RTL2RTL Formal Equivalence: Boosting the Design Confidence

Increasing design complexity driven by feature and performance requirements and the Time to Market (TTM) constraints force a faster design and validation closure. This in turn enforces novel ways of identifying and debugging behavioral inconsistencies early in the design cycle. Addition of incremental features and timing fixes may alter the legacy design behavior and would inadvertently result in undesirable bugs. The most common method of verifying the correctness of the changed design is to run a dynamic regression test suite before and after the intended changes and compare the results, a method which is not exhaustive. Modern Formal Verification (FV) techniques involving new methods of proving Sequential Hardware Equivalence enabled a new set of solutions for the given problem, with complete coverage guarantee. Formal Equivalence can be applied for proving functional integrity after design changes resulting from a wide variety of reasons, ranging from simple pipeline optimizations to complex logic redistributions. We present here our experience of successfully applying the RTL to RTL (RTL2RTL) Formal Verification across a wide spectrum of problems on a Graphics design. The RTL2RTL FV enabled checking the design sanity in a very short time, thus enabling faster and safer design churn. The techniques presented in this paper are applicable to any complex hardware design.Comment: In Proceedings FSFMA 2014, arXiv:1407.195

Towards large scale continuous EDA: a random matrix theory perspective

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDA) are a major branch of evolutionary algorithms (EA) with some unique advantages in principle. They are able to take advantage of correlation structure to drive the search more efficiently, and they are able to provide insights about the structure of the search space. However, model building in high dimensions is extremely challenging and as a result existing EDAs lose their strengths in large scale problems. Large scale continuous global optimisation is key to many real world problems of modern days. Scaling up EAs to large scale problems has become one of the biggest challenges of the field. This paper pins down some fundamental roots of the problem and makes a start at developing a new and generic framework to yield effective EDA-type algorithms for large scale continuous global optimisation problems. Our concept is to introduce an ensemble of random projections of the set of fittest search points to low dimensions as a basis for developing a new and generic divide-and-conquer methodology. This is rooted in the theory of random projections developed in theoretical computer science, and will exploit recent advances of non-asymptotic random matrix theory

Architecture aware parallel programming in Glasgow parallel Haskell (GPH)

General purpose computing architectures are evolving quickly to become manycore and hierarchical: i.e. a core can communicate more quickly locally than globally. To be effective on such architectures, programming models must be aware of the communications hierarchy. This thesis investigates a programming model that aims to share the responsibility of task placement, load balance, thread creation, and synchronisation between the application developer and the runtime system. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of four new architectureaware constructs for Glasgow parallel Haskell that exploit information about task size and aim to reduce communication for small tasks, preserve data locality, or to distribute large units of work. We define a semantics for the constructs that specifies the sets of PEs that each construct identifies, and we check four properties of the semantics using QuickCheck. We report a preliminary investigation of architecture aware programming models that abstract over the new constructs. In particular, we propose architecture aware evaluation strategies and skeletons. We investigate three common paradigms, such as data parallelism, divide-and-conquer and nested parallelism, on hierarchical architectures with up to 224 cores. The results show that the architecture-aware programming model consistently delivers better speedup and scalability than existing constructs, together with a dramatic reduction in the execution time variability. We present a comparison of functional multicore technologies and it reports some of the first ever multicore results for the Feedback Directed Implicit Parallelism (FDIP) and the semi-explicit parallelism (GpH and Eden) languages. The comparison reflects the growing maturity of the field by systematically evaluating four parallel Haskell implementations on a common multicore architecture. The comparison contrasts the programming effort each language requires with the parallel performance delivered. We investigate the minimum thread granularity required to achieve satisfactory performance for three implementations parallel functional language on a multicore platform. The results show that GHC-GUM requires a larger thread granularity than Eden and GHC-SMP. The thread granularity rises as the number of cores rises

CAP Bench: a benchmark suite for performance and energy evaluation of low-power many-core processors

International audienceSUMMARY The constant need for faster and more energy-efficient processors has been stimulating the development of new architectures, such as low-power many-core architectures. Researchers aiming to study these architectures are challenged by peculiar characteristics of some components such as Networks-on-Chip and lack of specific tools to evaluate their performance. In this context, the goal of this paper is to present a benchmark suite to evaluate state-of-the-art low-power many-core architectures such as the Kalray MPPA-256 low-power processor, which features 256 compute cores in a single chip. The benchmark was designed and used to highlight important aspects and details that need to be considered when developing parallel applications for emerging low-power many-core architectures. As a result, this paper demonstrates that the benchmark offers a diverse suite of programs with regard to parallel patterns, job types, communication intensity and task load strategies, suitable for a broad understanding of performance and energy consumption of MPPA-256 and upcoming many-core architectures

Rational series and asymptotic expansion for linear homogeneous divide-and-conquer recurrences

Among all sequences that satisfy a divide-and-conquer recurrence, the sequences that are rational with respect to a numeration system are certainly the most immediate and most essential. Nevertheless, until recently they have not been studied from the asymptotic standpoint. We show how a mechanical process permits to compute their asymptotic expansion. It is based on linear algebra, with Jordan normal form, joint spectral radius, and dilation equations. The method is compared with the analytic number theory approach, based on Dirichlet series and residues, and new ways to compute the Fourier series of the periodic functions involved in the expansion are developed. The article comes with an extended bibliography

Pyrazole-based analogs as potential antibacterial agents against methicillin-resistance staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and its SAR elucidation

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is becoming lethal to humanity due to easy transmission and difficult-to-treat skin and flimsy diseases. The most threatening aspect is the rapid resistance development of MRSA to any approved antibiotics, including vancomycin. The development of new, efficient, and nontoxic drug candidate to fight against MRSA isolates is the need of the hour. The intriguing molecular structure and versatile bioactive pyrazole core attracting to development required novel antibiotics. This review presents the decade developments of pyrazole-containing derivatives with a broad antibacterial movement against diverged bacterial strains. In specific, we correlated the efficacy of structurally diversified pyrazole analogs against MRSA and discussed different angles of structure-activity relationship (SAR). The current survey highlights pyrazole hybrids' present scenario on MRSA studies, covering articles published from 2011 to 2020. This collective information may become an excellent platform to plan and develop new pyrazole-based small MRSA growth inhibitors with minimal side effects. (C) 2020 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved