LEGaTO: first steps towards energy-efficient toolset for heterogeneous computing

LEGaTO is a three-year EU H2020 project which started in December 2017. The LEGaTO project will leverage task-based programming models to provide a software ecosystem for Made-in-Europe heterogeneous hardware composed of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and dataflow engines. The aim is to attain one order of magnitude energy savings from the edge to the converged cloud/HPC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Non-parametric linear time-invariant system identification by discrete wavelet transforms

We describe the use of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for non-parametric linear time-invariant system identification. Identification is achieved by using a test excitation to the system under test (SUT) that also acts as the analyzing function for the DWT of the SUT's output, so as to recover the impulse response. The method uses as excitation any signal that gives an orthogonal inner product in the DWT at some step size (that cannot be 1). We favor wavelet scaling coefficients as excitations, with a step size of 2. However, the system impulse or frequency response can then only be estimated at half the available number of points of the sampled output sequence, introducing a multirate problem that means we have to 'oversample' the SUT output. The method has several advantages over existing techniques, e.g., it uses a simple, easy to generate excitation, and avoids the singularity problems and the (unbounded) accumulation of round-off errors that can occur with standard techniques. In extensive simulations, identification of a variety of finite and infinite impulse response systems is shown to be considerably better than with conventional system identification methods.Department of Computin

FloWaveNet : A Generative Flow for Raw Audio

Most modern text-to-speech architectures use a WaveNet vocoder for synthesizing high-fidelity waveform audio, but there have been limitations, such as high inference time, in its practical application due to its ancestral sampling scheme. The recently suggested Parallel WaveNet and ClariNet have achieved real-time audio synthesis capability by incorporating inverse autoregressive flow for parallel sampling. However, these approaches require a two-stage training pipeline with a well-trained teacher network and can only produce natural sound by using probability distillation along with auxiliary loss terms. We propose FloWaveNet, a flow-based generative model for raw audio synthesis. FloWaveNet requires only a single-stage training procedure and a single maximum likelihood loss, without any additional auxiliary terms, and it is inherently parallel due to the characteristics of generative flow. The model can efficiently sample raw audio in real-time, with clarity comparable to previous two-stage parallel models. The code and samples for all models, including our FloWaveNet, are publicly available.Comment: 9 pages, ICML'201