An AER handshake-less modular infrastructure PCB with x8 2.5Gbps LVDS serial links

Nowadays spike-based brain processing emulation is taking off. Several EU and others worldwide projects are demonstrating this, like SpiNNaker, BrainScaleS, FACETS, or NeuroGrid. The larger the brain process emulation on silicon is, the higher the communication performance of the hosting platforms has to be. Many times the bottleneck of these system implementations is not on the performance inside a chip or a board, but in the communication between boards. This paper describes a novel modular Address-Event-Representation (AER) FPGA-based (Spartan6) infrastructure PCB (the AER-Node board) with 2.5Gbps LVDS high speed serial links over SATA cables that offers a peak performance of 32-bit 62.5Meps (Mega events per second) on board-to-board communications. The board allows back compatibility with parallel AER devices supporting up to x2 28-bit parallel data with asynchronous handshake. These boards also allow modular expansion functionality through several daughter boards. The paper is focused on describing in detail the LVDS serial interface and presenting its performance.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2009-10639-C04-02/01Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-02/01Junta de Andalucía TIC-6091Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad PRI-PIMCHI-2011-076

DALiuGE: A Graph Execution Framework for Harnessing the Astronomical Data Deluge

The Data Activated Liu Graph Engine - DALiuGE - is an execution framework for processing large astronomical datasets at a scale required by the Square Kilometre Array Phase 1 (SKA1). It includes an interface for expressing complex data reduction pipelines consisting of both data sets and algorithmic components and an implementation run-time to execute such pipelines on distributed resources. By mapping the logical view of a pipeline to its physical realisation, DALiuGE separates the concerns of multiple stakeholders, allowing them to collectively optimise large-scale data processing solutions in a coherent manner. The execution in DALiuGE is data-activated, where each individual data item autonomously triggers the processing on itself. Such decentralisation also makes the execution framework very scalable and flexible, supporting pipeline sizes ranging from less than ten tasks running on a laptop to tens of millions of concurrent tasks on the second fastest supercomputer in the world. DALiuGE has been used in production for reducing interferometry data sets from the Karl E. Jansky Very Large Array and the Mingantu Ultrawide Spectral Radioheliograph; and is being developed as the execution framework prototype for the Science Data Processor (SDP) consortium of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope. This paper presents a technical overview of DALiuGE and discusses case studies from the CHILES and MUSER projects that use DALiuGE to execute production pipelines. In a companion paper, we provide in-depth analysis of DALiuGE's scalability to very large numbers of tasks on two supercomputing facilities.Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, currently under review by Astronomy and Computin