The system architecture of the Pocket Companion

In the Moby Dick project we design the architecture of a so-called Pocket Companion. It is a small personal portable computer with wireless communication facilities for every day use. The typical use of the Pocket Companion induces a number of requirements concerning security, performance, energy consumption, communication and size. We have shown that these requirements are interrelated and can only be met optimal with one single architecture. The Pocket Companion architecture consists of a central switch with a security module surrounded by several modules. The Pocket Companion is a personal machine. Communication, and particularly wireless communication, is essential for the system to support electronic transactions. Such a system requires a good security infrastructure not only for safeguarding personal data, but also to allow safe (financial) transactions. The integration of a security module in the Pocket Companion architecture provides the basis for a secure environment.\ud Because battery life is limited and battery weight is an important factor for the size and the weight of the Pocket Companion, energy consumption plays a crucial role in the architecture. An important theme of the architecture is: enough performance for minimal energy consumption

Large scale ab initio calculations based on three levels of parallelization

We suggest and implement a parallelization scheme based on an efficient multiband eigenvalue solver, called the locally optimal block preconditioned conjugate gradient LOBPCG method, and using an optimized three-dimensional (3D) fast Fourier transform (FFT) in the ab initio}plane-wave code ABINIT. In addition to the standard data partitioning over processors corresponding to different k-points, we introduce data partitioning with respect to blocks of bands as well as spatial partitioning in the Fourier space of coefficients over the plane waves basis set used in ABINIT. This k-points-multiband-FFT parallelization avoids any collective communications on the whole set of processors relying instead on one-dimensional communications only. For a single k-point, super-linear scaling is achieved for up to 100 processors due to an extensive use of hardware optimized BLAS, LAPACK, and SCALAPACK routines, mainly in the LOBPCG routine. We observe good performance up to 200 processors. With 10 k-points our three-way data partitioning results in linear scaling up to 1000 processors for a practical system used for testing.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to Computational Material Scienc

GraXML - Modular Geometric Modeler

Many entities managed by HEP Software Frameworks represent spatial (3-dimensional) real objects. Effective definition, manipulation and visualization of such objects is an indispensable functionality. GraXML is a modular Geometric Modeling toolkit capable of processing geometric data of various kinds (detector geometry, event geometry) from different sources and delivering them in ways suitable for further use. Geometric data are first modeled in one of the Generic Models. Those Models are then used to populate powerful Geometric Model based on the Java3D technology. While Java3D has been originally created just to provide visualization of 3D objects, its light weight and high functionality allow an effective reuse as a general geometric component. This is possible also thanks to a large overlap between graphical and general geometric functionality and modular design of Java3D itself. Its graphical functionalities also allow a natural visualization of all manipulated elements. All these techniques have been developed primarily (or only) for the Java environment. It is, however, possible to interface them transparently to Frameworks built in other languages, like for example C++. The GraXML toolkit has been tested with data from several sources, as for example ATLAS and ALICE detector description and ATLAS event data. Prototypes for other sources, like Geometry Description Markup Language (GDML) exist too and interface to any other source is easy to add.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003. PSN THJT00

Two-level pipelined systolic array graphics engine

The authors report a VLSI design of an advanced systolic array graphics (SAG) engine built from pipelined functional units which can generate realistic images interactively for high-resolution displays. They introduce a structured frame store system as an environment for the advanced SAG engine and present the principles and architecture of the advanced SAG engine. They introduce pipelined functional units into this SAG engine to meet the performance requirements. This is done by a formal approach where the original systolic array is represented at bit level by a finite, vertex-weighted, edge-weighted, directed graph. Two architectures built from pipelined functional units are described. A prototype containing nine processing elements was fabricated in a 1.6-¿m CMOS technolog

Reconfigurable Mobile Multimedia Systems

This paper discusses reconfigurability issues in lowpower hand-held multimedia systems, with particular emphasis on energy conservation. We claim that a radical new approach has to be taken in order to fulfill the requirements - in terms of processing power and energy consumption - of future mobile applications. A reconfigurable systems-architecture in combination with a QoS driven operating system is introduced that can deal with the inherent dynamics of a mobile system. We present the preliminary results of studies we have done on reconfiguration in hand-held mobile computers: by having reconfigurable media streams, by using reconfigurable processing modules and by migrating functions

Adaptive antenna system by ESP32-PICO-D4 and its application to web radio system

Adaptive antenna technique has an important role in the IoT environment in order to establish reliable and stable wireless communication in high congestion situation. Even if knowing antenna characteristics in advance, electromagnetic wave propagation in the non-line-of-sight environment is very complex and unpredictable, therefore, the adjustment the antenna radiation for the optimum signal reception is important for the better wireless link. This article presents a simple but effective adaptive antenna system for Wi-Fi utilizing the function of a highly integrated component, ESP32-PICO-D4. This chip is a system-in-chip containing all components for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth application except for antenna. Together with SP3T RF switch and dielectric antennas and high-resolution audio DAC, completed web-radio system is made in the size of 50 x 50 mm.Comment: This article is submitted for Hardware

Janus II: a new generation application-driven computer for spin-system simulations

This paper describes the architecture, the development and the implementation of Janus II, a new generation application-driven number cruncher optimized for Monte Carlo simulations of spin systems (mainly spin glasses). This domain of computational physics is a recognized grand challenge of high-performance computing: the resources necessary to study in detail theoretical models that can make contact with experimental data are by far beyond those available using commodity computer systems. On the other hand, several specific features of the associated algorithms suggest that unconventional computer architectures, which can be implemented with available electronics technologies, may lead to order of magnitude increases in performance, reducing to acceptable values on human scales the time needed to carry out simulation campaigns that would take centuries on commercially available machines. Janus II is one such machine, recently developed and commissioned, that builds upon and improves on the successful JANUS machine, which has been used for physics since 2008 and is still in operation today. This paper describes in detail the motivations behind the project, the computational requirements, the architecture and the implementation of this new machine and compares its expected performances with those of currently available commercial systems.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figure