150 research outputs found
Modern computing: Vision and challenges
Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by technological advancements, computer systems, far from being static, have been continuously evolving and adapting to cover multifaceted societal niches. This has led to new paradigms such as cloud, fog, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT), which offer fresh economic and creative opportunities. Nevertheless, this rapid change poses complex research challenges, especially in maximizing potential and enhancing functionality. As such, to maintain an economical level of performance that meets ever-tighter requirements, one must understand the drivers of new model emergence and expansion, and how contemporary challenges differ from past ones. To that end, this article investigates and assesses the factors influencing the evolution of computing systems, covering established systems and architectures as well as newer developments, such as serverless computing, quantum computing, and on-device AI on edge devices. Trends emerge when one traces technological trajectory, which includes the rapid obsolescence of frameworks due to business and technical constraints, a move towards specialized systems and models, and varying approaches to centralized and decentralized control. This comprehensive review of modern computing systems looks ahead to the future of research in the field, highlighting key challenges and emerging trends, and underscoring their importance in cost-effectively driving technological progress
La traduzione specializzata all’opera per una piccola impresa in espansione: la mia esperienza di internazionalizzazione in cinese di Bioretics© S.r.l.
Global markets are currently immersed in two all-encompassing and unstoppable processes: internationalization and globalization. While the former pushes companies to look beyond the borders of their country of origin to forge relationships with foreign trading partners, the latter fosters the standardization in all countries, by reducing spatiotemporal distances and breaking down geographical, political, economic and socio-cultural barriers. In recent decades, another domain has appeared to propel these unifying drives: Artificial Intelligence, together with its high technologies aiming to implement human cognitive abilities in machinery. The “Language Toolkit – Le lingue straniere al servizio dell’internazionalizzazione dell’impresa” project, promoted by the Department of Interpreting and Translation (Forlì Campus) in collaboration with the Romagna Chamber of Commerce (Forlì-Cesena and Rimini), seeks to help Italian SMEs make their way into the global market. It is precisely within this project that this dissertation has been conceived. Indeed, its purpose is to present the translation and localization project from English into Chinese of a series of texts produced by Bioretics© S.r.l.: an investor deck, the company website and part of the installation and use manual of the Aliquis© framework software, its flagship product. This dissertation is structured as follows: Chapter 1 presents the project and the company in detail; Chapter 2 outlines the internationalization and globalization processes and the Artificial Intelligence market both in Italy and in China; Chapter 3 provides the theoretical foundations for every aspect related to Specialized Translation, including website localization; Chapter 4 describes the resources and tools used to perform the translations; Chapter 5 proposes an analysis of the source texts; Chapter 6 is a commentary on translation strategies and choices
Blending the Material and Digital World for Hybrid Interfaces
The development of digital technologies in the 21st century is progressing continuously and new device classes such as tablets, smartphones or smartwatches are finding their way into our everyday lives. However, this development also poses problems, as these prevailing touch and gestural interfaces often lack tangibility, take little account of haptic qualities and therefore require full attention from their users. Compared to traditional tools and analog interfaces, the human skills to experience and manipulate material in its natural environment and context remain unexploited. To combine the best of both, a key question is how it is possible to blend the material world and digital world to design and realize novel hybrid interfaces in a meaningful way. Research on Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) investigates the coupling between physical objects and virtual data. In contrast, hybrid interfaces, which specifically aim to digitally enrich analog artifacts of everyday work, have not yet been sufficiently researched and systematically discussed.
Therefore, this doctoral thesis rethinks how user interfaces can provide useful digital functionality while maintaining their physical properties and familiar patterns of use in the real world. However, the development of such hybrid interfaces raises overarching research questions about the design: Which kind of physical interfaces are worth exploring? What type of digital enhancement will improve existing interfaces? How can hybrid interfaces retain their physical properties while enabling new digital functions? What are suitable methods to explore different design? And how to support technology-enthusiast users in prototyping?
For a systematic investigation, the thesis builds on a design-oriented, exploratory and iterative development process using digital fabrication methods and novel materials. As a main contribution, four specific research projects are presented that apply and discuss different visual and interactive augmentation principles along real-world applications. The applications range from digitally-enhanced paper, interactive cords over visual watch strap extensions to novel prototyping tools for smart garments. While almost all of them integrate visual feedback and haptic input, none of them are built on rigid, rectangular pixel screens or use standard input modalities, as they all aim to reveal new design approaches. The dissertation shows how valuable it can be to rethink familiar, analog applications while thoughtfully extending them digitally. Finally, this thesis’ extensive work of engineering versatile research platforms is accompanied by overarching conceptual work, user evaluations and technical experiments, as well as literature reviews.Die Durchdringung digitaler Technologien im 21. Jahrhundert schreitet stetig voran und neue Geräteklassen wie Tablets, Smartphones oder Smartwatches erobern unseren Alltag. Diese Entwicklung birgt aber auch Probleme, denn die vorherrschenden berührungsempfindlichen Oberflächen berücksichtigen kaum haptische Qualitäten und erfordern daher die volle Aufmerksamkeit ihrer Nutzer:innen. Im Vergleich zu traditionellen Werkzeugen und analogen Schnittstellen bleiben die menschlichen Fähigkeiten ungenutzt, die Umwelt mit allen Sinnen zu begreifen und wahrzunehmen. Um das Beste aus beiden Welten zu vereinen, stellt sich daher die Frage, wie neuartige hybride Schnittstellen sinnvoll gestaltet und realisiert werden können, um die materielle und die digitale Welt zu verschmelzen. In der Forschung zu Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) wird die Verbindung zwischen physischen Objekten und virtuellen Daten untersucht. Noch nicht ausreichend erforscht wurden hingegen hybride Schnittstellen, die speziell darauf abzielen, physische Gegenstände des Alltags digital zu erweitern und anhand geeigneter Designparameter und Entwurfsräume systematisch zu untersuchen.
In dieser Dissertation wird daher untersucht, wie Materialität und Digitalität nahtlos ineinander übergehen können. Es soll erforscht werden, wie künftige Benutzungsschnittstellen nützliche digitale Funktionen bereitstellen können, ohne ihre physischen Eigenschaften und vertrauten Nutzungsmuster in der realen Welt zu verlieren. Die Entwicklung solcher hybriden Ansätze wirft jedoch übergreifende Forschungsfragen zum Design auf: Welche Arten von physischen Schnittstellen sind es wert, betrachtet zu werden? Welche Art von digitaler Erweiterung verbessert das Bestehende? Wie können hybride Konzepte ihre physischen Eigenschaften beibehalten und gleichzeitig neue digitale Funktionen ermöglichen? Was sind geeignete Methoden, um verschiedene Designs zu erforschen? Wie kann man Technologiebegeisterte bei der Erstellung von Prototypen unterstützen?
Für eine systematische Untersuchung stützt sich die Arbeit auf einen designorientierten, explorativen und iterativen Entwicklungsprozess unter Verwendung digitaler Fabrikationsmethoden und neuartiger Materialien. Im Hauptteil werden vier Forschungsprojekte vorgestellt, die verschiedene visuelle und interaktive Prinzipien entlang realer Anwendungen diskutieren. Die Szenarien reichen von digital angereichertem Papier, interaktiven Kordeln über visuelle Erweiterungen von Uhrarmbändern bis hin zu neuartigen Prototyping-Tools für intelligente Kleidungsstücke. Um neue Designansätze aufzuzeigen, integrieren nahezu alle visuelles Feedback und haptische Eingaben, um Alternativen zu Standard-Eingabemodalitäten auf starren Pixelbildschirmen zu schaffen. Die Dissertation hat gezeigt, wie wertvoll es sein kann, bekannte, analoge Anwendungen zu überdenken und sie dabei gleichzeitig mit Bedacht digital zu erweitern. Dabei umfasst die vorliegende Arbeit sowohl realisierte technische Forschungsplattformen als auch übergreifende konzeptionelle Arbeiten, Nutzerstudien und technische Experimente sowie die Analyse existierender Forschungsarbeiten
Key technologies for safe and autonomous drones
Drones/UAVs are able to perform air operations that are very difficult to be performed by manned aircrafts. In addition, drones' usage brings significant economic savings and environmental benefits, while reducing risks to human life. In this paper, we present key technologies that enable development of drone systems. The technologies are identified based on the usages of drones (driven by COMP4DRONES project use cases). These technologies are grouped into four categories: U-space capabilities, system functions, payloads, and tools. Also, we present the contributions of the COMP4DRONES project to improve existing technologies. These contributions aim to ease drones’ customization, and enable their safe operation.This project has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826610. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Spain, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands. The total project budget is 28,590,748.75 EUR (excluding ESIF partners), while the requested grant is 7,983,731.61 EUR to ECSEL JU, and 8,874,523.84 EUR of National and ESIF Funding. The project has been started on 1st October 2019
Energy-Sustainable IoT Connectivity: Vision, Technological Enablers, Challenges, and Future Directions
Technology solutions must effectively balance economic growth, social equity,
and environmental integrity to achieve a sustainable society. Notably, although
the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm constitutes a key sustainability enabler,
critical issues such as the increasing maintenance operations, energy
consumption, and manufacturing/disposal of IoT devices have long-term negative
economic, societal, and environmental impacts and must be efficiently
addressed. This calls for self-sustainable IoT ecosystems requiring minimal
external resources and intervention, effectively utilizing renewable energy
sources, and recycling materials whenever possible, thus encompassing energy
sustainability. In this work, we focus on energy-sustainable IoT during the
operation phase, although our discussions sometimes extend to other
sustainability aspects and IoT lifecycle phases. Specifically, we provide a
fresh look at energy-sustainable IoT and identify energy provision, transfer,
and energy efficiency as the three main energy-related processes whose
harmonious coexistence pushes toward realizing self-sustainable IoT systems.
Their main related technologies, recent advances, challenges, and research
directions are also discussed. Moreover, we overview relevant performance
metrics to assess the energy-sustainability potential of a certain technique,
technology, device, or network and list some target values for the next
generation of wireless systems. Overall, this paper offers insights that are
valuable for advancing sustainability goals for present and future generations.Comment: 25 figures, 12 tables, submitted to IEEE Open Journal of the
Communications Societ
Rewriting History: Repurposing Domain-Specific CGRAs
Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) are domain-specific devices
promising both the flexibility of FPGAs and the performance of ASICs. However,
with restricted domains comes a danger: designing chips that cannot accelerate
enough current and future software to justify the hardware cost. We introduce
FlexC, the first flexible CGRA compiler, which allows CGRAs to be adapted to
operations they do not natively support.
FlexC uses dataflow rewriting, replacing unsupported regions of code with
equivalent operations that are supported by the CGRA. We use equality
saturation, a technique enabling efficient exploration of a large space of
rewrite rules, to effectively search through the program-space for supported
programs. We applied FlexC to over 2,000 loop kernels, compiling to four
different research CGRAs and 300 generated CGRAs and demonstrate a 2.2
increase in the number of loop kernels accelerated leading to 3 speedup
compared to an Arm A5 CPU on kernels that would otherwise be unsupported by the
accelerator
Database System Acceleration on FPGAs
Relational database systems provide various services and applications with an efficient means for storing, processing, and retrieving their data. The performance of these systems has a direct impact on the quality of service of the applications that rely on them. Therefore, it is crucial that database systems are able to adapt and grow in tandem with the demands of these applications, ensuring that their performance scales accordingly. In the past, Moore's law and algorithmic advancements have been sufficient to meet these demands. However, with the slowdown of Moore's law, researchers have begun exploring alternative methods, such as application-specific technologies, to satisfy the more challenging performance requirements. One such technology is field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which provide ideal platforms for developing and running custom architectures for accelerating database systems.
The goal of this thesis is to develop a domain-specific architecture that can enhance the performance of in-memory database systems when executing analytical queries. Our research is guided by a combination of academic and industrial requirements that seek to strike a balance between generality and performance. The former ensures that our platform can be used to process a diverse range of workloads, while the latter makes it an attractive solution for high-performance use cases.
Throughout this thesis, we present the development of a system-on-chip for database system acceleration that meets our requirements. The resulting architecture, called CbMSMK, is capable of processing the projection, sort, aggregation, and equi-join database operators and can also run some complex TPC-H queries. CbMSMK employs a shared sort-merge pipeline for executing all these operators, which results in an efficient use of FPGA resources. This approach enables the instantiation of multiple acceleration cores on the FPGA, allowing it to serve multiple clients simultaneously. CbMSMK can process both arbitrarily deep and wide tables efficiently. The former is achieved through the use of the sort-merge algorithm which utilizes the FPGA RAM for buffering intermediate sort results. The latter is achieved through the use of KeRRaS, a novel variant of the forward radix sort algorithm introduced in this thesis. KeRRaS allows CbMSMK to process a table a few columns at a time, incrementally generating the final result through multiple iterations. Given that acceleration is a key objective of our work, CbMSMK benefits from many performance optimizations. For instance, multi-way merging is employed to reduce the number of merge passes required for the execution of the sort-merge algorithm, thus improving the performance of all our pipeline-breaking operators. Another example is our in-depth analysis of early aggregation, which led to the development of a novel cache-based algorithm that significantly enhances aggregation performance. Our experiments demonstrate that CbMSMK performs on average 5 times faster than the state-of-the-art CPU-based database management system MonetDB.:I Database Systems & FPGAs
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Databases & the Importance of Performance
1.2 Accelerators & FPGAs
1.3 Requirements
1.4 Outline & Summary of Contributions
2 BACKGROUND ON DATABASE SYSTEMS
2.1 Databases
2.1.1 Storage Model
2.1.2 Storage Medium
2.2 Database Operators
2.2.1 Projection
2.2.2 Filter
2.2.3 Sort
2.2.4 Aggregation
2.2.5 Join
2.2.6 Operator Classification
2.3 Database Queries
2.4 Impact of Acceleration
3 BACKGROUND ON FPGAS
3.1 FPGA
3.1.1 Logic Element
3.1.2 Block RAM (BRAM)
3.1.3 Digital Signal Processor (DSP)
3.1.4 IO Element
3.1.5 Programmable Interconnect
3.2 FPGADesignFlow
3.2.1 Specifications
3.2.2 RTL Description
3.2.3 Verification
3.2.4 Synthesis, Mapping, Placement, and Routing
3.2.5 TimingAnalysis
3.2.6 Bitstream Generation and FPGA Programming
3.3 Implementation Quality Metrics
3.4 FPGA Cards
3.5 Benefits of Using FPGAs
3.6 Challenges of Using FPGAs
4 RELATED WORK
4.1 Summary of Related Work
4.2 Platform Type
4.2.1 Accelerator Card
4.2.2 Coprocessor
4.2.3 Smart Storage
4.2.4 Network Processor
4.3 Implementation
4.3.1 Loop-based implementation
4.3.2 Sort-based Implementation
4.3.3 Hash-based Implementation
4.3.4 Mixed Implementation
4.4 A Note on Quantitative Performance Comparisons
II Cache-Based Morphing Sort-Merge with KeRRaS (CbMSMK)
5 OBJECTIVES AND ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW
5.1 From Requirements to Objectives
5.2 Architecture Overview
5.3 Outlineof Part II
6 COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF OPENCL AND RTL FOR SORT-MERGE PRIMITIVES ON FPGAS
6.1 Programming FPGAs
6.2 RelatedWork
6.3 Architecture
6.3.1 Global Architecture
6.3.2 Sorter Architecture
6.3.3 Merger Architecture
6.3.4 Scalability and Resource Adaptability
6.4 Experiments
6.4.1 OpenCL Sort-Merge Implementation
6.4.2 RTLSorters
6.4.3 RTLMergers
6.4.4 Hybrid OpenCL-RTL Sort-Merge Implementation
6.5 Summary & Discussion
7 RESOURCE-EFFICIENT ACCELERATION OF PIPELINE-BREAKING DATABASE OPERATORS ON FPGAS
7.1 The Case for Resource Efficiency
7.2 Related Work
7.3 Architecture
7.3.1 Sorters
7.3.2 Sort-Network
7.3.3 X:Y Mergers
7.3.4 Merge-Network
7.3.5 Join Materialiser (JoinMat)
7.4 Experiments
7.4.1 Experimental Setup
7.4.2 Implementation Description & Tuning
7.4.3 Sort Benchmarks
7.4.4 Aggregation Benchmarks
7.4.5 Join Benchmarks
7. Summary
8 KERRAS: COLUMN-ORIENTED WIDE TABLE PROCESSING ON FPGAS
8.1 The Scope of Database System Accelerators
8.2 Related Work
8.3 Key-Reduce Radix Sort(KeRRaS)
8.3.1 Time Complexity
8.3.2 Space Complexity (Memory Utilization)
8.3.3 Discussion and Optimizations
8.4 Architecture
8.4.1 MSM
8.4.2 MSMK: Extending MSM with KeRRaS
8.4.3 Payload, Aggregation and Join Processing
8.4.4 Limitations
8.5 Experiments
8.5.1 Experimental Setup
8.5.2 Datasets
8.5.3 MSMK vs. MSM
8.5.4 Payload-Less Benchmarks
8.5.5 Payload-Based Benchmarks
8.5.6 Flexibility
8.6 Summary
9 A STUDY OF EARLY AGGREGATION IN DATABASE QUERY PROCESSING ON FPGAS
9.1 Early Aggregation
9.2 Background & Related Work
9.2.1 Sort-Based Early Aggregation
9.2.2 Cache-Based Early Aggregation
9.3 Simulations
9.3.1 Datasets
9.3.2 Metrics
9.3.3 Sort-Based Versus Cache-Based Early Aggregation
9.3.4 Comparison of Set-Associative Caches
9.3.5 Comparison of Cache Structures
9.3.6 Comparison of Replacement Policies
9.3.7 Cache Selection Methodology
9.4 Cache System Architecture
9.4.1 Window Aggregator
9.4.2 Compressor & Hasher
9.4.3 Collision Detector
9.4.4 Collision Resolver
9.4.5 Cache
9.5 Experiments
9.5.1 Experimental Setup
9.5.2 Resource Utilization and Parameter Tuning
9.5.3 Datasets
9.5.4 Benchmarks on Synthetic Data
9.5.5 Benchmarks on Real Data
9.6 Summary
10 THE FULL PICTURE
10.1 System Architecture
10.2 Benchmarks
10.3 Meeting the Objectives
III Conclusion
11 SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK ON FUTURE RESEARCH
11.1 Summary
11.2 Future Work
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLE
Evolution from the ground up with Amee – From basic concepts to explorative modeling
Evolutionary theory has been the foundation of biological research for about a century
now, yet over the past few decades, new discoveries and theoretical advances have rapidly
transformed our understanding of the evolutionary process. Foremost among them are
evolutionary developmental biology, epigenetic inheritance, and various forms of evolu-
tionarily relevant phenotypic plasticity, as well as cultural evolution, which ultimately led
to the conceptualization of an extended evolutionary synthesis. Starting from abstract
principles rooted in complexity theory, this thesis aims to provide a unified conceptual
understanding of any kind of evolution, biological or otherwise. This is used in the second
part to develop Amee, an agent-based model that unifies development, niche construction,
and phenotypic plasticity with natural selection based on a simulated ecology. Amee
is implemented in Utopia, which allows performant, integrated implementation and
simulation of arbitrary agent-based models. A phenomenological overview over Amee’s
capabilities is provided, ranging from the evolution of ecospecies down to the evolution
of metabolic networks and up to beyond-species-level biological organization, all of
which emerges autonomously from the basic dynamics. The interaction of development,
plasticity, and niche construction has been investigated, and it has been shown that while
expected natural phenomena can, in principle, arise, the accessible simulation time and
system size are too small to produce natural evo-devo phenomena and –structures. Amee thus can be used to simulate the evolution of a wide variety of processes
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