The aim of this study is to describe personal experience in the intensive management of patients with severe diabetes undergoing pancreas transplantation.
Clinical records of subjects consecutively ...undergoing an isolated or combined pancreas transplant have been examinated.
During the considered period, 10 patients received an isolated pancreas transplant and 43 a simultaneous kidney-pancreas transplantation (SPKT), including 6 using a kidney from a living donor. The mean stay in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) was 4.7 days: 52 patients (98.2%) were transferred to the Surgical Department, whereas one (1.8%) belonging to the SPKT group died with a non-functioning graft. Ten patients (18.6%) were re-admitted because of the onset of late complications, including one SPKT who died of sudden cardiac death with functioning grafts. Arterial hypertension appeared in 51% of the recipients, and 5.6% experienced at least one hypotensive episode. Cardiac rhythm alterations were diagnosed in 5 subjects (9.4%), and myocardial ischemia in 9 (17%).
Pancreas transplantation is a therapeutic option that can improve patients' quality of life by also slowing down the evolution of diabetes; however, it is important to bear in mind the associated risks. The best results are obtained in patients in whom the disease has not already seriously impaired the function of the various target organs.
Most distributed applications are based on architectural models that do not involve real-time knowledge of network status and of their network usage. Moreover the new “network aware” architectures ...are still under development and their design is not yet complete. We considered, as a use case, an application using ODBMS (Objectivity/DB) for the distributed analysis of experimental data. The dynamic usage of system and network resources at host and application levels has been measured in different client/server configurations, and on several LAN and WAN layouts. The aim was to study the application efficiency and behavior versus the network characteristics and conditions.
The most interesting results of the LAN and WAN tests are described. System bottlenecks and limitations have been identified, and efficient working conditions in the different scenarios have been defined. The behavior observed when moving away from the optimal working conditions is also described.
The objective of the MONARC project is to identify baseline computing models that could provide viable solutions meeting the data analysis needs of the LHC experiments. A powerful and flexible set of ...simulation tools has been developed to model the performance of distributed computing resources for a set of reconstruction and analysis tasks. In this paper we report the validation of the simulation tools using the testbed environments with Objectivity/DB over LAN and WAN connections. A simple and effective way to parameterize and evaluate the concurrent database access over network has been established.
The four High Energy Physics (HEP) detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are among the most important experiments where the National ...Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) is being actively involved. A Grid infrastructure of the World LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) has been developed by the HEP community leveraging on broader initiatives (e.g. EGEE in Europe, OSG in northen America) as a framework to exchange and maintain data storage and provide computing infrastructure for the entire LHC community. INFN-CNAF in Bologna hosts the Italian Tier-1 site, which represents the biggest italian center in the WLCG distributed computing. In the first part of this paper we will describe on the building of the Italian Tier-1 to cope with the WLCG computing requirements focusing on some peculiarities; in the second part we will analyze the INFN-CNAF contribution for the developement of the grid middleware, stressing in particular the characteristics of the Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS), the de facto standard for authorization on a grid, and StoRM, an implementation of the Storage Resource Manager (SRM) specifications for POSIX file systems. In particular StoRM is used at INFN-CNAF in conjunction with General Parallel File System (GPFS) and we are also testing an integration with Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) to realize a complete Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM).
