An atomic block is a language construct that simplifies the programming of critical sections. In the past, software transactional memory (STM) and lock inference have been used to implement atomic blocks. Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. STM provides fine-grained locking but has high overheads due to logging and potential rollbacks. Lock inference is a static analysis that compute...

Micromotion has long been associated with wear of polyethylene tibial inserts, potentially causing failure of unicompartmental knee replacement systems. One cause of micromotion is the locking mechanism between the undersurface of the polyethylene and the tibial tray. The objective of this study was to investigate the use of new novel lock designs for reducing the micromotion associated with a ...

Hole drilling operations are common in fibre reinforced plastics FRP’s to facilitate fastener assembly to other parts in more complex structures. As these materials are non-homogeneous, drilling causes some damages, like delamination, for example. Delamination can be reduced by a careful selection of drilling parameters, drill material and drill bit geometry. In this work two types of laminates...

In this paper we break a knapsack based two-lock cryptosystem proposed at ICICS’03 [7]. The two-lock cryptosystem is a commutative encryption algorithm that is very useful for the construction of the general t-out-of-n oblivious transfers and millionaire protocol. However, our analysis shows that the proposed knapsack based two-lock cryptosystem is extremely insecure. The serious flaw is that t...

Hardware lock elision (HLE) concurrently executes lock critical sections as hardware transactions, but fallbacks to the original sequential lock fallback path when some hardware transaction fails. Recent software-assisted lock-removal based schemes provide a better concurrency by sacrificing safety (opacity). Hardware transactions can execute at the same time with the lock fallback path as long...

In this short paper we show that hardware-based transactional lock elision can provide benefit by reducing the incidence of lock holder preemption, decreasing lock hold times and promoting improved scalability.

openshapedoor within door { booleanopen int size point hinge , lock line door open = true size = 200 hinge = \NW + {10, 0} lock = if open then hinge-{0, size} else hinge+{size, 0} door = [hinge,lock] } width = 800 length = 800 centre = {500, 500} .

The objective of the thesis is to address the problem of clock skew between two different clock domains in modern day microprocessors due to the process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations. In order to mitigate the misalignment of the clocks in the different clock domains, a delay line is added in all but the reference clock domain. These delay lines add or subtract the delay (as necessar...