In the wake of electric power system transition towards smart grids, and the adoption of the electric market schemes, electric utilities are facing the need of a better load profiles understanding for their customers. In this work, some key objectives were addresses, such as definition of the mathematical model for calculating the hourly energy specific, identification of the three target groups for users who have developed consumer profiles, definition of the two types of significant load and assessment of the impact of using consumer profiles on users.

Nowadays, the paradigm of parallel computing is changing. CUDA is now a popular programming model for general purpose computations on GPUs and a great number of applications were ported to CUDA obtaining speedups of orders of magnitude comparing to optimized CPU implementations. Hybrid approaches that combine the message passing model with the shared memory model for parallel computing are a solution for very large applications. We considered a heterogeneous cluster that combines the CPU and GPU computations using MPI and CUDA for developing a high performance linear algebra library. Our library deals with large linear systems solvers because they are a common problem in the fields of science and engineering. Direct methods for computing the solution of such systems can be very expensive due to high memory requirements and computational cost. An efficient alternative are iterative methods which computes only an approximation of the solution. In this paper we present an implementation of a library that uses a hybrid model of computation using MPI and CUDA implementing both direct and iterative linear systems solvers. Our library implements LU and Cholesky factorization based solvers and some of the non-stationary iterative methods using the MPI/CUDA combination. We compared the performance of our MPI/CUDA implementation with classic programs written to be run on a single CPU.

Identifying the consumers' attitude towards television/radio/press advertising is especially important, a fact which is highlighted by national and international speciality literature. The attitude of the consumer towards a television commercial influences the attitude to wards the promoted product or brand. Thus, a positive attitude towards the commercial for a brand determines a positive attitude towards the respective brand and, eventually, may result in the formulation of the purchase intent. It is hard to say which aspects of advertising have the greatest influence on the formation of consumer attitudes and purchase intent formulation, but not impossible to find out. In this context, through this study, we aim at contributing to the determination of the consumers' attitude towards televised advertising aimed at promoting food products.

Higher education has a key role in the new knowledge society. In Europe there are over 4,000 higher education institutions of which 3300 are in EU27 countries and over 20 million students. EU countries' governments and higher education institutions are in a continuous process of finding ways to create better conditions for studies considering the very important role that higher education plays in the economic development of a country. This article presents an overview of the main statistical indicators which monitors achievements in higher education in EU27 countries during 2011 and 2012, revealing large differences still exist between the EU27.