Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

A Design Methodology for Space-Time Adapter

This paper presents a solution to efficiently explore the design space of communication adapters. In most digital signal processing (DSP) applications, the overall architecture of the system is significantly affected by communication architecture, so the designers need specifically optimized adapters. By explicitly modeling these communications within an effective graph-theoretic model and analysis framework, we automatically generate an optimized architecture, named Space-Time AdapteR (STAR). Our design flow inputs a C description of Input/Output data scheduling, and user requirements (throughput, latency, parallelism...), and formalizes communication constraints through a Resource Constraints Graph (RCG). The RCG properties enable an efficient architecture space exploration in order to synthesize a STAR component. The proposed approach has been tested to design an industrial data mixing block example: an Ultra-Wideband interleaver.Comment: ISBN : 978-1-59593-606-

Using MCD-DVS for dynamic thermal management performance improvement

With chip temperature being a major hurdle in microprocessor design, techniques to recover the performance loss due to thermal emergency mechanisms are crucial in order to sustain performance growth. Many techniques for power reduction in the past and some on thermal management more recently have contributed to alleviate this problem. Probably the most important thermal control technique is dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVS) which allows for almost cubic reduction in power with worst-case performance penalty only linear. So far, DVS techniques for temperature control have been studied at the chip level. Finer grain DVS is feasible if a globally-asynchronous locally-synchronous (GALS) design style is employed. GALS, also known as multiple-clock domain (MCD), allows for an independent voltage and frequency control for each one of the clock domains that are part of the chip. There are several studies on DVS for GALS that aim to improve energy and power efficiency but not temperature. This paper proposes and analyses the usage of DVS at the domain level to control temperature in a clustered MCD microarchitecture with the goal of improving the performance of applications that do not meet the thermal constraints imposed by the designers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Steps to an advanced Ada programming environment

Conceptual simplicity, tight coupling of tools, and effective support of host-target software development will characterize advanced Ada programming support environments. Several important principles have been demonstrated in the Arcturus system, including template-assisted Ada editing, command completion using Ada as a command language, and combining the advantages of interpretation and compliation. Other principles, relating to analysis, testing, and debugging of concurrent Ada programs, have appeared in other contexts. This paper discusses several of these topics, considers how they can be integrated, and argues for their inclusion in an environment appropriate for software development in the late 1980's

Photon temporal modes: a complete framework for quantum information science

Field-orthogonal temporal modes of photonic quantum states provide a new framework for quantum information science (QIS). They intrinsically span a high-dimensional Hilbert space and lend themselves to integration into existing single-mode fiber communication networks. We show that the three main requirements to construct a valid framework for QIS -- the controlled generation of resource states, the targeted and highly efficient manipulation of temporal modes and their efficient detection -- can be fulfilled with current technology. We suggest implementations of diverse QIS applications based on this complete set of building blocks.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figure

BRAHMS: Novel middleware for integrated systems computation

Biological computational modellers are becoming increasingly interested in building large, eclectic models, including components on many different computational substrates, both biological and non-biological. At the same time, the rise of the philosophy of embodied modelling is generating a need to deploy biological models as controllers for robots in real-world environments. Finally, robotics engineers are beginning to find value in seconding biomimetic control strategies for use on practical robots. Together with the ubiquitous desire to make good on past software development effort, these trends are throwing up new challenges of intellectual and technological integration (for example across scales, across disciplines, and even across time) - challenges that are unmet by existing software frameworks. Here, we outline these challenges in detail, and go on to describe a newly developed software framework, BRAHMS. that meets them. BRAHMS is a tool for integrating computational process modules into a viable, computable system: its generality and flexibility facilitate integration across barriers, such as those described above, in a coherent and effective way. We go on to describe several cases where BRAHMS has been successfully deployed in practical situations. We also show excellent performance in comparison with a monolithic development approach. Additional benefits of developing in the framework include source code self-documentation, automatic coarse-grained parallelisation, cross-language integration, data logging, performance monitoring, and will include dynamic load-balancing and 'pause and continue' execution. BRAHMS is built on the nascent, and similarly general purpose, model markup language, SystemML. This will, in future, also facilitate repeatability and accountability (same answers ten years from now), transparent automatic software distribution, and interfacing with other SystemML tools. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved