of History

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive, memory-centric characterization of the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite, using a number of mechanisms including dynamic binary instrumentation, measurements on native hardware using hardware performance counters and operating system based tools. We present a number of results including working set sizes, memory capacity consumption and memory bandwidth utilization of various workloads. Our experiments reveal that, on the x86_64 ISA, SPEC CPU2017 workloads execute a significant number of memory related instructions, with approximately 50% of all dynamic instructions requiring memory accesses. We also show that there is a large variation in the memory footprint and bandwidth utilization profiles of the entire suite, with some benchmarks using as much as 16 GB of main memory and up to 2.3 GB/s of memory bandwidth. We perform instruction distribution analysis of the benchmark suite and find that the average instruction count for SPEC CPU2017 workloads is an order of magnitude higher than SPEC CPU2006 ones. In addition, we also find that FP benchmarks of the suite have higher compute requirements: on average, FP workloads execute three times the number of compute operations as compared to INT workloads.

World University root node

Department of Computer Science

ICPE 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering

Memory centric characterization and analysis of SPec CPU 2017 suite

New benchmark suites are constantly being released, with each one providing a much larger set of benchmarks, representing an ever-growing variety of workloads. Contemporary workloads are increasingly more complex in their computational and memory footprints. Most computer architecture research is based on the ability of researchers to simulate novel ideas with a variety of workloads representing the domain being researched. However, bigger and complex benchmarks suites have made it extremely impractical to simulate complete benchmarks from start to finish. As a result, architects are becoming increasingly dependent on statistical sampling techniques like SimPoints, which identify long, repetitive execution phases in benchmarks and limit simulations to a few instances of these phases. These techniques present an inherent trade-off between simulation speed and accuracy. This work presents results and insights for determining the accuracy of simulation points for the SPEC CPU2017 suite, using Pin and PinPoints, which is an implementation of SimPoints for the x86 ISA. Our analysis concludes that carefully chosen simulation points faithfully represent the workload; we observe <1% variance in the instruction distribution between full runs and the ones using SimPoints, while reducing simulation time by 750x. We also show that on average, just 12 phases can faithfully represent the 90th percentile of a benchmark's behavior, which can help reduce the overall simulation time by up to 1297x. In addition, using performance statistics with native binaries on real hardware and from an architectural model of the same machine using SimPoints, we report good co-relations between the two on metrics such as CPI. Finally, we present cases like memory hierarchy explorations, where SimPoints should be used judiciously and with extreme caution in order to derive correct conclusions - inappropriately chosen SimPoint configurations can show large deviations in memory hierarchy behavior as compared to full runs, as reported by prior studies.

Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, IISWC 2019

Efficacy of Statistical Sampling on Contemporary Workloads: The Case of SPEC CPU2017

In India, role of women as farm managers has been veiled behind image of men as primary decision makers on farms. Data shows that approximately 8% farm households had women farm managers in India in 2004 and this number increased to 11% in 2011. This rising phenomenon of farm management by women begets an in depth understanding about these farms, including, differentials in productivity levels across men and women managers. This paper uses three measures to capture productivity – production value, profit value and crop specific yields. Results show that total farm production and profits are lower by approximately 11% in households where women manage farms. This falls to 7% when controls for crop choice, input usage, location and farmer characteristics are included. The main mediating factors in explaining the productivity gap are crop choice and input usage, explaining almost 45% of the productivity gap. Further, the paper provides suggestive evidence on mechanisms contributing to the remaining productivity difference that cannot be explained by differences in observed characteristics. It shows that inadequate experience of women farm managers in agricultural production processes can be an important factor behind the remaining gap. The study makes two contributions to the literature – one, it is the first quantitative study in the Indian context on gender differentials in farm productivity and second, it applies semi-parametric decomposition techniques to look at the productivity differentials along the entire distribution.

Department of Economics

Fulltext

World Development

Back to the plough: Women managers and farm productivity in India

The 10% quota for the economically weaker sections completely overturns the original logic of reservations on its head, while misconstruing the EWS category itself. Data suggests that caste remains a critical marker of disadvantage, even amongst the “poor.” © 2019 Economic and Political Weekly. All Rights Reserved.

Economic and Political Weekly

The 10% quota is caste still an indicator of backwardness?

We prove majorization inequalities for different means of positive definite matrices. These include the Cartan mean (the Karcher mean), the log Euclidean mean, the Wasserstein mean and the power mean. © 2018 Elsevier Inc.

Department of Mathematics

Linear Algebra and Its Applications

Inequalities for the Wasserstein mean of positive definite matrices

We present results from molecular dynamics simulations of a spherically confined neutral polymer in the presence of crowding particles, studying polymer shapes and conformations as a function of the strength of the attraction to the confining wall, solvent quality, and the density of crowders. The conformations of the polymer under good solvent conditions are weakly dependent on crowder particle density, even when the polymer is strongly confined. In contrast, under poor solvent conditions, when the polymer assumes a collapsed conformation when unconfined, it can exhibit transitions to two different adsorbed phases, when either the interaction with the wall or the density of crowder particles is changed. One such transition involves a desorbed collapsed phase change to an adsorbed extended phase as the attraction of the polymer towards the confining wall is increased. Such an adsorbed extended phase can exhibit a second transition to an ordered adsorbed collapsed phase as the crowder particle density is increased. The ordered adsorbed collapsed phase of the polymer differs significantly in its structure from the desorbed collapsed phase. We revisit the earlier understanding of the adsorption of confined polymers on attractive surfaces in light of our results. © 2019 Author(s).

Department of Biology

Journal of Chemical Physics

Confined crowded polymers near attractive surfaces

The adaptive in vivo mechanisms underlying the switch in Salmonella enterica lifestyles from the infectious form to a dormant form remain unknown. We employed Caenorhabditis elegans as a heterologous host to understand the temporal dynamics of Salmonella pathogenesis and to identify its lifestyle form in vivo. We discovered that Salmonella exists as sessile aggregates, or in vivo biofilms, in the persistently infected C. elegans gut. In the absence of in vivo biofilms, Salmonella killed the host more rapidly by actively inhibiting innate immune pathways. Regulatory crosstalk between two major Salmonella pathogenicity islands, SPI-1 and SPI-2, was responsible for biofilm-induced changes in host physiology during persistent infection. Thus, biofilm formation is a survival strategy in long-term infections, as prolonging host survival is beneficial for the parasitic lifestyle. © 2019 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Salmonella biofilms program innate immunity for persistence in Caenorhabditis elegans

arXiv

Orthogonal polynomials associated with a continued fraction of Hirschhorn

What makes a place remote? Is remoteness a factor of geography and topography, is it a construct of connectivity, or is it an outcome of politics and history? For the Monpas of Arunachal Pradesh in North East India, inhabiting the Indo-Tibetan borderlands, remote denotes multiple aspects: lack of material infrastructure and transport, improper communication and geographical isolation. Living an enclave existence far away from centres of commerce, governance and industry, Monpas consider themselves to be backward. Yet, Monyul, the traditional homeland of the Monpa communities, is of high strategic importance in the still unresolved India–China border conflict. Its present remoteness is woven into the politics of borders and frontiers. Through a focus on the particular history and politics of Monyul, I show how colonial and postcolonial policies transformed the region into a remote periphery. While infrastructure and connectivity can lead to the economic and political integration of a region, the withholding of the same makes a region appear remote. I bring the concept of selective connectivity to understand how road infrastructure is a particular form of exercising state control. © 2019 European Association of Social Anthropologists

Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Social Anthropology

Selective access: or, how states make remoteness

This paper examines the ritual and everyday practices of a family of buffalo-keeping Yadavs in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Water buffalo and indigenous Indian cattle are described as biologically and socially distinct beings: buffalo are economic animals, favoured for milk production, but ritually devalued and legally killable; cattle are sacred, protected from slaughter. Cows have historically been the animals central to public imaginations of Hindu belonging in scholarship and popular politics. But buffalo, not cows, are the animals central to Yadav self-making. This paper shows how heterodox bovine beliefs and everyday practices knit buffalo into a capacious Hindu interspecies world that subverts contemporary cow politics. © 2019, © 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.