8 research outputs found
Scheduling, Binding and Routing System for a Run-Time Reconfigurable Operator Based Multimedia Architecture
International audienceThis article presents an integrated environment for application scheduling, binding and routing used for the run-time reconfigurable, operator based, ROMA multimedia architecture. The environment is very flexible and after a minor modification can support other reconfigurable architectures. Currently, it supports the architecture model composed of a bank of single (double) port memories, two communication networks (with different topologies) and a set of run-time functionally reconfigurable non-pipelined and pipelined operators. The main novelty of this work is simultaneous solving of the scheduling, binding and routing tasks. This frequently generates optimal results, which has been shown by extensive experiments using the constraint programming paradigm. In order to show flexibility of our environment, we have used it in this article for optimization of application scheduling, binding and routing (the case of the non-pipelined execution model) and for space exploration (case of the pipelined execution model)
Rapid Control Prototyping for Reconfigurable Assembly Workstations
Department of System Design and Control EngineeringDiverse customer demands and rapid technology change have led to a paradigm shift in the manufacturing industry, from mass production to mass customization, and eventually to personalization. In the past, manufacturers have faced a challenge to produce a large volume of a product at low cost. Today, they should however produce a very small volume of a highly personalized product at mass production cost. In order to meet these challenges, rapid configuration or reconfiguration of manufacturing systems are crucial. Therefore, many studies have discussed reconfigurable manufacturing systems, emphasizing on dynamic scheduling and flexible shop floor logistics. However, little attention has given to the hardware control and the corresponding software development, although they are very important and time-consuming tasks for manufacturing system reconfiguration.
Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to quickly design, test, and verify the control software both in a virtual and in a real environment. To do this, we propose a procedure of rapid control prototyping consisting of virtual factory construction, control software development and a final calibration procedure. Rapid control prototyping facilitates engineers to quickly develop control software including communication inputs and outputs, prior to constructing a real shop floor. The proposed simultaneous procedure of manufacturing system design and its control software development will significantly reduce the reconfiguration time of a manufacturing system.clos
Re-targetable tools and methodologies for the efficient deployment of high-level source code on coarse-grained dynamically reconfigurable architectures
Reconfigurable computing traditionally consists of a data path machine (such as an FPGA)
acting as a co-processor to a conventional microprocessor. This involves partitioning the application such that the data path intensive parts are implemented on the reconfigurable fabric, and
the control flow intensive parts are implemented on the microprocessor. Often the two parts
have to be written in different languages. New highly parallel data path architectures allow parallelism approaching that of FPGAs, but are able to be reconfigured very rapidly. As a result, it
is possible to use these architectures to perform control flow in a manner similar to a microprocessor, and thus a complete program can be described from an unmodified high-level language
(in particular C). This overcomes the historical instruction-level parallelism (ILP) wall.To make full use of the available parallelism , existing microprocessor tool flows are insufficient.
Data path machines are typically programmed via HDL tools from the ASIC design world.
This expresses algorithm s at a low er level than the application algorithm s are typically developed in. The work in this thesis builds upon earlier work to allow applications to be described
from high-level languages, by employing low-level optimisations in the compiler back-end and
working from the assembly, to maximise parallel efficiency. This consists of scheduling, where
known techniques are used to pack instructions into basic blocks that map well to the reconfigurable core (optimising spatial efficiency); then automatic pipelining is applied to dramatically
improve the achievable throughput (optimising temporal efficiency). Together these can be
thought of as “instruction-level parallelism done right”. Speed-ups of more than an order of
magnitude were achieved, yielding throughputs of 180-380M Pixels/s on typical image signal
processing tasks, matching the performance of hard-wired ASICs.Furthermore, conventional software-based simulation technologies for data path machines are
too slow for use in application verification. This thesis demonstrates how a high-speed software
emulator can be created for self-controlled dynamically reconfigurable data path machines,
using a static serialisation of the data paths in each configuration context. This yields run-time
performance several orders of magnitude higher than existing techniques, making it suitable for
use in feedback-directed optimisation
Multi-core architectures with coarse-grained dynamically reconfigurable processors for broadband wireless access technologies
Broadband Wireless Access technologies have significant market potential, especially the
WiMAX protocol which can deliver data rates of tens of Mbps. Strong demand for high
performance WiMAX solutions is forcing designers to seek help from multi-core processors
that offer competitive advantages in terms of all performance metrics, such as speed, power
and area. Through the provision of a degree of flexibility similar to that of a DSP and
performance and power consumption advantages approaching that of an ASIC,
coarse-grained dynamically reconfigurable processors are proving to be strong candidates
for processing cores used in future high performance multi-core processor systems.
This thesis investigates multi-core architectures with a newly emerging dynamically
reconfigurable processor – RICA, targeting WiMAX physical layer applications. A novel
master-slave multi-core architecture is proposed, using RICA processing cores. A SystemC
based simulator, called MRPSIM, is devised to model this multi-core architecture. This
simulator provides fast simulation speed and timing accuracy, offers flexible architectural
options to configure the multi-core architecture, and enables the analysis and investigation
of multi-core architectures. Meanwhile a profiling-driven mapping methodology is
developed to partition the WiMAX application into multiple tasks as well as schedule and
map these tasks onto the multi-core architecture, aiming to reduce the overall system
execution time. Both the MRPSIM simulator and the mapping methodology are seamlessly
integrated with the existing RICA tool flow.
Based on the proposed master-slave multi-core architecture, a series of diverse
homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-core solutions are designed for different fixed
WiMAX physical layer profiles. Implemented in ANSI C and executed on the MRPSIM
simulator, these multi-core solutions contain different numbers of cores, combine various memory architectures and task partitioning schemes, and deliver high throughputs at
relatively low area costs. Meanwhile a design space exploration methodology is developed
to search the design space for multi-core systems to find suitable solutions under certain
system constraints. Finally, laying a foundation for future multithreading exploration on the
proposed multi-core architecture, this thesis investigates the porting of a real-time operating
system – Micro C/OS-II to a single RICA processor. A multitasking version of WiMAX is
implemented on a single RICA processor with the operating system support
System-level scheduling on instruction cell based reconfigurable systems
This paper presents a new operation chaining reconfigurable scheduling algorithm (CRS) based on list scheduling that maximizes instruction level parallelism available in distributed high performance instruction cell based reconfigurable systems. Unlike other typical scheduling methods, it considers the placement and routing effect, register assignment and advanced operation chaining compilation technique to generate higher performance scheduled code. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated here using a recently developed industrial distributed reconfigurable instruction cell based architecture [11]. The results show that schedules using this approach achieve equivalent throughput to VLIW architectures but at much lower power consumption. 1