5,367 research outputs found
HERO: Heterogeneous Embedded Research Platform for Exploring RISC-V Manycore Accelerators on FPGA
Heterogeneous embedded systems on chip (HESoCs) co-integrate a standard host
processor with programmable manycore accelerators (PMCAs) to combine
general-purpose computing with domain-specific, efficient processing
capabilities. While leading companies successfully advance their HESoC
products, research lags behind due to the challenges of building a prototyping
platform that unites an industry-standard host processor with an open research
PMCA architecture. In this work we introduce HERO, an FPGA-based research
platform that combines a PMCA composed of clusters of RISC-V cores, implemented
as soft cores on an FPGA fabric, with a hard ARM Cortex-A multicore host
processor. The PMCA architecture mapped on the FPGA is silicon-proven,
scalable, configurable, and fully modifiable. HERO includes a complete software
stack that consists of a heterogeneous cross-compilation toolchain with support
for OpenMP accelerator programming, a Linux driver, and runtime libraries for
both host and PMCA. HERO is designed to facilitate rapid exploration on all
software and hardware layers: run-time behavior can be accurately analyzed by
tracing events, and modifications can be validated through fully automated hard
ware and software builds and executed tests. We demonstrate the usefulness of
HERO by means of case studies from our research
Towards a Scalable Hardware/Software Co-Design Platform for Real-time Pedestrian Tracking Based on a ZYNQ-7000 Device
Currently, most designers face a daunting task to
research different design flows and learn the intricacies of
specific software from various manufacturers in
hardware/software co-design. An urgent need of creating a
scalable hardware/software co-design platform has become a key
strategic element for developing hardware/software integrated
systems. In this paper, we propose a new design flow for building
a scalable co-design platform on FPGA-based system-on-chip.
We employ an integrated approach to implement a histogram
oriented gradients (HOG) and a support vector machine (SVM)
classification on a programmable device for pedestrian tracking.
Not only was hardware resource analysis reported, but the
precision and success rates of pedestrian tracking on nine open
access image data sets are also analysed. Finally, our proposed
design flow can be used for any real-time image processingrelated
products on programmable ZYNQ-based embedded
systems, which benefits from a reduced design time and provide a
scalable solution for embedded image processing products
dReDBox: Materializing a full-stack rack-scale system prototype of a next-generation disaggregated datacenter
Current datacenters are based on server machines, whose mainboard and hardware components form the baseline, monolithic building block that the rest of the system software, middleware and application stack are built upon. This leads to the following limitations: (a) resource proportionality of a multi-tray system is bounded by the basic building block (mainboard), (b) resource allocation to processes or virtual machines (VMs) is bounded by the available resources within the boundary of the mainboard, leading to spare resource fragmentation and inefficiencies, and (c) upgrades must be applied to each and every server even when only a specific component needs to be upgraded. The dRedBox project (Disaggregated Recursive Datacentre-in-a-Box) addresses the above limitations, and proposes the next generation, low-power, across form-factor datacenters, departing from the paradigm of the mainboard-as-a-unit and enabling the creation of function-block-as-a-unit. Hardware-level disaggregation and software-defined wiring of resources is supported by a full-fledged Type-1 hypervisor that can execute commodity virtual machines, which communicate over a low-latency and high-throughput software-defined optical network. To evaluate its novel approach, dRedBox will demonstrate application execution in the domains of network functions virtualization, infrastructure analytics, and real-time video surveillance.This work has been supported in part by EU H2020 ICTproject dRedBox, contract #687632.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Improving performance guarantees in wormhole mesh NoC designs
Wormhole-based mesh Networks-on-Chip (wNoC) are deployed in high-performance many-core processors due to their physical scalability and low-cost. Delivering tight and time composable Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) estimates for applications as needed in safety-critical real-time embedded systems is challenged by wNoCs due to their distributed nature. We propose a bandwidth control mechanism for wNoCs that enables the computation of tight time-composable WCET estimates with low average performance degradation and high scalability. Our evaluation
with the EEMBC automotive suite and an industrial real-time parallel avionics application confirms so.The research leading to these results is funded by the European Union Seventh
Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 287519 (parMERASA)
and by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain under contract TIN2012-34557. Milos Panic is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education under the FPU grant FPU12/05966. Carles Hernández is jointly funded by the
Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER funds through
grant TIN2014-60404-JIN. Jaume Abella is partially supported by the Ministry
of Economy and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship
number RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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