Communication-avoiding micro-architecture to compute Xcorr scores for peptide identification.

Database algorithms play a crucial part in systems biology studies by identifying proteins from mass spectrometry data. Many of these database search algorithms incur huge computational costs by computing similarity scores for each pair of sparse experimental spectrum and candidate theoretical spectrum vectors. Modern MS instrumentation techniques which are capable of generating high-resolution spectrometry data require comparison against an enormous search space, further emphasizing the need of efficient accelerators. Recent research has shown that the overall cost of scoring, and deducing peptides is dominated by the communication costs between different hierarchies of memory and processing units. However, these communication costs are seldom considered in accelerator-based architectures leading to inefficient DRAM accesses, and poor data-utilization due to irregular memory access patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel communication-avoiding micro-architecture to compute cross-correlation based similarity score by utilizing efficient local cache, and peptide pre-fetching to minimize DRAM accesses, and a custom-designed peptide broadcast bus to allow input reuse. An efficient bus arbitration scheme was designed, and implemented to minimize synchronization cost and exploit parallelism of processing elements. Our simulation results show that the proposed micro-architecture performs on average 24x better than a CPU implementation running on a 3.6 GHz Intel i7-4970 processor with 16GB memory.

Assessment of Knowledge and Practices of Hygienic Milk Production among Dairy Farmworkers, Southwest Delhi.

INTRODUCTION: India has emerged as the highest milk-producing country in the world, with an annual production of 137.7 million tones (2013-2014). The quality of contaminated milk deteriorates quickly and produces diseases if consumed. Therefore, care has to be taken in production, storage, and transport of milk. Knowledge about hygienic milk production practices is essential for proper health and nutrition. However, an assessment of their knowledge of hygienic milk production practices has not been carried out in a systematic manner. OBJECTIVE: This study aims at assessing the knowledge and practices of hygienic milk production among small dairy farmers in the peri-urban area of Southwest Delhi. METHODOLOGY: This exploratory cross-sectional study is conducted among 60 dairy farmworkers, selected conveniently from Southwest Delhi. Practices and knowledge levels are assessed using a pretested semi-structured questionnaire. RESULTS: The desired outcome indicates the knowledge level of dairy farmworkers regarding clean milk production practices. CONCLUSION: Knowledge level -It can be observed that 66.6% of the dairy farmworkers belong to category 2 (medium), whereas 13.3% and 20% of dairy farmworkers belong to category 1 (low) and 3 (high), respectively. Practice level -This study indicates that 60% of the dairy farmworkers belong to category 2 (medium), followed by 21.6% and 18.3% of the dairy farmworkers belong to category 1 (low) and 3 (high), respectively.