A FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Software Architecture for Highly Dependable Systems

Nowadays, systems-on-chip are commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware. The use of hybrid architectures based on a mixture of general purpose processors and reconfigurable components has gained importance across the scientific community allowing a significant improvement of computational performance. Along with the demand for performance, the great sensitivity of reconfigurable hardware devices to physical defects lead to the request of highly dependable and fault tolerant systems. This paper proposes an FPGA-based reconfigurable software architecture able to abstract the underlying hardware platform giving an homogeneous view of it. The abstraction mechanism is used to implement fault tolerance mechanisms with a minimum impact on the system performanc

FASTER: Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration

The FASTER (Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration) EU FP7 project, aims to ease the design and implementation of dynamically changing hardware systems. Our motivation stems from the promise reconfigurable systems hold for achieving high performance and extending product functionality and lifetime via the addition of new features that operate at hardware speed. However, designing a changing hardware system is both challenging and time-consuming. FASTER facilitates the use of reconfigurable technology by providing a complete methodology enabling designers to easily specify, analyze, implement and verify applications on platforms with general-purpose processors and acceleration modules implemented in the latest reconfigurable technology. Our tool-chain supports both coarse- and fine-grain FPGA reconfiguration, while during execution a flexible run-time system manages the reconfigurable resources. We target three applications from different domains. We explore the way each application benefits from reconfiguration, and then we asses them and the FASTER tools, in terms of performance, area consumption and accuracy of analysis

Knowledge Transfer in Space Science

Knowledge Transfer (KT) is a major part of technical aspect in space science. By involving the research council funded Knowledge Transfer Account (KTA) programme and the university industrial and commercial partners, these strengthen the future research collaboration amongst the university, industrial, commercial, scientific and engineering communities. Since the space science research and development is a multi-billion pounds sterling industry, it is often referred as the most advanced research and technological breakthrough. The industry inventions including scratch-resistant lenses, smoke detectors, cordless tools, water filters become the popular industrial products. They benefit us enormously. This paper is to present the Future Universities and Future Knowledge Systems for KT in space science. It includes the discussion of the European Union (EU) Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and its einfrastructure projects, Astrogrid Virtual Observatory, Gaia Data Centre, European Space Agency (ESA) XMMNewton Satellite Reflection Grating Spectrometer and Optical Monitor, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Swift Explorer mission UltraViolet/Optical Telescope, Hinode Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) imaging spectrometer, Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), Cassini Electron Spectrometer (ELS), CryoSat-2 mission simulation and EnviSat radar altimeter, GlobIce, SOHO, Cluster-2, ESA’s Exobiology on Mars (ExoMars) Panoramic Cameras (PanCam) and stereo mapping plus many future space missions in the pipeline. The United Kingdom (UK) Government’s Engineering Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) and University College London (UCL) develop the programme of exchanging knowledge via their KTA. The account itself has a wide range of industrial and commercial partners. The aim of the programme is to attract the highly skilled people and the high-tech industries (such as space industry) to innovate and to develop the opportunities in the industrial/commercial fields and value added market. All these can be achieved with the collaboration and KT in the Future Universities and Future Knowledge System