Recent Advances in Embedded Computing, Intelligence and Applications

The latest proliferation of Internet of Things deployments and edge computing combined with artificial intelligence has led to new exciting application scenarios, where embedded digital devices are essential enablers. Moreover, new powerful and efficient devices are appearing to cope with workloads formerly reserved for the cloud, such as deep learning. These devices allow processing close to where data are generated, avoiding bottlenecks due to communication limitations. The efficient integration of hardware, software and artificial intelligence capabilities deployed in real sensing contexts empowers the edge intelligence paradigm, which will ultimately contribute to the fostering of the offloading processing functionalities to the edge. In this Special Issue, researchers have contributed nine peer-reviewed papers covering a wide range of topics in the area of edge intelligence. Among them are hardware-accelerated implementations of deep neural networks, IoT platforms for extreme edge computing, neuro-evolvable and neuromorphic machine learning, and embedded recommender systems

Runtime scheduling and updating for deep learning applications

Recent decades have witnessed the breakthrough of deep learning algorithms, which have been widely used in many areas. Typically, deployment of deep learning applications consists of compute-intensive training and latency-sensitive inference. To support deep learning applications, enterprises build large-scale computing clusters composed of expensive accelerators, such as GPUs, FPGAs or other domain-specific ASICs. However, it is challenging for deep learning applications to achieve high resource utilization and maintain high accuracy in the face of dynamic workloads. On the one hand, the workload of deep learning tasks always changes over time, which leads to a gap between the required resources and statically allocated resources. On the other hand, the distribution of input data may also change over time, and the accuracy of inference could decrease before updating the model. In this thesis, we present a new deep learning system architecture which can schedule and update deep learning applications at runtime to efficiently handle dynamic workloads. We identify and study three key components. (i) PipeSwitch: A deep learning system that allows multiple deep learning applications to time-share the same GPU with the entire GPU memory and millisecond-scale switching overhead. PipeSwitch enables unused cycles of inference applications to be dynamically filled by training or other inference applications. With PipeSwitch, GPU utilization can be significantly improved without sacrificing service level objectives. (ii) DistMind: A disaggregated deep learning system that enables efficient multiplexing of deep learning applications with near-optimal resource utilization. DistMind decouples compute from host memory, and exposes the abstractions of a GPU pool and a memory pool, each of which can be independently provisioned and dynamically allocated to deep learning tasks. (iii) RegexNet: A payload-based, automated, reactive recovery system for web services under regular expression denial of service attacks. RegexNet adopts a deep learning model, which is updated constantly in a feedback loop during runtime, to classify payloads of upcoming HTTP requests. We have built system prototypes for these components, and integrated them with existing software. Our evaluation on a variety of environments and configurations shows the benefits of our solution

Tracking the Temporal-Evolution of Supernova Bubbles in Numerical Simulations

The study of low-dimensional, noisy manifolds embedded in a higher dimensional space has been extremely useful in many applications, from the chemical analysis of multi-phase flows to simulations of galactic mergers. Building a probabilistic model of the manifolds has helped in describing their essential properties and how they vary in space. However, when the manifold is evolving through time, a joint spatio-temporal modelling is needed, in order to fully comprehend its nature. We propose a first-order Markovian process that propagates the spatial probabilistic model of a manifold at fixed time, to its adjacent temporal stages. The proposed methodology is demonstrated using a particle simulation of an interacting dwarf galaxy to describe the evolution of a cavity generated by a Supernov