10,307 research outputs found
Multistage Switching Architectures for Software Routers
Software routers based on personal computer (PC) architectures are becoming an important alternative to proprietary and expensive network devices. However, software routers suffer from many limitations of the PC architecture, including, among others, limited bus and central processing unit (CPU) bandwidth, high memory access latency, limited scalability in terms of number of network interface cards, and lack of resilience mechanisms. Multistage PC-based architectures can be an interesting alternative since they permit us to i) increase the performance of single software routers, ii) scale router size, iii) distribute packet manipulation and control functionality, iv) recover from single-component failures, and v) incrementally upgrade router performance. We propose a specific multistage architecture, exploiting PC-based routers as switching elements, to build a high-speed, largesize,scalable, and reliable software router. A small-scale prototype of the multistage router is currently up and running in our labs, and performance evaluation is under wa
The Design of a System Architecture for Mobile Multimedia Computers
This chapter discusses the system architecture of a portable computer, called Mobile Digital Companion, which provides support for handling multimedia applications energy efficiently. Because battery life is limited and battery weight is an important factor for the size and the weight of the Mobile Digital Companion, energy management plays a crucial role in the architecture. As the Companion must remain usable in a variety of environments, it has to be flexible and adaptable to various operating conditions. The Mobile Digital Companion has an unconventional architecture that saves energy by using system decomposition at different levels of the architecture and exploits locality of reference with dedicated, optimised modules. The approach is based on dedicated functionality and the extensive use of energy reduction techniques at all levels of system design. The system has an architecture with a general-purpose processor accompanied by a set of heterogeneous autonomous programmable modules, each providing an energy efficient implementation of dedicated tasks. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies
A Fast Algorithm for Sparse Controller Design
We consider the task of designing sparse control laws for large-scale systems
by directly minimizing an infinite horizon quadratic cost with an
penalty on the feedback controller gains. Our focus is on an improved algorithm
that allows us to scale to large systems (i.e. those where sparsity is most
useful) with convergence times that are several orders of magnitude faster than
existing algorithms. In particular, we develop an efficient proximal Newton
method which minimizes per-iteration cost with a coordinate descent active set
approach and fast numerical solutions to the Lyapunov equations. Experimentally
we demonstrate the appeal of this approach on synthetic examples and real power
networks significantly larger than those previously considered in the
literature
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