Design of Energy Efficient and Dependable Health Monitoring Systems under Unreliable Nanometer Technologies

In this paper we investigate the impact of potential hardware misbehavior induced by reliability issues and scaled voltages in wireless body sensor network (WBSN) nodes. Our study reveals the inherent resilience of popular algorithms in cardiac monitoring applications and argues that by exploiting the unique characteristics of such algorithms the energy efficiency and reliability of such systems can be significantly improved. This is achieved by developing a cross-layer design paradigm that utilizes low cost techniques at the hardware and software layers and by optimizing the synergy between them in order to provide intelligent trade-offs between energy, performance and quality. The main idea of the proposed approach is the selective application of costly robust techniques only to the most critical tasks identified at the application layer that are detrimental for obtaining sufficient output quality. Our results show that by ensuring the correct operation of only 37% of the total computations in an electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring WBSN node we can achieve up to 70% power savings with only 9% degradation in ECG output quality

Dependable Embedded Systems

This Open Access book introduces readers to many new techniques for enhancing and optimizing reliability in embedded systems, which have emerged particularly within the last five years. This book introduces the most prominent reliability concerns from today’s points of view and roughly recapitulates the progress in the community so far. Unlike other books that focus on a single abstraction level such circuit level or system level alone, the focus of this book is to deal with the different reliability challenges across different levels starting from the physical level all the way to the system level (cross-layer approaches). The book aims at demonstrating how new hardware/software co-design solution can be proposed to ef-fectively mitigate reliability degradation such as transistor aging, processor variation, temperature effects, soft errors, etc. Provides readers with latest insights into novel, cross-layer methods and models with respect to dependability of embedded systems; Describes cross-layer approaches that can leverage reliability through techniques that are pro-actively designed with respect to techniques at other layers; Explains run-time adaptation and concepts/means of self-organization, in order to achieve error resiliency in complex, future many core systems

2006 Major Sponsored Program and Faculty Awards for Research & Creative Activity

Awards of $3 million or more Awards of$1 million to $2,999,999 Awards of$200,000 to $999,999 Career and K Awards Arts and Humanities Awards of$50,000 or more Arts and Humanities Awards of $5,000 to$49,999 Patents Issued Intellectual Property Licences Creative Works in Fine and Performing Arts Books Recognitions and Honors Glossary of Federal Agency Abbreviations This is the fifth annual “Major Sponsored Program and Faculty Awards for Research and Creative Activity” report. This booklet highlights the successes of University of Nebraska–Lincoln faculty during 2006. The funding sources, projects and investigators on major grants and sponsored program awards received during the year are listed, as well as patents issued; published books and scholarship; fellowships and other recognitions; intellectual property licenses; and performances and exhibitions in the fine and performing arts. This impressive list grows each year and I am pleased to present evidence of our faculties’ accomplishments. During FY2005-06, we achieved a funding milestone — UNL faculty attracted $104.6 million in external funding to the institution. This is the first time we exceeded$100 million and this in fact tripled the comparable figure achieved ten years ago. How have we reached this success? We have worked to closely integrate our research priorities with our established programs of excellence building on each success. We zealously foster interdisciplinary research and collaborations with public and private partnerships, thus expanding our economic development efforts by working with business and industry. And we celebrate our achievements and recognize that excellence attracts excellence. This booklet reports only the largest dollar amounts as reported through our Office of Sponsored Programs. However, the majority of our research and creative activity is conducted by single investigators and scholars who are pioneering new frontiers across all fields. Many faculty obtain funding at levels below the significantly high thresholds set for inclusion in this report. This in no way diminishes their scholarly contributions and we are proud of all faculty achievement

Major Sponsored Programs and Faculty Awards for Research and Creative Activity 2007

This is the sixth annual “Major Sponsored Programs and Faculty Awards for Research and Creative Activity” report. This booklet highlights the successes of University of Nebraska–Lincoln faculty during 2007. It lists the funding sources, projects and investigators on major grants and sponsored program awards received during the year, as well as patents issued; published books and scholarship; fellowships and other recognitions; intellectual property licenses; and performances and exhibitions in the fine and performing arts. This impressive list grows each year and I am pleased to present evidence of our faculty’s accomplishments. Researchers at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln have pushed the frontiers in their disciplines in the past year, setting new drilling records in Antarctica, winning the nation’s highest honor for technology and building an ultra-fast, high-intensity laser that has the highest combination of peak power and repetition rate of any U.S. laser. Our sponsored funding continues to grow, with awards of $171.9 million last year alone. How have we reached this success? We have worked to integrate our research priorities with our established programs of excellence, building on each success. We zealously foster interdisciplinary research and collaborations with public and private partnerships, thus expanding our economic development efforts by working with business and industry. And we celebrate our achievements and recognize that excellence attracts excellence. These accomplishments exemplify how UNL’s emphasis on innovation, interdisciplinarity and international collaborations is propelling our research into new arenas, producing new products and technologies for the marketplace and offering our students intensive research experiences

Cross layer reliability estimation for digital systems

Forthcoming manufacturing technologies hold the promise to increase multifuctional computing systems performance and functionality thanks to a remarkable growth of the device integration density. Despite the benefits introduced by this technology improvements, reliability is becoming a key challenge for the semiconductor industry. With transistor size reaching the atomic dimensions, vulnerability to unavoidable fluctuations in the manufacturing process and environmental stress rise dramatically. Failing to meet a reliability requirement may add excessive re-design cost to recover and may have severe consequences on the success of a product. %Worst-case design with large margins to guarantee reliable operation has been employed for long time. However, it is reaching a limit that makes it economically unsustainable due to its performance, area, and power cost. One of the open challenges for future technologies is building ``dependable'' systems on top of unreliable components, which will degrade and even fail during normal lifetime of the chip. Conventional design techniques are highly inefficient. They expend significant amount of energy to tolerate the device unpredictability by adding safety margins to a circuit's operating voltage, clock frequency or charge stored per bit. Unfortunately, the additional cost introduced to compensate unreliability are rapidly becoming unacceptable in today's environment where power consumption is often the limiting factor for integrated circuit performance, and energy efficiency is a top concern. Attention should be payed to tailor techniques to improve the reliability of a system on the basis of its requirements, ending up with cost-effective solutions favoring the success of the product on the market. Cross-layer reliability is one of the most promising approaches to achieve this goal. Cross-layer reliability techniques take into account the interactions between the layers composing a complex system (i.e., technology, hardware and software layers) to implement efficient cross-layer fault mitigation mechanisms. Fault tolerance mechanism are carefully implemented at different layers starting from the technology up to the software layer to carefully optimize the system by exploiting the inner capability of each layer to mask lower level faults. For this purpose, cross-layer reliability design techniques need to be complemented with cross-layer reliability evaluation tools, able to precisely assess the reliability level of a selected design early in the design cycle. Accurate and early reliability estimates would enable the exploration of the system design space and the optimization of multiple constraints such as performance, power consumption, cost and reliability. This Ph.D. thesis is devoted to the development of new methodologies and tools to evaluate and optimize the reliability of complex digital systems during the early design stages. More specifically, techniques addressing hardware accelerators (i.e., FPGAs and GPUs), microprocessors and full systems are discussed. All developed methodologies are presented in conjunction with their application to real-world use cases belonging to different computational domains

An Outlook on Design Technologies for Future Integrated Systems

The economic and social demand for ubiquitous and multifaceted electronic systems-in combination with the unprecedented opportunities provided by the integration of various manufacturing technologies-is paving the way to a new class of heterogeneous integrated systems, with increased performance and connectedness and providing us with gateways to the living world. This paper surveys design requirements and solutions for heterogeneous systems and addresses design technologies for realizing them

Realtime optical measurement of wastewater COD and nutrients

Abstract. This study successfully gathered preliminary data and developed a real-time (COD) determination method using UV-visible spectrophotometry. This method is intended to be part of a new product by Valmet that can measure multiple parameters in wastewater. Six samples from four different locations within the Taskila wastewater treatment plant were analyzed, and the data served as a foundation for creating prediction models using MATLAB. The study confirmed the potential of UV-Vis spectrophotometry as a reliable and accurate tool for COD determination in wastewater treatment. However, the MATLAB prediction models would benefit from refinement and validation with larger datasets. This research paves the way for future studies aiming to improve real-time monitoring methods in wastewater treatment for optimal environmental sustainability

Cross-Layer Approaches for an Aging-Aware Design of Nanoscale Microprocessors

Thanks to aggressive scaling of transistor dimensions, computers have revolutionized our life. However, the increasing unreliability of devices fabricated in nanoscale technologies emerged as a major threat for the future success of computers. In particular, accelerated transistor aging is of great importance, as it reduces the lifetime of digital systems. This thesis addresses this challenge by proposing new methods to model, analyze and mitigate aging at microarchitecture-level and above