A public–private partnership ( PPP , 3P , or P3 ) is a long-term arrangement between a government and private sector institutions. Typically, it involves private capital financing government projects and services up-front, and then drawing revenues from taxpayers and/or users for profit over the course of the PPP contract. Public–private partnerships have been implemented in multiple countries and are primarily used for infrastructure projects. Although they are not compulsory, PPPs have been employed for building, equipping, operating and maintaining schools, hospitals, transport systems, and water and sewerage systems.
113-570: Exscalate4Cov was a public-private consortium supported by the Horizon Europe program from the European Union , aimed at leveraging high-performance computing (HPC) as a response to the coronavirus pandemic. The project utilized high-throughput, extreme-scale, computer-aided drug design software to conduct experiments. The Exsclate4Cov project, which stands for EXaSCale smArt pLatform Against paThogEns for Corona Virus ,
226-408: A drug target , often a protein receptor . The goal is to find compounds that interact with the targets, leading to potential therapeutic effects. Therefore, the process of finding new drugs usually involves high-throughput screening (HTS). HTS enables the rapid identification of active compounds. For example, virtual screening can be used as an early stage of the drug discovery pipeline to evaluate
339-434: A parallel program running on a distributed memory system. Actual distributed memory supercomputers such as computer clusters often run such programs. The principal MPI-1 model has no shared memory concept, and MPI-2 has only a limited distributed shared memory concept. Nonetheless, MPI programs are regularly run on shared memory computers, and both MPICH and Open MPI can use shared memory for message transfer if it
452-407: A rent-seeking behavior, which leads to spiraling costs for users and/or taxpayers in the operation phase of the project. Some public–private partnerships, when the development of new technologies is involved, include profit-sharing agreements. This generally involves splitting revenues between the inventor and the public once a technology is commercialized. Profit-sharing agreements may stand over
565-470: A building contractor, a maintenance company, and one or more equity investors. The two former are typically equity holders in the project, who make decisions but are only repaid when the debts are paid, while the latter is the project's creditor (debt holder). It is the SPV that signs the contract with the government and with subcontractors to build the facility and then maintain it. A typical PPP example would be
678-399: A definition, the term has been defined by major entities. For example, The OECD formally defines public–private partnerships as "long term contractual arrangements between the government and a private partner whereby the latter delivers and funds public services using a capital asset, sharing the associated risks". According to David L. Weimer and Aidan R. Vining, "A P3 typically involves
791-475: A fixed period of time or in perpetuity. Using PPPs have been justified in various ways over time. Advocates generally argue that PPPs enable the public sector to harness the expertise and efficiencies that the private sector can bring to the delivery of certain facilities and services traditionally procured and delivered by the public sector. On the other hand, critics suggest that PPPs are part of an ideological program that seeks to privatize public services for
904-465: A general index was added. All valid MPI-3.0 programs are also valid in MPI-3.1. MPI-4.0 is a major update that introduces large-count versions of many routines, persistent collective operations, partitioned communications, and a new MPI initialization method. It also adds application info assertions and improves error handling definitions, along with various smaller enhancements. Any valid MPI-3.1 program
1017-450: A hospital building financed and constructed by a private developer and then leased to the hospital authority. The private developer then acts as landlord, providing housekeeping and other non-medical services, while the hospital itself provides medical services. The SPV links the firms responsible of the building phase and the operating phase together. Hence there is a strong incentives in the building stage to make investments with regard to
1130-488: A library from one family works as a drop-in replacement of one from the same family, but direct replacement across families is impossible. The French CEA maintains a wrapper interface to facilitate such switches. MPI hardware research focuses on implementing MPI directly in hardware, for example via processor-in-memory , building MPI operations into the microcircuitry of the RAM chips in each node. By implication, this approach
1243-452: A message-passing application programmer interface, together with protocol and semantic specifications for how its features must behave in any implementation." MPI's goals are high performance, scalability, and portability. MPI remains the dominant model used in high-performance computing today. MPI is not sanctioned by any major standards body; nevertheless, it has become a de facto standard for communication among processes that model
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#17327798404331356-404: A mix of both. PPPs are structurally more expensive than publicly financed projects because of the private sector's higher cost of borrowing, resulting in users or taxpayers footing the bill for disproportionately high interest costs. PPPs also have high transaction costs . PPPs are controversial as funding tools, largely over concerns that public return on investment is lower than returns for
1469-649: A multi-core machine) will be assigned just a single process. This assignment happens at runtime through the agent that starts the MPI program, normally called mpirun or mpiexec. MPI library functions include, but are not limited to, point-to-point rendezvous-type send/receive operations, choosing between a Cartesian or graph -like logical process topology, exchanging data between process pairs (send/receive operations), combining partial results of computations (gather and reduce operations), synchronizing nodes (barrier operation) as well as obtaining network-related information such as
1582-438: A number of instances of the named MPI process. The newly spawned set of MPI processes form a new MPI_COMM_WORLD intracommunicator but can communicate with the parent and the intercommunicator the function returns. MPI_Comm_spawn_multiple is an alternate interface that allows the different instances spawned to be different binaries with different arguments. The parallel I/O feature is sometimes called MPI-IO, and refers to
1695-556: A private entity financing, constructing, or managing a project in return for a promised stream of payments directly from government or indirectly from users over the projected life of the project or some other specified period of time". A 2013 study published in State and Local Government Review found that definitions of public-private partnerships vary widely between municipalities: "Many public and private officials tout public–private partnerships for any number of activities, when in truth
1808-545: A process group (which can mean the entire process pool or a program-defined subset). A typical function is the MPI_Bcast call (short for " broadcast "). This function takes data from one node and sends it to all processes in the process group. A reverse operation is the MPI_Reduce call, which takes data from all processes in a group, performs an operation (such as summing), and stores the results on one node. MPI_Reduce
1921-492: A project cheaper for taxpayers. This can be done by cutting corners, designing the project so as to be more profitable in the operational phase, charging user fees, and/or monetizing aspects of the projects not covered by the contract. For P3 schools in Nova Scotia , this latter aspect has included restricting the use of schools' fields and interior walls, and charging after-hours facility access to community groups at 10 times
2034-455: A radical reform of government service provision. In 1997, the new British government of Tony Blair 's Labour Party expanded the PFI but sought to shift the emphasis to the achievement of "value for money", mainly through an appropriate allocation of risk. Blair created Partnerships UK (PUK), a new semi-independent organization to replace the previous pro-PPP government institutions. Its mandate
2147-605: A range of costs, the exact nature of which has changed over time and varies by jurisdiction. One thing that does remain consistent, however, is the favoring of "risk transfer" to the private partner, to the detriment of the public sector comparator. Value for money assessment procedures were incorporated into the PFI and its Australian and Canadian counterparts beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A 2012 study showed that value-for-money frameworks were still inadequate as an effective method of evaluating PPP proposals. The problem
2260-498: A ranking of hit compounds as its output, indicating the most promising candidates for further investigation. At the software level, the project utilizes the EXSCALATE docking platform. LiGen (Ligand Generator) is one of the main components of the platform, and it is used to perform molecular docking and scoring simulations. LiGen is responsible for generating and evaluating the conformations of ligands. Another relevant component at
2373-413: A set of functions designed to abstract I/O management on distributed systems to MPI, and allow files to be easily accessed in a patterned way using the existing derived datatype functionality. The little research that has been done on this feature indicates that it may not be trivial to get high performance gains by using MPI-IO. For example, an implementation of sparse matrix-vector multiplications using
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#17327798404332486-579: A significant advantage by saving time in identifying potential new treatments. During the European Exscalate4Cov project activities, raloxifene was selected through a combined approach of drug repurposing and in-silico screening on SARS-CoV-2 target’s proteins, followed by subsequent in-vitro screening. The project's large-scale campaign results are available through the MEDIATE (MolEcular DockIng AT homE) platform. The objective of MEDIATE
2599-458: A transfer of risk, but when things go wrong the risk stays with the public sector and, at the end of the day, the public because the companies expect to get paid. The health board should now be seeking an exit from this failed arrangement with Consort and at the very least be looking to bring facilities management back in-house. Furthermore, assessments ignore the practices of risk transfers to contractors under traditional procurement methods. As for
2712-454: A vested interest in recommending the PPP option over the traditional public procurement method. The lack of transparency surrounding individual PPP projects makes it difficult to draft independent value-for-money assessments. A number of Australian studies of early initiatives to promote private investment in infrastructure concluded that in most cases, the schemes being proposed were inferior to
2825-519: A write to remote memory, a read from remote memory, and a reduction operation on the same memory across a number of tasks, respectively. Also defined are three different methods to synchronize this communication (global, pairwise, and remote locks) as the specification does not guarantee that these operations have taken place until a synchronization point. These types of call can often be useful for algorithms in which synchronization would be inconvenient (e.g. distributed matrix multiplication ), or where it
2938-413: Is MPI_Send , which allows one specified process to send a message to a second specified process. Point-to-point operations, as these are called, are particularly useful in patterned or irregular communication, for example, a data-parallel architecture in which each processor routinely swaps regions of data with specific other processors between calculation steps, or a master–slave architecture in which
3051-454: Is a popular distributed environment and message passing system developed in 1989, and which was one of the systems that motivated the need for standard parallel message passing. Threaded shared memory programming models (such as Pthreads and OpenMP ) and message passing programming (MPI/PVM) can be considered complementary and have been used together on occasion in, for example, servers with multiple large shared-memory nodes. The MPI interface
3164-507: Is available. Designing programs around the MPI model (contrary to explicit shared memory models) has advantages when running on NUMA architectures since MPI encourages memory locality . Explicit shared memory programming was introduced in MPI-3. Although MPI belongs in layers 5 and higher of the OSI Reference Model , implementations may cover most layers, with sockets and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used in
3277-506: Is borne exclusively by the users of the service, for example, by toll road users such as in the case of Toronto 's Yonge Street at the dawn of the 19th century, and the more recent Highway 407 in Ontario . In other types (notably the PFI), capital investment is made by the private sector on the basis of a contract with the government to provide agreed-on services, and the cost of providing
3390-532: Is compatible with MPI-4.0. MPI-4.1 is a minor update focused on corrections and clarifications to the MPI-4.0 standard. It deprecates several routines, the MPI_HOST attribute key, and the mpif.h Fortran include file. A new routine has been added to inquire about the hardware running the MPI program. Any valid MPI-4.0 program remains valid in MPI-4.1. MPI is often compared with Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM), which
3503-463: Is currently undergoing testing for approval. The experiments, including the discovery of raloxifene as a possible drug candidate against COVID-19, gained significant interest from the scientific community, as documented in several scientific articles. The project's results also captured national interest in Italy, highlighted by various newspaper articles, due to the use of Italian supercomputers during
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3616-558: Is desirable for tasks to be able to balance their load while other processors are operating on data. The key aspect is "the ability of an MPI process to participate in the creation of new MPI processes or to establish communication with MPI processes that have been started separately." The MPI-2 specification describes three main interfaces by which MPI processes can dynamically establish communications, MPI_Comm_spawn , MPI_Comm_accept / MPI_Comm_connect and MPI_Comm_join . The MPI_Comm_spawn interface allows an MPI process to spawn
3729-549: Is equivalent to having each process (including the root itself) call MPI_Send and the root make the corresponding number of ordered MPI_Recv calls to assemble all of these arrays into a larger one: However, you may instead wish to send data as one block as opposed to 100 int s. To do this define a "contiguous block" derived data type: For passing a class or a data structure, MPI_Type_create_struct creates an MPI derived data type from MPI_predefined data types, as follows: where: The disp (displacements) array
3842-484: Is established or renewed, the financing is, from the public sector's perspective, "on-balance sheet". According to PPP advocates, the public sector will regularly benefit from significantly deferred cash flows. This viewpoint has been contested through research that shows that a majority of PPP projects ultimately cost significantly more than traditional public ones. In the European Union, the fact that PPP debt
3955-509: Is in principle optimized for the hardware on which it runs). MPI uses Language Independent Specifications (LIS) for calls and language bindings. The first MPI standard specified ANSI C and Fortran-77 bindings together with the LIS. The draft was presented at Supercomputing 1994 (November 1994) and finalized soon thereafter. About 128 functions constitute the MPI-1.3 standard which was released as
4068-423: Is independent of language, operating system, and CPU, but cannot be readily updated or removed. Another approach has been to add hardware acceleration to one or more parts of the operation, including hardware processing of MPI queues and using RDMA to directly transfer data between memory and the network interface controller without CPU or OS kernel intervention. mpicc (and similarly mpic++ , mpif90 , etc.)
4181-462: Is meant to provide essential virtual topology, synchronization , and communication functionality between a set of processes (that have been mapped to nodes/servers/computer instances) in a language-independent way, with language-specific syntax (bindings), plus a few language-specific features. MPI programs always work with processes, but programmers commonly refer to the processes as processors. Typically, for maximum performance, each CPU (or core in
4294-479: Is mixed and often unavailable. There is no consensus about how to define a PPP. The term can cover hundreds of different types of long-term contracts with a wide range of risk allocations, funding arrangements, and transparency requirements. The advancement of PPPs, as a concept and a practice, is a product of the new public management of the late 20th century, the rise of neoliberalism, and globalization pressures. Despite there being no formal consensus regarding
4407-419: Is needed for data structure alignment , since the compiler may pad the variables in a class or data structure. The safest way to find the distance between different fields is by obtaining their addresses in memory. This is done with MPI_Get_address , which is normally the same as C's & operator but that might not be true when dealing with memory segmentation . Passing a data structure as one block
4520-479: Is not recorded as debt and remains largely "off-balance-sheet" has become a major concern. Indeed, keeping the PPP project and its contingent liabilities "off balance sheet" means that the true cost of the project is hidden. According to the International Monetary Fund , economic ownership of the asset should determine whether to record PPP-related assets and liabilities in the government's or
4633-405: Is often useful at the start or end of a large distributed calculation, where each processor operates on a part of the data and then combines it into a result. Other operations perform more sophisticated tasks, such as MPI_Alltoall which rearranges n items of data such that the n th node gets the n th item of data from each. Many MPI functions require that you specify the type of data which
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4746-462: Is responsible, and the Private sector assumes that risk at a cost for the taxpayer. If the value of the risk transfer is appraised too high, then the government is overpaying for P3 projects. Incidentally, a 2018 UK Parliament report underlines that some private investors have made large returns from PPP deals, suggesting that departments are overpaying for transferring the risks of projects to
4859-416: Is sent between processes. This is because MPI aims to support heterogeneous environments where types might be represented differently on the different nodes (for example they might be running different CPU architectures that have different endianness ), in which case MPI implementations can perform data conversion . Since the C language does not allow a type itself to be passed as a parameter, MPI predefines
4972-399: Is significantly faster than passing one item at a time, especially if the operation is to be repeated. This is because fixed-size blocks do not require serialization during transfer. Given the following data structures: Here's the C code for building an MPI-derived data type: MPI-2 defines three one-sided communications operations, MPI_Put , MPI_Get , and MPI_Accumulate , being
5085-480: Is that it is unclear what the catchy term "value-for-money" means in the technical details relating to their practical implementation. A Scottish auditor once qualified this use of the term as "technocratic mumbo-jumbo". Project promoters often contract a PPP unit or one of the Big Four accounting firms to conduct the value for money assessments. Because these firms also offer PPP consultancy services, they have
5198-454: Is that most of the up-front financing is made through the private sector. The way this financing is done differs significantly by country. For P3s in the UK, bonds are used rather than bank loans . In Canada, P3 projects usually use loans that must be repaid within five years, and the projects are refinanced at a later date. In some types of public–private partnership, the cost of using the service
5311-607: Is to collect a chemical library of Sars-COV-2 inhibitors. The MEDIATE portal provides access to a set of small molecules that research can use to start de-novo drug design from a reduced set of molecules. Raloxifene is a known chemical compound used to treat osteoporosis . As a result of drug repositioning experiments, the E4C project identified raloxifene as a possible candidate to treat early-stage COVID-19 patients, aiming to prevent clinical progression. In October 2020, AIFA authorized clinical trials to treat COVID-19 patients, and it
5424-520: Is used to identify hit molecules for the latter stages of the drug discovery pipeline, such as lead optimization and clinical trial . The Exscalate4Cov project was initiated after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. This project aimed to leverage the computational power of EU supercomputers to accelerate the discovery of effective treatments for the coronavirus. By utilizing high-throughput virtual screening, Exscalate4Cov aimed to find faster solutions to
5537-601: The Conservative government of John Major in the United Kingdom introduced the Private finance initiative (PFI), the first systematic program aimed at encouraging public–private partnerships. The 1992 program focused on reducing the public-sector borrowing requirement , although, as already noted, the effect on public accounts was largely illusory. Initially, the private sector was unenthusiastic about PFI, and
5650-506: The locking and disk seek overhead. Due to its vast performance benefits, MPI-IO also became the underlying I/O layer for many state-of-the-art I/O libraries, such as HDF5 and Parallel NetCDF . Its popularity also triggered research on collective I/O optimizations, such as layout-aware I/O and cross-file aggregation. Many other efforts are derivatives of MPICH, LAM, and other works, including, but not limited to, commercial implementations from HPE , Intel , Microsoft , and NEC . While
5763-421: The syntax and semantics of library routines that are useful to a wide range of users writing portable message-passing programs in C , C++ , and Fortran . There are several open-source MPI implementations , which fostered the development of a parallel software industry , and encouraged development of portable and scalable large-scale parallel applications. The message passing interface effort began in
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#17327798404335876-482: The MPI I/O library shows a general behavior of minor performance gain, but these results are inconclusive. It was not until the idea of collective I/O implemented into MPI-IO that MPI-IO started to reach widespread adoption. Collective I/O substantially boosts applications' I/O bandwidth by having processes collectively transform the small and noncontiguous I/O operations into large and contiguous ones, thereby reducing
5989-956: The MPI session. Each communicator gives each contained process an independent identifier and arranges its contained processes in an ordered topology . MPI also has explicit groups, but these are mainly good for organizing and reorganizing groups of processes before another communicator is made. MPI understands single group intracommunicator operations, and bilateral intercommunicator communication. In MPI-1, single group operations are most prevalent. Bilateral operations mostly appear in MPI-2 where they include collective communication and dynamic in-process management. Communicators can be partitioned using several MPI commands. These commands include MPI_COMM_SPLIT , where each process joins one of several colored sub-communicators by declaring itself to have that color. A number of important MPI functions involve communication between two specific processes. A popular example
6102-684: The MPI-2 standard. MPI-3.0 introduces significant updates to the MPI standard, including nonblocking versions of collective operations, enhancements to one-sided operations, and a Fortran 2008 binding. It removes deprecated C++ bindings and various obsolete routines and objects. Importantly, any valid MPI-2.2 program that avoids the removed elements is also valid in MPI-3.0. MPI-3.1 is a minor update focused on corrections and clarifications, particularly for Fortran bindings. It introduces new functions for manipulating MPI_Aint values, nonblocking collective I/O routines, and methods for retrieving index values by name for MPI_T performance variables. Additionally,
6215-882: The SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19, ANTAREX4ZIKA was dedicated to addressing the Zika virus . The ANTAREX4ZIKA project concluded at the end of 2018 and involved a virtual screening campaign on the CINECA Marconi machine, with a total of 10 PetaFLOPS. The ANTAREX project, which stands for AutoTuning and Adaptivity appRoach for Energy efficient eXascale HPC systems, emphasized auto-tuning and energy efficiency of HPC applications, making them more effective in various research scenarios, including drug discovery. The Exscalate4Cov consortium of public-private entities has been coordinated by Dompè, and it involved 17 other institutions, from research centers to universities. Inputs at
6328-569: The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant ASC-9310330, NSF Science and Technology Center Cooperative agreement number CCR-8809615, and from the European Commission through Esprit Project P6643. The University of Tennessee also made financial contributions to the MPI Forum. MPI is a communication protocol for programming parallel computers . Both point-to-point and collective communication are supported. MPI "is
6441-522: The United States and Europe. Most of the major vendors of concurrent computers were involved in the MPI effort, collaborating with researchers from universities, government laboratories, and industry . MPI provides parallel hardware vendors with a clearly defined base set of routines that can be efficiently implemented. As a result, hardware vendors can build upon this collection of standard low-level routines to create higher-level routines for
6554-403: The application level consist of ligands from the chemical space and the protein target of the virtual screening campaign, specifically the spike protein in the case of Exscalate4Cov. Following a molecular docking stage that generates potential ligand conformations, a scoring stage assesses the interaction strength between each ligand's pose and the protein. The pipeline ultimately produces
6667-453: The assessment of PPPs which focused heavily on value for money . Heather Whiteside defines P3 "Value for money" as: Not to be confused with lower overall project costs, value for money is a concept used to evaluate P3 private-partner bids against a hypothetical public sector comparator designed to approximate the costs of a fully public option (in terms of design, construction, financing, and operations). P3 value for money calculations consider
6780-516: The connection of the poor to water and sanitation, water tariffs have increased out of reach of poor households. Water multinationals are withdrawing from developing countries, and the World Bank is reluctant to provide support. Message Passing Interface The Message Passing Interface ( MPI ) is a standardized and portable message-passing standard designed to function on parallel computing architectures . The MPI standard defines
6893-406: The constants MPI_INT , MPI_CHAR , MPI_DOUBLE to correspond with int , char , double , etc. Here is an example in C that passes arrays of int s from all processes to one. The one receiving process is called the "root" process, and it can be any designated process but normally it will be process 0. All the processes ask to send their arrays to the root with MPI_Gather , which
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#17327798404337006-496: The contractor. One of the main criticisms of public–private partnerships is the lack of accountability and transparency associated with these projects. Part of the reason why evidence of PPP performance is often unavailable is that most financial details of P3s are under the veil of commercial confidentiality provisions, and unavailable to researchers and the public. Around the world, opponents of P3s have launched judicial procedures to access greater P3 project documentation than
7119-727: The contractual complexities and rigidities they entail". In the United Kingdom, many private finance initiative programs ran dramatically over budget and have not provided value for money for the taxpayer, with some projects costing more to cancel than to complete. An in-depth study conducted by the National Audit Office of the United Kingdom concluded that the private finance initiative model had proved to be more expensive and less efficient in supporting hospitals, schools, and other public infrastructure than public financing. A treasury select committee stated that 'PFI
7232-413: The cost of the complex scientific laboratory, which was ultimately built, was very much larger than estimated. On the other hand, Allyson Pollock argues that in many PFI projects risks are not in fact transferred to the private sector and, based on the research findings of Pollock and others, George Monbiot argues that the calculation of risk in PFI projects is highly subjective, and is skewed to favor
7345-465: The costs to be larger than what was projected. Another risk within this area is with change of governance from differing political representatives could lead to projects being diminished or reduction of the allocated budget. This is common within PPPs as different political actors are likely to scrutinise their opponents based on their ideological positions. Private monopolies created by PPPs can generate
7458-542: The crisis. Exscalate4Cov's approach involved screening billions of compounds against various protein targets of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, identifying those with a higher binding affinity with the target. The project's objectives were: The Exscalate4Cov project followed the ANTAREX4ZIKA project, both of which aimed to leverage HPC for drug discovery, albeit targeting different viruses. While Exscalate4Cov focused on
7571-427: The distributed-memory communication environment supplied with their parallel machines . MPI provides a simple-to-use portable interface for the basic user, yet one powerful enough to allow programmers to use the high-performance message passing operations available on advanced machines. In an effort to create a universal standard for message passing, researchers did not base it off of a single system but it incorporated
7684-403: The end of the 20th century. They were aimed at increasing the private sector's involvement in public administration . They were seen by governments around the world as a method of financing new or refurbished public sector assets outside their balance sheet . While PPP financing comes from the private sector, these projects are always paid for either through taxes or by users of the service, or
7797-454: The final end of the MPI-1 series in 2008. At present, the standard has several versions: version 1.3 (commonly abbreviated MPI-1 ), which emphasizes message passing and has a static runtime environment, MPI-2.2 (MPI-2), which includes new features such as parallel I/O, dynamic process management and remote memory operations, and MPI-3.1 (MPI-3), which includes extensions to the collective operations with non-blocking versions and extensions to
7910-410: The government of the day appear more fiscally responsible , while offloading the costs of their projects to service users or future governments. In Canada, many auditors general have condemned this practice, and forced governments to include PPP projects "on-balance sheet". On PPP projects where the public sector intends to compensate the private sector through availability payments once the facility
8023-427: The government retains ownership of the facility and/or remains responsible for public service delivery. Others argue that they exist on a continuum of privatization, P3s being a more limited form of privatization than the outright sale of public assets, but more extensive than simply contracting out government services. Because "privatization" has a negative connotation in some circles, supporters of P3s generally take
8136-502: The idea that the private sector is inherently better at managing risk, there has been no comprehensive study comparing risk management by the public sector and by P3s. Auditor Generals of Quebec , Ontario and New Brunswick have publicly questioned P3 rationales based on a transfer of risk, the latter stating he was "unable to develop any substantive evidence supporting risk transfer decisions". Furthermore, many PPP concessions proved to be unstable and required to be renegotiated to favor
8249-473: The interactions between 12 viral proteins of SARS-CoV-2 against 70 billion molecules from the EXSCALATE chemical library. In November 2020, consortium members coordinated one of the largest virtual screening campaigns, harnessing the combined computational power of two supercomputers totaling 81 PFLOPS. The supercomputers used are: The large-scale campaign used a reservation of 800 Marconi100 nodes and 1500 HP5 nodes for 60 hours. Achieving an average throughput
8362-411: The interactions between large datasets of small molecules and a drug target, identifying potential hit candidates. This approach helps in identifying potential hit candidates by predicting how different compounds will bind to the target protein, which will go further in the experimental validation. In an urgent computing scenario, such as a pandemic, where time to solution is critical, virtual screening
8475-549: The interface. It is relatively easy to write multithreaded point-to-point MPI code, and some implementations support such code. Multithreaded collective communication is best accomplished with multiple copies of Communicators, as described below. MPI provides several features. The following concepts provide context for all of those abilities and help the programmer to decide what functionality to use in their application programs. Four of MPI's eight basic concepts are unique to MPI-2. Communicator objects connect groups of processes in
8588-473: The lack of investor rights guarantees, commercial confidentiality laws, and dedicated state spending on public infrastructure in these countries made the implementation of public–private partnership in transition economies difficult. PPPs in the countries usually can't rely on stable revenues from user fees either. The World Bank 's Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Forum attempts to mitigate these challenges. A defining aspect of many infrastructure P3s
8701-419: The limited "bottom line" sheets available on the project's websites. When they are successful, the documents they receive are often heavily redacted. A 2007 survey of U.S. city managers revealed that communities often fail to sufficiently monitor PPPs: "For instance, in 2002, only 47.3% of managers involved with private firms as delivery partners reported that they evaluate that service delivery. By 2007, that
8814-480: The majority of P3 projects in Australia. Wall Street firms have increased their interest in PPP since the 2008 financial crisis. Government sometimes make in kind contributions to a PPP, notably with the transfer of existing assets. In projects that are aimed at creating public goods , like in the infrastructure sector, the government may provide a capital subsidy in the form of a one-time grant so as to make
8927-401: The master sends new task data to a slave whenever the prior task is completed. MPI-1 specifies mechanisms for both blocking and non-blocking point-to-point communication mechanisms, as well as the so-called 'ready-send' mechanism whereby a send request can be made only when the matching receive request has already been made. Collective functions involve communication among all processes in
9040-404: The modern electric grid . In Newfoundland, Robert Gillespie Reid contracted to operate the railways for fifty years from 1898, though originally they were to become his property at the end of the period. The late 20th and early 21st century saw a clear trend toward governments across the globe making greater use of various PPP arrangements. Pressure to change the model of public procurement
9153-510: The most useful features of several systems, including those designed by IBM, Intel , nCUBE , PVM, Express, P4 and PARMACS. The message-passing paradigm is attractive because of wide portability and can be used in communication for distributed-memory and shared-memory multiprocessors, networks of workstations, and a combination of these elements. The paradigm can apply in multiple settings, independent of network speed or memory architecture. Support for MPI meetings came in part from DARPA and from
9266-719: The number of processes in the computing session, current processor identity that a process is mapped to, neighboring processes accessible in a logical topology, and so on. Point-to-point operations come in synchronous , asynchronous , buffered, and ready forms, to allow both relatively stronger and weaker semantics for the synchronization aspects of a rendezvous-send. Many outstanding operations are possible in asynchronous mode, in most implementations. MPI-1 and MPI-2 both enable implementations that overlap communication and computation, but practice and theory differ. MPI also specifies thread safe interfaces, which have cohesion and coupling strategies that help avoid hidden state within
9379-509: The one-sided operations. MPI-2's LIS specifies over 500 functions and provides language bindings for ISO C , ISO C++ , and Fortran 90 . Object interoperability was also added to allow easier mixed-language message passing programming. A side-effect of standardizing MPI-2, completed in 1996, was clarifying the MPI-1 standard, creating the MPI-1.2. MPI-2 is mostly a superset of MPI-1, although some functions have been deprecated. MPI-1.3 programs still work under MPI implementations compliant with
9492-737: The operating stage. These investments can be desirable but may also be undesirable (e.g., when the investments not only reduce operating costs but also reduce service quality). Public infrastructure is a relatively low-risk, high-reward investment, and combining it with complex arrangements and contracts that guarantee and secure the cash flows make PPP projects prime candidates for project financing . The equity investors in SPVs are usually institutional investors such as pension funds, life insurance companies, sovereign wealth and superannuation funds, and banks. Major P3 investors include AustralianSuper , OMERS and Dutch state-owned bank ABN AMRO , which funded
9605-409: The pandemic. Additionally, the large-scale campaign results gained attention from international journals. Public%E2%80%93private partnership Cooperation between private actors, corporations and governments has existed since the inception of sovereign states , notably for the purpose of tax collection and colonization . Contemporary "public–private partnerships" came into being around
9718-430: The position that P3s do not constitute privatization, while P3 opponents argue that they do. The Canadian Union of Public Employees describes P3s as "privatization by stealth". Governments have used such a mix of public and private endeavors throughout history. Muhammad Ali of Egypt utilized " concessions " in the early 1800s to obtain public works for minimal cost while the concessionaires' companies made most of
9831-541: The post-processing step involved 19 nodes over five days. The final output consisted of CSV files containing scores for each input ligand, occupying 69 TB. The resulting dataset, containing 570 million hit compounds, is freely available. The Exscalate4Cov project also conducted drug repositioning experiments. Drug repurposing offers an interesting approach to address unmet clinical needs in case of urgent computing , due to pandemics . Hence, repurposing existing drugs with established safety and toxicology profiles provides
9944-418: The private corporation's balance sheet is not straightforward. The effectiveness of PPPs as cost-saving venture has been refuted by numerous studies. Research has showed that on average, governments pay more for PPPs projects than for traditional publicly financed projects. The higher cost of P3s is attributed to these systemic factors: Sometimes, private partners manage to overcome these costs and provide
10057-492: The private funder. PPPs are closely related to concepts such as privatization and the contracting out of government services. The secrecy surrounding their financial details complexifies the process of evaluating whether PPPs have been successful. PPP advocates highlight the sharing of risk and the development of innovation , while critics decry their higher costs and issues of accountability . Evidence of PPP performance in terms of value for money and efficiency, for example,
10170-610: The private sector, one of the Treasury's stated benefits of PPP. Supporters of P3s claim that risk is successfully transferred from public to private sectors as a result of P3, and that the private sector is better at risk management . As an example of successful risk transfer, they cite the case of the National Physical Laboratory . This deal ultimately caused the collapse of the building contractor Laser (a joint venture between Serco and John Laing ) when
10283-481: The private sector: When private companies take on a PFI project, they are deemed to acquire risks the state would otherwise have carried. These risks carry a price, which proves to be remarkably responsive to the outcome you want. A paper in the British Medical Journal shows that before risk was costed, the hospital schemes it studied would have been built much more cheaply with public funds. After
10396-636: The profits from projects such as railroads and dams. Much of the early infrastructure of the United States was built by what can be considered public–private partnerships. This includes the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike road in Pennsylvania, which was initiated in 1792, an early steamboat line between New York and New Jersey in 1808; many of the railroads, including the nation's first railroad , chartered in New Jersey in 1815; and most of
10509-403: The profits of private entities. PPPs are often structured so that borrowing for the project does not appear on the balance sheet of the public-sector body seeking to make a capital investment. Rather, the borrowing is incurred by the private-sector vehicle implementing the project, with or without an explicit backup guarantee of the loan by the public body. On PPP projects where the cost of using
10622-473: The project economically viable. In other cases, the government may support the project by providing revenue subsidies, including tax breaks or by guaranteed annual revenues for a fixed period. Within public-private partnerships (PPPs), there are various risks associated. One risk common within PPPs is the lack of proper or accurate cost evaluation. Oftentimes the estimated costs of a project will not properly account for delays or unexpected events, leading to
10735-1036: The public sector was opposed to its implementation. In 1993, the Chancellor of the Exchequer described its progress as "disappointingly slow". To help promote and implement the policy, Major created institutions staffed with people linked with the City of London , accountancy and consultancy firms who had a vested interest in the success of PFI. Around the same time, PPPs were being initiated haphazardly in various OECD countries. The first governments to implement them were ideologically neoliberal and short on revenues : they were thus politically and fiscally inclined to try out alternative forms of public procurement. These early PPP projects were usually pitched by wealthy and politically connected business magnates . This explains why each countries experimenting with PPPs started in different sectors . At that time, PPPs were seen as
10848-483: The rate of non-P3 schools. In Ontario, a 2012 review of 28 projects showed that the costs were on average 16% lower for traditional publicly procured projects than for PPPs. A 2014 report by the Auditor General of Ontario said that the province overpaid by $ 8 billion through PPPs. In response to these negative findings about the costs and quality of P3 projects, proponents developed formal procedures for
10961-489: The relationship is contractual, a franchise, or the load shedding of some previously public service to a private or nonprofit entity." A more general term for such agreements is "shared service delivery", in which public-sector entities join with private firms or non-profit organizations to provide services to citizens. There is a semantic debate pertaining to whether public–private partnerships constitute privatization or not. Some argue that it isn't "privatization" because
11074-494: The risk was costed, they all tipped the other way; in several cases by less than 0.1%. Following an incident in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh where surgeons were forced to continue a heart operation in the dark following a power cut caused by PFI operating company Consort, Dave Watson from Unison criticized the way the PFI contract operates: It's a costly and inefficient way of delivering services. It's meant to mean
11187-462: The same level is the libdpipe library, which facilitates scaling across multi-node and cores. To hinge the computational power offered by HPC centers, the docking platform uses MPI to scale multi-node and CUDA acceleration to take advantage of supercomputer's GPUs. The CUDA version has undergone various optimizations, including OpenACC , OpenMP , and other techniques, to enhance performance and efficiency. The project's main experiment evaluated
11300-441: The service is intended to be borne exclusively by the end-user, or through a lease billed to the government every year during the operation phase of the project, the PPP is, from the public sector's perspective, an " off-balance sheet " method of financing the delivery of new or refurbished public-sector assets. This justification was particularly important during the 1990s, but has been exposed as an accounting trick designed to make
11413-414: The services is borne wholly or in part by the government. Typically, a private-sector consortium forms a special company called a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) to develop, build, maintain, and operate the asset for the contracted period. In cases where the government has invested in the project, it is typically (but not always) allotted an equity share in the SPV. The consortium is usually made up of
11526-507: The specifications mandate a C and Fortran interface, the language used to implement MPI is not constrained to match the language or languages it seeks to support at runtime. Most implementations combine C, C++ and assembly language, and target C, C++, and Fortran programmers. Bindings are available for many other languages, including Perl, Python, R, Ruby, Java, and CL (see #Language bindings ). The ABI of MPI implementations are roughly split between MPICH and Open MPI derivatives, so that
11639-556: The standard model of public procurement based on competitively tendered construction of publicly owned assets. In 2009, the New Zealand Treasury , in response to inquiries by the new National Party government, released a report on PPP schemes that concluded that "there is little reliable empirical evidence about the costs and benefits of PPPs" and that there "are other ways of obtaining private sector finance", as well as that "the advantages of PPPs must be weighed against
11752-518: The standardization process. Jack Dongarra , Tony Hey , and David W. Walker put forward a preliminary draft proposal, "MPI1", in November 1992. In November 1992 a meeting of the MPI working group took place in Minneapolis and decided to place the standardization process on a more formal footing. The MPI working group met every 6 weeks throughout the first 9 months of 1993. The draft MPI standard
11865-535: The summer of 1991 when a small group of researchers started discussions at a mountain retreat in Austria. Out of that discussion came a Workshop on Standards for Message Passing in a Distributed Memory Environment, held on April 29–30, 1992 in Williamsburg, Virginia . Attendees at Williamsburg discussed the basic features essential to a standard message-passing interface and established a working group to continue
11978-435: The transport layer. Most MPI implementations consist of a specific set of routines directly callable from C , C++ , Fortran (i.e., an API) and any language able to interface with such libraries, including C# , Java or Python . The advantages of MPI over older message passing libraries are portability (because MPI has been implemented for almost every distributed memory architecture) and speed (because each implementation
12091-466: Was 2400 ligands per second (lig/s) on Marconi100 and 2000 lig/s on HPC5. Another critical aspect of the experiment was data storage management. The platform leveraged efficient MPI I/O operations to handle multi-node computations. The input data required 3.3 TB of space in SMILES format. However, SMILES data needed to be expanded in a pre-processing step involving 100 nodes over five days. Similarly,
12204-427: Was associated with the neoliberal turn. Instigators of the policy portrayed PPPs as a solution to concerns about the growing level of public debt during the 1970s and 1980s. They sought to encourage private investment in infrastructure , initially on the basis of ideology and accounting fallacies arising from the fact that public accounts did not distinguish between recurrent and capital expenditures. In 1992,
12317-631: Was coordinated by Dompé Farmaceutici and involved 17 participants. It was part of the Horizon 2020 SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Health, demographic change and well-being founding funding . The project conducted one of the largest virtual screening and drug repositioning experiments, identifying a potentially effective molecule against SARS-CoV-2 . Drug discovery can be a long and costly process, often taking years and requiring substantial financial investment. Pharmaceutical companies have large datasets of chemical compounds , which they test against
12430-439: Was down to 45.4%. Performance monitoring is a general concern from these surveys and in the scholarly criticisms of these arrangements." After a wave of privatization of many water services in the 1990s, mostly in developing countries, experiences show that global water corporations have not brought the promised improvements in public water utilities. Instead of lower prices, large volumes of investment, and improvements in
12543-454: Was no more efficient than other forms of borrowing and it was "illusory" that it shielded the taxpayer from risk'. One of the main rationales for P3s is that they provide for a transfer of risk : the Private partner assumes the risks in case of cost overruns or project failures. Methods for assessing value-for-money rely heavily on risk transfers to show the superiority of P3s. However, P3s do not inherently reduce risk, they simply reassign who
12656-551: Was presented at the Supercomputing '93 conference in November 1993. After a period of public comments, which resulted in some changes in MPI, version 1.0 of MPI was released in June 1994. These meetings and the email discussion together constituted the MPI Forum, membership of which has been open to all members of the high-performance-computing community. The MPI effort involved about 80 people from 40 organizations, mainly in
12769-531: Was to promote and implement PFI. PUK was central in making PPPs the "new normal" for public infrastructure procurements in the country. Multiple countries subsequently created similar PPP units based on PUK's model. While initiated in first world countries , PPPs immediately received significant attention in developing countries . This is because the PPP model promised to bring new sources of funding for infrastructure projects in transition economies , which could translate into jobs and economic growth . However,
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