FPGAs for the Masses: Affordable Hardware Synthesis from Domain-Specific Languages

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have the unique ability to be configured into application-specific architectures that are well suited to specific computing problems. This enables them to achieve performances and energy efficiencies that outclass other processor-based architectures, such as Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs), Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). Despite this, FPGAs are yet to gain widespread adoption, especially among application and software developers, because of their laborious application development process that requires hardware design expertise. In some application areas, domain-specific hardware synthesis tools alleviate this problem by using a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to hide the low-level hardware details and also improve productivity of the developer. Additionally, these tools leverage domain knowledge to perform optimizations and produce high-quality hardware designs. While this approach holds great promise, the significant effort and cost of developing such domain-specific tools make it unaffordable in many application areas. In this thesis, we develop techniques to reduce the effort and cost of developing domain-specific hardware synthesis tools. To demonstrate our approach, we develop a toolchain to generate complete hardware systems from high-level functional specifications written in a DSL. Firstly, our approach uses language embedding and type-directed staging to develop a DSL and compiler in a cost-effective manner. To further reduce effort, we develop this compiler by composing reusable optimization modules, and integrate it with existing hardware synthesis tools. However, most synthesis tools require users to have hardware design knowledge to produce high-quality results. Therefore, secondly, to facilitate people without hardware design skills to develop domain-specific tools, we develop a methodology to generate high-quality hardware designs from well known computational patterns, such as map, zipWith, reduce and foreach; computational patterns are algorithmic methods that capture the nature of computation and communication and can be easily understood and used without expert knowledge. In our approach, we decompose the DSL specifications into constituent computational patterns and exploit the properties of these patterns, such as degree of parallelism, interdependence between operations and data-access characteristics, to generate high-quality hardware modules to implement them, and compose them into a complete system design. Lastly, we extended our methodology to automatically parallelize computations across multiple hardware modules to benefit from the spatial parallelism of the FPGA as well as overcome performance problems caused by non-sequential data access patterns and long access latency to external memory. To achieve this, we utilize the data-access properties of the computational patterns to automatically identify synchronization requirements and generate such multi-module designs from the same high-level functional specifications. Driven by power and performance constraints, today the world is turning to reconfigurable technology (i.e., FPGAs) to meet the computational needs of tomorrow. In this light, this work addresses the cardinal problem of making tomorrow's computing infrastructure programmable to application developers

Front-Line Physicians' Satisfaction with Information Systems in Hospitals

Day-to-day operations management in hospital units is difficult due to continuously varying situations, several actors involved and a vast number of information systems in use. The aim of this study was to describe front-line physicians' satisfaction with existing information systems needed to support the day-to-day operations management in hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was used and data chosen with stratified random sampling were collected in nine hospitals. Data were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The response rate was 65 % (n = 111). The physicians reported that information systems support their decision making to some extent, but they do not improve access to information nor are they tailored for physicians. The respondents also reported that they need to use several information systems to support decision making and that they would prefer one information system to access important information. Improved information access would better support physicians' decision making and has the potential to improve the quality of decisions and speed up the decision making process.Peer reviewe

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Boo