Toward an Energy Efficient Language and Compiler for (Partially) Reversible Algorithms

We introduce a new programming language for expressing reversibility, Energy-Efficient Language (Eel), geared toward algorithm design and implementation. Eel is the first language to take advantage of a partially reversible computation model, where programs can be composed of both reversible and irreversible operations. In this model, irreversible operations cost energy for every bit of information created or destroyed. To handle programs of varying degrees of reversibility, Eel supports a log stack to automatically trade energy costs for space costs, and introduces many powerful control logic operators including protected conditional, general conditional, protected loops, and general loops. In this paper, we present the design and compiler for the three language levels of Eel along with an interpreter to simulate and annotate incurred energy costs of a program.Comment: 17 pages, 0 additional figures, pre-print to be published in The 8th Conference on Reversible Computing (RC2016

JPEG steganography with particle swarm optimization accelerated by AVX

Digital steganography aims at hiding secret messages in digital data transmitted over insecure channels. The JPEG format is prevalent in digital communication, and images are often used as cover objects in digital steganography. Optimization methods can improve the properties of images with embedded secret but introduce additional computational complexity to their processing. AVX instructions available in modern CPUs are, in this work, used to accelerate data parallel operations that are part of image steganography with advanced optimizations.Web of Science328art. no. e544

Multiple objective optimisation of data and control paths in a behavioural silicon compiler

The objective of this research was to implement an 'intelligent' silicon compiler that provides the ability to automatically explore the design space and optimise a design, given as a behavioural description, with respect to multiple objectives. The objective has been met by the implementation of the MOODS Silicon Compiler. The user submits goals or objectives to the system which automatically finds near optimal solutions. As objectives may be conflicting, trade-offs between synthesis tasks are essential and consequently their simultaneous execution must occur. Tasks are decomposed into behaviour preserving transformations which, due to their completeness, can be applied in any sequence to a multi-level representation of the design. An accurate evaluation of the design is ensured by feeding up technology dependent information to a cost function. The cost function guides the simulated annealing algorithm in applying transformations to iteratively optimise the design. The simulated annealing algorithm provides an abstractness from the transformations and designer's objectives. This abstractness avoids the construction of tailored heuristics which pre-program trade-offs into a system. Pre-programmed trade-offs are used in most systems by assuming a particular shape to the trade-off curve and are inappropriate as trade-offs are technology dependent. The lack of pre-programmed trade-offs in the MOODS system allows it to adapt to changes in technology or library cells. The choice of cells and their subsequent sharing are based on the user's criteria expressed in the cost function, rather than being pre-programmed into the system. The results show that implementations created by MOODS are better than or equal to those achieved by other systems. Comparisons with other systems highlighted the importance of specifying all of a design's data as the lack of data misrepresents the design leading to misleading comparisons. The MOODS synthesis system includes an efficient method for automated design space exploration where a varied set of near optimal implementations can be produced from a single behavioural specification. Design space exploration is an important aspect of designing by high-level synthesis and in the development of synthesis systems. It allows the designer to obtain a perspicuous characterization of a design's design space allowing him to investigate alternative designs

Detailed simulations of cell biology with Smoldyn 2.1.

Most cellular processes depend on intracellular locations and random collisions of individual protein molecules. To model these processes, we developed algorithms to simulate the diffusion, membrane interactions, and reactions of individual molecules, and implemented these in the Smoldyn program. Compared to the popular MCell and ChemCell simulators, we found that Smoldyn was in many cases more accurate, more computationally efficient, and easier to use. Using Smoldyn, we modeled pheromone response system signaling among yeast cells of opposite mating type. This model showed that secreted Bar1 protease might help a cell identify the fittest mating partner by sharpening the pheromone concentration gradient. This model involved about 200,000 protein molecules, about 7000 cubic microns of volume, and about 75 minutes of simulated time; it took about 10 hours to run. Over the next several years, as faster computers become available, Smoldyn will allow researchers to model and explore systems the size of entire bacterial and smaller eukaryotic cells

A new approach to reversible computing with applications to speculative parallel simulation

In this thesis, we propose an innovative approach to reversible computing that shifts the focus from the operations to the memory outcome of a generic program. This choice allows us to overcome some typical challenges of "plain" reversible computing. Our methodology is to instrument a generic application with the help of an instrumentation tool, namely Hijacker, which we have redesigned and developed for the purpose. Through compile-time instrumentation, we enhance the program's code to keep track of the memory trace it produces until the end. Regardless of the complexity behind the generation of each computational step of the program, we can build inverse machine instructions just by inspecting the instruction that is attempting to write some value to memory. Therefore from this information, we craft an ad-hoc instruction that conveys this old value and the knowledge of where to replace it. This instruction will become part of a more comprehensive structure, namely the reverse window. Through this structure, we have sufficient information to cancel all the updates done by the generic program during its execution. In this writing, we will discuss the structure of the reverse window, as the building block for the whole reversing framework we designed and finally realized. Albeit we settle our solution in the specific context of the parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) adopting the Time Warp synchronization protocol, this framework paves the way for further general-purpose development and employment. We also present two additional innovative contributions coming from our innovative reversibility approach, both of them still embrace traditional state saving-based rollback strategy. The first contribution aims to harness the advantages of both the possible approaches. We implement the rollback operation combining state saving together with our reversible support through a mathematical model. This model enables the system to choose in autonomicity the best rollback strategy, by the mutable runtime dynamics of programs. The second contribution explores an orthogonal direction, still related to reversible computing aspects. In particular, we will address the problem of reversing shared libraries. Indeed, leading from their nature, shared objects are visible to the whole system and so does every possible external modification of their code. As a consequence, it is not possible to instrument them without affecting other unaware applications. We propose a different method to deal with the instrumentation of shared objects. All our innovative proposals have been assessed using the last generation of the open source ROOT-Sim PDES platform, where we integrated our solutions. ROOT-Sim is a C-based package implementing a general purpose simulation environment based on the Time Warp synchronization protocol