Revisiting the high-performance reconfigurable computing for future datacenters

Modern datacenters are reinforcing the computational power and energy efficiency by assimilating field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The sustainability of this large-scale integration depends on enabling multi-tenant FPGAs. This requisite amplifies the importance of communication architecture and virtualization method with the required features in order to meet the high-end objective. Consequently, in the last decade, academia and industry proposed several virtualization techniques and hardware architectures for addressing resource management, scheduling, adoptability, segregation, scalability, performance-overhead, availability, programmability, time-to-market, security, and mainly, multitenancy. This paper provides an extensive survey covering three important aspects-discussion on non-standard terms used in existing literature, network-on-chip evaluation choices as a mean to explore the communication architecture, and virtualization methods under latest classification. The purpose is to emphasize the importance of choosing appropriate communication architecture, virtualization technique and standard language to evolve the multi-tenant FPGAs in datacenters. None of the previous surveys encapsulated these aspects in one writing. Open problems are indicated for scientific community as well

Investigating Advances in the Acquisition of Secure Systems Based on Open Architecture, Open Source Software, and Software Product Lines

Naval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research Progra

Estudo de modos de comando em cenários de interacção gestual

Tese de mestrado, Engenharia Informática (Sistemas de Informação), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2010Recentemente, tem-se assistido a uma “revolução tecnológica” na concepção de dispositivos computacionais que visam a interacção pessoa-máquina. Os periféricos de entrada deixaram de ser a única forma de transmitir intenções às máquinas, sendo agora possível fazê-lo com o próprio corpo. Dispositivos que permitem interacção por toque estão-se a disseminar por locais públicos, mas não é só nestes locais que o fenómeno se verifica. A quantidade de produtos comerciais que permitem este género de interacção também não pára de aumentar, pelo que é necessário compreender as vantagens e desvantagens da interacção gestual e torná-la cada vez mais eficaz. Existem muitas tecnologias que possibilitam a construção de dispositivos tácteis, variando nas suas capacidades e custos. O estudo dessas tecnologias, no decorrer deste trabalho, resultou na construção de uma mesa interactiva multi-toque de “baixo custo”. Nos dispositivos vocacionados para interacção gestual as dimensões da superfície com a qual é possível interagir são iguais às dimensões do ecrã, o que leva à necessidade de ter uma especial atenção na concepção de aplicações para estes dispositivos. As características de uma interface concebida para um ecrã de grandes dimensões poderão não ser adequadas para um ecrã de dimensões mais reduzidas, e vice-versa. Além das dimensões, o género de aplicação também influencia o paradigma de interacção. No caso específico de interacção gestual em aplicações de desenho existe a dificuldade acrescida da aplicação compreender quando o gesto do utilizador tem por objectivo desenhar ou executar um comando. Neste trabalho são apresentados dois conjuntos de gestos de comando com o objectivo de eliminar a ambiguidade existente entre os gestos em aplicações de desenho. São também apresentadas as conclusões de estudos conduzidos para atestar a qualidade dos conjuntos propostos, assim como a sua adequabilidade relativamente a diferentes dimensões de ecrã.Lately we’ve been witnessing a “technologic revolution” in the making of devices that allow human-computer interaction. Input devices are no longer the only way to instruct intentions to computers. It’s now possible to do the same using one's own body. Devices that allow touch interaction are being disseminated in public places, but it’s not only in those places that the phenomenon occurs. The number of commercial products that allow this kind of interaction doesn’t stop growing. So, it’s of vital importance to understand the advantages and disadvantages of gestural interaction and make it more effective. There are a lot of technologies that allow the construction of tactile devices, going through a wide range of capabilities and manufacturing costs. The study of those technologies, during this work, resulted in the construction of a “low-cost” multi-touch interactive table. In devices oriented for gestural interaction, the dimensions of the surface of interaction are equal to the dimensions of the screen, which demands a special attention in the design of applications for those devices. The features of an interface conceived for a large screen may not be suitable for a screen of smaller dimensions, and vice-versa. Apart from the dimensions, the kind of application can also influence the interaction paradigm. In the specific case of gestural interaction in drawing applications there’s also the increased difficulty of making the application understand when the gesture has the objective of drawing or, instead, executing a command. In this work, two sets of command gestures are introduced, with the goal of disambiguating the intent of gestures in drawing applications. Also presented are the conclusions of studies who aimed to test the quality of the proposed sets, as well as their suitability to multi-sized screens

SensiCut: Material-Aware Laser Cutting Using Speckle Sensing and Deep Learning

Laser cutter users face difficulties distinguishing between visually similar materials. This can lead to problems, such as using the wrong power/speed settings or accidentally cutting hazardous materials. To support users, we present SensiCut, an integrated material sensing platform for laser cutters. SensiCut enables material awareness beyond what users are able to see and reliably differentiates among similar-looking types. It achieves this by detecting materials' surface structures using speckle sensing and deep learning. SensiCut consists of a compact hardware add-on for laser cutters and a user interface that integrates material sensing into the laser cutting workflow. In addition to improving the traditional workflow and its safety1, SensiCut enables new applications, such as automatically partitioning designs when engraving on multi-material objects or adjusting their geometry based on the kerf of the identified material. We evaluate SensiCut's accuracy for different types of materials under different sheet orientations and illumination conditions

Detecting and Classifying Human Touches in a Social Robot Through Acoustic Sensing and Machine Learning

An important aspect in Human-Robot Interaction is responding to different kinds of touch stimuli. To date, several technologies have been explored to determine how a touch is perceived by a social robot, usually placing a large number of sensors throughout the robot's shell. In this work, we introduce a novel approach, where the audio acquired from contact microphones located in the robot's shell is processed using machine learning techniques to distinguish between different types of touches. The system is able to determine when the robot is touched (touch detection), and to ascertain the kind of touch performed among a set of possibilities: stroke, tap, slap, and tickle (touch classification). This proposal is cost-effective since just a few microphones are able to cover the whole robot's shell since a single microphone is enough to cover each solid part of the robot. Besides, it is easy to install and configure as it just requires a contact surface to attach the microphone to the robot's shell and plug it into the robot's computer. Results show the high accuracy scores in touch gesture recognition. The testing phase revealed that Logistic Model Trees achieved the best performance, with an F-score of 0.81. The dataset was built with information from 25 participants performing a total of 1981 touch gestures.The research leading to these results has received funding from the projects: Development of social robots to help seniors with cognitive impairment (ROBSEN), funded by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad; and RoboCity2030-III-CM, funded by Comunidad de Madrid and cofunded by Structural Funds of the EU.Publicad

Investigation of dynamic three-dimensional tangible touchscreens: Usability and feasibility

The ability for touchscreen controls to move from two physical dimensions to three dimensions may soon be possible. Though solutions exist for enhanced tactile touchscreen interaction using vibrotactile devices, no definitive commercial solution yet exists for providing real, physical shape to the virtual buttons on a touchscreen display. Of the many next steps in interface technology, this paper concentrates on the path leading to tangible, dynamic, touchscreen surfaces. An experiment was performed that explores the usage differences between a flat surface touchscreen and one augmented with raised surface controls. The results were mixed. The combination of tactile-visual modalities had a negative effect on task completion time when visual attention was focused on a single task (single target task time increased by 8% and the serial target task time increased by 6%). On the other hand, the dual modality had a positive effect on error rate when visual attention was divided between two tasks (the serial target error rate decreased by 50%). In addition to the experiment, this study also investigated the feasibility of creating a dynamic, three dimensional, tangible touchscreen. A new interface solution may be possible by inverting the traditional touchscreen architecture and integrating emerging technologies such as organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays and electrorheological fluid based tactile pins

FPGA-Based Processor Acceleration for Image Processing Applications

FPGA-based embedded image processing systems offer considerable computing resources but present programming challenges when compared to software systems. The paper describes an approach based on an FPGA-based soft processor called Image Processing Processor (IPPro) which can operate up to 337 MHz on a high-end Xilinx FPGA family and gives details of the dataflow-based programming environment. The approach is demonstrated for a k-means clustering operation and a traffic sign recognition application, both of which have been prototyped on an Avnet Zedboard that has Xilinx Zynq-7000 system-on-chip (SoC). A number of parallel dataflow mapping options were explored giving a speed-up of 8 times for the k-means clustering using 16 IPPro cores, and a speed-up of 9.6 times for the morphology filter operation of the traffic sign recognition using 16 IPPro cores compared to their equivalent ARM-based software implementations. We show that for k-means clustering, the 16 IPPro cores implementation is 57, 28 and 1.7 times more power efficient (fps/W) than ARM Cortex-A7 CPU, nVIDIA GeForce GTX980 GPU and ARM Mali-T628 embedded GPU respectively

Modeling Power Consumption and Temperature in TLM Models

International audienceMany techniques and tools exist to estimate the power consumption and the temperature map of a chip. These tools help the hardware designers develop power efficient chips in the presence of temperature constraints. For this task, the application can be ignored or at least abstracted by some high level scenarios; at this stage, the actual embedded software is generally not available yet. However, after the hardware is defined, the embedded software can still have a significant influence on the power consumption; i.e., two implementations of the same application can consume more or less power. Moreover, the actual software powe