The complexity of modern architectures require compilers to apply an increasingly large collection of architecturesensitive optimizations, e.g., parallelization and cache optimizations, which interact with each other in unpredictable ways. We present a framework to support fine-grained parameterization of these optimizations and flexible tuning of their configuration space. Instead of directly ...

Nests of the harvester ant Pogonomyrmex barbatus typically contain higher concentrations of organic matter, nitrogen and phosphorus than surrounding soils. The difference between nest soils and surrounding soils is due, at least in part, to ant foraging behavior. Ants retrieve seeds from the environment and concentrate seed nutrients in the vicinity of the nest. But elevated nutrient concentrat...

Parents of many bird species produce alarm calls when they approach and deter a nest predator in order to defend their offspring. Alarm calls have been shown to warn nestlings about predatory threats, but parents also face a similar risk of predation when incubating eggs in their nests. Here, I show that incubating female Japanese great tits, Parus minor, assess predation risk by conspecific al...

When an ant colony needs to find a new nest, scouts are sent out to evaluate the suitability of potential sites, particularly their size. It has been suggested that ant scouts of Leptothorax albipennis use a simple heuristic known as Buffon’s needle to evaluate nest size. They do this in two stages: first laying a pheromone trail in the nest site, then, after a return to the old nest, coming ba...

Studies of nesting birds commonly seek to estimate nest success and to evaluate relationships between nest-survival rates and hypothesized infl uential factors. Recently, a number of advances have been made with regard to the analysis of nest-survival data, and improved methods now exist for relaxing assumptions and accounting for potentially important sources of variation in nest-survival data...

We propose a class hierarchy for loops in a loop nest. Its purpose is to help identify the proper code generation methods for a space-time mapped nest. We illustrate the hierarchy and its use on a loop nest for computing the reeexive transitive closure of a graph.

Queues formed by social wasps to inherit the dominant position in the nest are analyzed by using a transient quasi-birth-and-death (QBD) process. We show that the extended nest lifespan due to division of labor between queen and helpers has a big impact on nest productivity.