Pre-existing orthorhombic embryos-induced hexagonal-orthorhombic martensitic transformation in MnNiSi_(1-x)(CoNiGe)_x alloy

The thermal-elastic martensitic transformation from high-temperature Ni_(2)In-type hexagonal structure to low-temperature TiNiSi-type orthorhombic structure has been widely studied in MnMX(M=Ni or Co,and X=Ge or Si)alloys.However,the answer to how the orthorhombic martensite nucleates and grows within the hexagonal parent is still unclear.In this work,the hexagonal-orthorhombic martensitic transformation in a Co and Ge co-substituted MnNiSi is investigated.One can find some orthorhombic laths embedded in the hexagonal parent at a temperature above the martensitic transformation start temperature(M_(s)).With the the sample cooing to M_(s),the laths turn broader,indicating that the martensitic transformation starts from these pre-existing orthorhombic laths.Microstructure observation suggests that these pre-existing orthorhombic laths do not originate from the hexagonal-orthorhombic martensitic transformation because of the difference between atomic occupations of doping elements in the hexagonal parent and those in the preexisting orthorhombic laths.The phenomenological crystallographic theory and experimental investigations prove that the pre-existing orthorhombic lath and generated orthorhombic martensite have the same crystallography relationship to the hexagonal parent.Therefore,the orthorhombic martensite can take these pre-existing laths as embryos and grow up.This work implies that the martensitic transformation in MnNiSi_(1-x)(CoNiGe)_(x) alloy is initiated by orthorhombic embryos.

Ferromagnetism and magnetostructural coupling in V-doped MnNiGe alloys

The magnetostructural coupling between magnetic and structure transitions plays an important role in the multifunctional applications of magentocaloric materials. In this work, ferromagnetism and magnetostructural transformation are achieved in nonmagnetic V-doped MnNiGe alloys. With simultaneously reducing the transformation temperature and converting antiferromagnetic martensite to ferromagnetic state, the magnetostructural transformation between ferromagnetic orthorhombic phase and paramagnetic hexagonal phase is established in a temperature region as large as 130 K. The magnetic-field-induced magnetostructural transformation is accompanied by considerable magnetocaloric effect.

SMART: Speedup Job Completion Time by Scheduling Reduce Tasks

Distributed computing systems have been widely used as the amount of data grows exponentially in the era of information explosion. Job completion time (JCT) is a major metric for assessing their effectiveness. How to reduce the JCT for these systems through reasonable scheduling has become a hot issue in both industry and academia. Data skew is a common phenomenon that can compromise the performance of such distributed computing systems. This paper proposes SMART, which can effectively reduce the JCT through handling the data skew during the reducing phase. SMART predicts the size of reduce tasks based on part of the completed map tasks and then enforces largest-first scheduling in the reducing phase according to the predicted reduce task size. SMART makes minimal modifications to the original Hadoop with only 20 additional lines of code and is readily deployable. The robustness and the effectiveness of SMART have been evaluated with a real-world cluster against a large number of datasets. Experiments show that SMART reduces JCT by up to 6.47%, 9.26%, and 13.66% for Terasort, WordCount and InvertedIndex respectively with the Purdue MapReduce benchmarks suite (PUMA) dataset.

Analyzing and Optimizing Packet Corruption in RDMA Network

Remote direct memory access (RDMA) has become one of the state-of-the-art high-performance network technologies in datacenters. The reliable transport of RDMA is designed based on a lossless underlying network and cannot endure a high packet loss rate. However, except for switch buffer overflow, there is another kind of packet loss in the RDMA network, i.e., packet corruption, which has not been discussed in depth. The packet corruption incurs long application tail latency by causing timeout retransmissions. The challenges to solving packet corruption in the RDMA network include: 1) packet corruption is inevitable with any remedial mechanisms and 2) RDMA hardware is not programmable. This paper proposes some designs which can guarantee the expected tail latency of applications with the existence of packet corruption. The key idea is controlling the occurring probabilities of timeout events caused by packet corruption through transforming timeout retransmissions into out-of-order retransmissions. We build a probabilistic model to estimate the occurrence probabilities and real effects of the corruption patterns. We implement these two mechanisms with the help of programmable switches and the zero-byte message RDMA feature. We build an ns-3 simulation and implement optimization mechanisms on our testbed. The simulation and testbed experiments show that the optimizations can decrease the flow completion time by several orders of magnitudes with less than 3% bandwidth cost at different packet corruption rates.