Warm Climate in the “Boring Billion” Era

The Mesoproterozoic – no “boring billion”

The authors show that the Mesoproterozoic (1.6-1.0 bn year before present) was no “boring billion” but a “bustling billion” - not only with Stromatolites and their apex in the Calymmian and Ectasian but also with the presence of multicellular organisms. To make it visible a graphical reconstruction was created. For a long time, it was assumed that there existed no noteworthy biosphere on Earth ...

Scalable Processors in the Billion-Transistor Era: IRAM

T he importance of an efficient memory system is increasing as fabrication processes scale down, yielding faster processors and larger memories. This trend widens the processor-memory gap. Not long ago, off-chip main memory was able to supply the CPU with data at an adequate rate. Today, with processor performance increasing at a rate of about 60 percent per year and memory latency improving by...

Parallel Media Processors for the Billion-Transistor Era

This paper describes the challenges presented by singlechip parallel media processors (PMPs). These machines integrate multiple parallel function units, instruction execution, and memory hierarchies on a single chip. The combination of programmability and high performance on data parallelism is necessary to meet the demands of nextgeneration multimedia applications. Many research issues must be...

Biological Wastewater Treatment in Warm Climate Regions Biological Wastewater Treatment in Warm Climate Regions

Climate stability during the Pliocene warm period

[1] We present a high-resolution climate record from a sediment core spanning an 80-kyr interval of time during the mid-Pliocene epoch, when warmer conditions and lower global ice volume prevailed worldwide. Oxygen and carbon isotope analyses were made on benthic and planktonic foraminifera from ODP Site 981 in the North Atlantic. The amplitude and approximate recurrence interval of suborbital ...