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An occam Style Communications System for UNIX Networks
This document describes the design of a communications system which provides occam style communications primitives under a Unix environment, using TCP/IP protocols, and any number of other protocols deemed suitable as underlying transport layers. The system will integrate with a low overhead scheduler/kernel without incurring significant costs to the execution of processes within the run time environment. A survey of relevant occam and occam3 features and related research is followed by a look at the Unix and TCP/IP facilities which determine our working constraints, and a description of the T9000 transputer's Virtual Channel Processor, which was instrumental in our formulation. Drawing from the information presented here, a design for the communications system is subsequently proposed. Finally, a preliminary investigation of methods for lightweight access control to shared resources in an environment which does not provide support for critical sections, semaphores, or busy waiting, is made. This is presented with relevance to mutual exclusion problems which arise within the proposed design. Future directions for the evolution of this project are discussed in conclusion
Castell: a heterogeneous cmp architecture scalable to hundreds of processors
Technology improvements and power constrains have taken multicore architectures to dominate
microprocessor designs over uniprocessors. At the same time, accelerator based architectures
have shown that heterogeneous multicores are very efficient and can provide high throughput for
parallel applications, but with a high-programming effort. We propose Castell a scalable chip
multiprocessor architecture that can be programmed as uniprocessors, and provides the high
throughput of accelerator-based architectures.
Castell relies on task-based programming models that simplify software development. These
models use a runtime system that dynamically finds, schedules, and adds hardware-specific features
to parallel tasks. One of these features is DMA transfers to overlap computation and data
movement, which is known as double buffering. This feature allows applications on Castell
to tolerate large memory latencies and lets us design the memory system focusing on memory
bandwidth.
In addition to provide programmability and the design of the memory system, we have used
a hierarchical NoC and added a synchronization module. The NoC design distributes memory
traffic efficiently to allow the architecture to scale. The synchronization module is a consequence
of the large performance degradation of application for large synchronization latencies.
Castell is mainly an architecture framework that enables the definition of domain-specific
implementations, fine-tuned to a particular problem or application. So far, Castell has been
successfully used to propose heterogeneous multicore architectures for scientific kernels, video
decoding (using H.264), and protein sequence alignment (using Smith-Waterman and clustalW).
It has also been used to explore a number of architecture optimizations such as enhanced DMA
controllers, and architecture support for task-based programming models.
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Acceleration of stereo-matching on multi-core CPU and GPU
This paper presents an accelerated version of a
dense stereo-correspondence algorithm for two different parallelism
enabled architectures, multi-core CPU and GPU. The
algorithm is part of the vision system developed for a binocular
robot-head in the context of the CloPeMa 1 research project.
This research project focuses on the conception of a new clothes
folding robot with real-time and high resolution requirements
for the vision system. The performance analysis shows that
the parallelised stereo-matching algorithm has been significantly
accelerated, maintaining 12x and 176x speed-up respectively
for multi-core CPU and GPU, compared with non-SIMD singlethread
CPU. To analyse the origin of the speed-up and gain
deeper understanding about the choice of the optimal hardware,
the algorithm was broken into key sub-tasks and the performance
was tested for four different hardware architectures
Programming MPSoC platforms: Road works ahead
This paper summarizes a special session on multicore/multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) programming challenges. The current trend towards MPSoC platforms in most computing domains does not only mean a radical change in computer architecture. Even more important from a SW developer´s viewpoint, at the same time the classical sequential von Neumann programming model needs to be overcome. Efficient utilization of the MPSoC HW resources demands for radically new models and corresponding SW development tools, capable of exploiting the available parallelism and guaranteeing bug-free parallel SW. While several standards are established in the high-performance computing domain (e.g. OpenMP), it is clear that more innovations are required for successful\ud
deployment of heterogeneous embedded MPSoC. On the other hand, at least for coming years, the freedom for disruptive programming technologies is limited by the huge amount of certified sequential code that demands for a more pragmatic, gradual tool and code replacement strategy
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