Exploiting partial reconfiguration through PCIe for a microphone array network emulator

The current Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) technology enables the deployment of relatively low-cost wireless sensor networks composed of MEMS microphone arrays for accurate sound source localization. However, the evaluation and the selection of the most accurate and power-efficient network’s topology are not trivial when considering dynamic MEMS microphone arrays. Although software simulators are usually considered, they consist of high-computational intensive tasks, which require hours to days to be completed. In this paper, we present an FPGA-based platform to emulate a network of microphone arrays. Our platform provides a controlled simulated acoustic environment, able to evaluate the impact of different network configurations such as the number of microphones per array, the network’s topology, or the used detection method. Data fusion techniques, combining the data collected by each node, are used in this platform. The platform is designed to exploit the FPGA’s partial reconfiguration feature to increase the flexibility of the network emulator as well as to increase performance thanks to the use of the PCI-express high-bandwidth interface. On the one hand, the network emulator presents a higher flexibility by partially reconfiguring the nodes’ architecture in runtime. On the other hand, a set of strategies and heuristics to properly use partial reconfiguration allows the acceleration of the emulation by exploiting the execution parallelism. Several experiments are presented to demonstrate some of the capabilities of our platform and the benefits of using partial reconfiguration

FPGA based remote code integrity verification of programs in distributed embedded systems

The explosive growth of networked embedded systems has made ubiquitous and pervasive computing a reality. However, there are still a number of new challenges to its widespread adoption that include scalability, availability, and, especially, security of software. Among the different challenges in software security, the problem of remote-code integrity verification is still waiting for efficient solutions. This paper proposes the use of reconfigurable computing to build a consistent architecture for generation of attestations (proofs) of code integrity for an executing program as well as to deliver them to the designated verification entity. Remote dynamic update of reconfigurable devices is also exploited to increase the complexity of mounting attacks in a real-word environment. The proposed solution perfectly fits embedded devices that are nowadays commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware components that are exploited to solve different computational problems

Towards a Holistic CAD Platform for Nanotechnologies

Silicon-based CMOS technologies are predicted to reach their ultimate limits by the middle of the next decade. Research on nanotechnologies is actively conducted, in a world-wide effort to develop new technologies able to maintain the Moore's law. They promise revolutionizing the computing systems by integrating tremendous numbers of devices at low cost. These trends will have a profound impact on the architectures of computing systems and will require a new paradigm of CAD. The paper presents a work in progress on this direction. It is aimed at fitting requirements and constraints of nanotechnologies, in an effort to achieve efficient use of the huge computing power promised by them. To achieve this goal we are developing CAD tools able to exploit efficiently these huge computing capabilities promised by nanotechnologies in the domain of simulation of complex systems composed by huge numbers of relatively simple elements.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

HW implementation of an execution manager for reconfigurable systems

Reconfigurable HW can be used to build a hardware multitasking system where tasks can be assigned to the reconfigurable HW at run-time according to the requirements of the running applications. Normally the execution in this kind of systems is controlled by an embedded processor. In these systems tasks are frequently represented as subtask graphs, where a subtask is the basic scheduling unit that can be assigned to a reconfigurable HW. In order to control the execution of these tasks, the processor must manage at run-time complex data structures, like graphs or linked list, which may generate significant execution-time penalties. In addition, HW/SW communications are frequently a system bottleneck. Hence, it is very interesting to find a way to reduce the run-time SW computations and the HW/SW communications. To this end we have developed a HW execution manager that controls the execution of subtask graphs over a set of reconfigurable units. This manager receives as input a subtask graph coupled to a subtask schedule, and guarantees its proper execution. In addition it includes support to reduce the execution-time overhead due to reconfigurations. With this HW support the execution of task graphs can be managed efficiently generating only very small run-time penalties

Rewiring strategies for changing environments

A typical pervasive application executes in a changing environment: people, computing resources, software services and network connections come and go continuously. A robust pervasive application needs adapt to this changing context as long as there is an appropriate rewiring strategy that guarantees correct behavior. We combine the MERODE modeling methodology with the ReWiRe framework for creating interactive pervasive applications that can cope with changing environments. The core of our approach is a consistent environment model, which is essential to create (re)configurable context-aware pervasive applications. We aggregate different ontologies that provide the required semantics to describe almost any target environment. We present a case study that shows a interactive pervasive application for media access that incorporates parental control on media content and can migrate between devices. The application builds upon models of the run-time environment represented as system states for dedicated rewiring strategies