This paper describes several massively parallel implementations for a global search algorithm DIRECT. Two parallel schemes take different approaches to address DIRECT’s design challenges imposed by memory requirements and data dependency. Three design aspects in topology, data structures, and task allocation are compared in detail. The goal is to analytically investigate the strengths and weakn...

Tree nuts and peanuts are good sources of many nutrients and antioxidants, but they are also energy dense. The latter often limits intake because of concerns about their possible contribution to positive energy balance. However, evidence to date suggests that nuts are not associated with predicted weight gain. This is largely due to their high satiety value, leading to strong compensatory dieta...

Spark [6] is a cluster framework that performs in-memory computing, with the goal of outperforming disk-based engines like Hadoop [2]. As with other distributed data processing platforms, it is common to collect data in a manyto-many fashion, a stage traditionally known as the shuffle phase. In Spark, many sources of inefficiency exist in the shuffle phase that, once addressed, potentially prom...

A large body of research has investigated whether physicians overuse care. There is less evidence on whether, for a fixed level of spending, doctors allocate resources to patients with the highest expected returns. We assess both sources of inefficiency exploiting variation in rates of negative imaging tests for pulmonary embolism. We document enormous across-doctor heterogeneity in testing con...

September 2011 this is a rough and incomplete first draft please do not distribute or quote Abstract: Recent theoretical work has demonstrated that holdout is the appropriate efficiency justification for eminent domain. In parallel, recent empirical work has demonstrated that state legislatures either grant discretion to local authorities, or constrain them from using eminent domain. This paper...

Empirical work has drawn attention to the high degree of productivity differences within industries, and its role in resource allocation. This paper examines the allocational efficiency of such markets. Productivity differences introduce two new sources of potential inefficiency: selection of the right distribution of firms and allocation of the right quantities across firms. We show that these...

Using the US states plus the District of Columbia, output-oriented innovative efficiency scores are computed using data envelopment analysis (DEA) where total patent counts serve as the measure of innovative output and industry and academic research and development expenditures, and numbers of research scientists, graduate students, and postdoctoral positions are inputs. In the second stage the...

Parallel performance tuning naturally involves a diagnosis process to locate and explain sources of program inefficiency. Proposed is an approach that exploits parallel computation patterns (models) for diagnosis discovery. Knowledge of performance problems and inference rules for hypothesis search are engineered from model semantics and analysis expertise. In this manner, the performance diagn...

In this paper we appraise current agricultural subsidy policy in the EU. Several sources of its inefficiency are identified: it is inefficient for supporting farmers' incomes or guaranteeing food security, and irrational transfer payments decoupled from actual performance that may be negative for environmental protection, social cohesion, etc. Based on a simplified economic model, we prove that...

One of the main purposes of the frontier literature is to estimate inefficiency. Given this objective, it is unfortunate that the issue of estimating “firm-specific” inefficiency in cross sectional context has not received much attention. To estimate firm-specific (technical) inefficiency, the standard procedure is to use the mean of the inefficiency term conditional on the entire composed erro...