VERILOG Implementation of Reconfigurable Routers for Low Power

Network-on-chip (NoC) designs are based on a compromise among latency, power dissipation, or energy, and the balance is usually defined at design time. However, setting all parameters, such as buffer size, at design time can cause either excessive power dissipation (originated by router under utilization), or a higher latency. The situation worsens whenever the application changes its communication pattern, e.g., a portable phone downloads a new service. Large buffer sizes can ensure performance during the execution of different applications, but unfortunately, these same buffers are mainly responsible for the router total power dissipation. Another aspect is that by sizing buffers for the worst case latency incurs extra dissipation for the mean case, which is much more frequent. In this paper we propose the use of a reconfigurable router, where the buffer slots are dynamically allocated to increase router efficiency in an NoC, even under rather different communication loads. In the proposed architecture, the depth of each buffer word used in the input channels of the routers can be reconfigured at run time. The reconfigurable router allows up to 52% power savings, while maintaining the same performance as that of a homogeneous router, but using a 64% smaller buffer size

ANÁLISIS TÉRMICO DE LA UNIDAD CENTRAL DE PROCESAMIENTO Y UNIDAD GRÁFICA DE PROCESAMIENTO DEL XBOX 360 ELITE

ResumenEn el presente documento se muestra  el diseño y análisis térmico  de la unidad central de procesamiento (CPU) y la unidad de procesamiento gráfico (GPU) de una consola de videojuegos  Xbox 360, esto a partir de las plataformas de Solidworks y Ansys  para poder determinar el por qué es que estas unidades fallan al sufrir sobrecalentamiento presentando un mensaje de error e64 que indica  que hay una perturbación en el zócalo de la unidad de procesamiento.Palabra(s) Clave: Análisis, CPU, Diseño, GPU, Xbox 360. THERMAL ANALYSIS OF THE CENTRAL PROCESSING UNIT AND GRAPHICS PROCESSING UNIT OF THE XBOX360 ELITEAbstractThis document shows the design and thermal analysis of the central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU) of an xbox360 video game console to determine why these units fail to suffer overheating and presenting an error message e64 indicating that there is a disturbance in the processing unit.Keywords: Analysis, CPU, Design, GPU, Xbox 360

Virtual Trainer for Physical Activities using a Natural User Interface

Despite the known health benefits of regular participation in physical activity people still refuse this practise. Nowadays, Virtual Reality (VR) is a very powerful and compelling computer tool by which humans can interface and interact with computer-generated environments. In this paper, we propose a virtual training system which can be customized for the physical activity level of the user. System provides real time visual action guide and a performance’s feedback of users through a Natural User Interface (NUI). We conduct a brief pilot study to evaluate our virtual trainers in which participants’ performance doing physical activities is evaluated via our NUI. Initial results indicate that virtual training through a NUI is motivating and entertaining for any kind of user, in particular for individuals with low level of physical activity.XV Workshop de Computación Gráfica, Imágenes y Visualización (WCGIV).Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Parallelizing Games for Heterogeneous Computing Environments

Game applications nowadays run on platforms that contain multiple and different types of processors. Benefiting from the available processing power requires: (1) Code to be designed to run in parallel; and (2) Efficient mapping techniques to schedule tasks optimally on appropriate processors for increasing performance. The work in this thesis is directed towards improving the execution time performance of game applications on host platforms. The methodology adopted consisted of the following different stages: (1) Studying the main features of game applications; (2) Investigating parallelization opportunities within these applications, (3) Identifying/designing the programming structures needed to realize those opportunities; and (4) Designing, implementing, verifying and testing the parallel programming structures developed to support heterogeneous processing and maximize use of available processing power. The research reported in this thesis presents a new framework for parallel programming of games. This framework consists of two major components which form the two main contributions of our work. These are (1) Sayl, a new design pattern to enable parallel programming of game applications and to reduce the amount of programmer work when writing parallel code; and (2) Arbiter Work Stealing, a new task scheduler capable of efficiently and automatically scheduling dynamically generated tasks to processors in a heterogeneous processing and memory environment. The framework was used to successfully parallelize the serial code of a sample game application to work in a heterogeneous processing environment. The parallel version shows far superior performance as compared to the serial version

Task Activity Vectors: A Novel Metric for Temperature-Aware and Energy-Efficient Scheduling

This thesis introduces the abstraction of the task activity vector to characterize applications by the processor resources they utilize. Based on activity vectors, the thesis introduces scheduling policies for improving the temperature distribution on the processor chip and for increasing energy efficiency by reducing the contention for shared resources of multicore and multithreaded processors

User-directed Vectorization in OmpSs

In the recent shift to the multi-core and many-core era, where systems tend to be heterogeneous even at chip level, SIMD instruction sets and accelerators that exploit parallelism in a similar way are coming into prominence in new multiprocessors and systems. This heterogeneity, even at chip level, is causing a lot of trouble to compilers and parallel programming models in terms of being able to maximize the profitability of the computational resources in an easy, generic, efficient and portable fashion. Although a lot of work on automatic vectorization/simdization techniques has been done over the years, compilers show important limitations when vectorizing code with pointers and function calls because of the traditional compiler analysis limitations, such as those in pointers aliasing analysis. Concerning parallel programming models, some of them are restricted to specific architectures while other portable ones, such as OpenCL, require programmers to face low-level architecture details and hard source code transformations, presenting important performance problems among different architectures, which requires new tuning efforts. In an attempt to offer a unified and generic solution to the auto-vectorization/simdization and portability problems, we propose User-directed Vectorization in OmpSs, a high-level programming model extension that offers developers the possibility to easily guide the compiler in the vectorization process just introducing some simple notations on the vectorizable areas of the code, such loops and functions. We focused our particular design, implementation and evaluation on the Intel SSE instruction set for CPUs, getting the same or higher speed-ups than using the GCC compiler auto-vectorization in easily-vectorizable codes, and a performance improvement of up to 2.30 in more complex codes where GCC is not able to apply auto-vectorization and the hand-coded OpenCL version reaches a speed-up of 2.23

O uso de jogos eletrônicos no ensino de conceitos básicos de inovação: compreendendo o uso da tecnologia

Introduction - Electronic games are the object of great human and cultural fascination, causing significant impacts on society and contributing to impactful innovations in the way they are used. Objective - To understand the history of electronic games and their relationship with technological innovation and computational technologies, to study their feasibility and impact with the creation of a game prototype around innovation. Methodology - Investigative research with exhaustive bibliographic deepening of the history of electronic games and most impactful innovations. Deductive and exploratory, producing from the acquired knowledge a prototype of an electronic game around innovation with application and data collection. Results - The IDEABREAKER game prototype was created, which deals with basic concepts of innovation where an audience of 200 people tested the application with significant engagement results. 51% of users played more than once, 96.5% played at least once and the average playing time was 15% longer than the control average. Conclusions - Electronic games are a potential tool for use around innovation and for the dissemination of related knowledge in a productive way and with a high potential for engagement.Introdução - Os jogos eletrônicos são objeto de grande deslumbramento humano e cultural causando impactos significativos na sociedade e contribuindo para inovações impactantes na sua forma de uso. Objetivo - Compreender a história dos jogos eletrônicos e sua relação com a inovação tecnológica e as tecnologias computacionais, estudar sua viabilidade e impacto com a criação de um protótipo de jogo na área de inovação. Metodologia - Pesquisa investigativa com exaustivo aprofundamento bibliográfico da história dos jogos eletrônicos e inovações mais impactantes. Dedutiva e exploratória produzindo a partir dos conhecimentos adquiridos um protótipo de jogo eletrônico na área da inovação com aplicação e coleta de dados. Resultados - Foi concebido o protótipo IDEABREAKER jogo que trata de conceitos básicos de inovação onde um público de 200 pessoas testou o aplicativo com resultados significativos de engajamento. 51% dos usuários jogaram mais de uma única vez, 96,5% jogaram ao menos uma única vez e o tempo médio de jogo foi 15% maior que a média de controle. Conclusões – Jogos eletrônicos são uma potencial ferramenta para uso na área de inovação e para a disseminação do conhecimento relacionado de forma produtiva e com alto potencial de engajamento

Home gateway do Living Usability Lab

Mestrado em Sistemas de InformaçãoA população sénior tem crescido exponencialmente nos últimos anos, o que leva a que haja uma procura de recursos de prestação de serviços de saúde que é maior do que a oferta. De forma a resolver este problema surgiu o Ambient Assisted Living para apoiar seniores no seu quotidiano, dentro das suas habitações. Neste documento é descrito o desenvolvimento do Home Gateway para apoio aos serviços Ambient Assisted Living, do projeto Living Usability Lab, e respetiva arquitetura. O Home Gateway é a entidade responsável por gerir todos os recursos oferecidos na habitação do sénior. A arquitetura deste sistema é baseada na arquitetura orientada a serviços, utilizando o OSGi. Os recursos são todos disponibilizados através de serviços Web pelo que são descritos alguns dos serviços implementados. O Home Gateway desenvolvido responde eficientemente à necessidade de este ser autónomo, de interoperabilidade, de segurança, de escalabilidade, de conter monitorização, de personalização, de adaptação, de ser embebido e distribuído, de providenciar interação explícita, entre outros. O sistema desenvolvido é passível de ser expandido a outras áreas de saúde e a outros leques etários, para além do apoio à população sénior na própria habitação. Em suma e tendo em conta as conclusões e limitações do trabalho desenvolvido torna-se evidente a possibilidade de trabalhos futuros focados em soluções que podem vir a ser implementadas.The elder population has been growing exponentially in the last years, which results in a greater search of provision of health care resources comparing to the provision of that services. In order to solve this problem the Ambient Assisted Living emerged to support the elderly in their daily life, within their homes. In this document, it’s described the development of the Home Gateway to support the services of Ambient Assisted Living, of Living Usability Lab project and its architecture. The Home Gateway is the entity responsible for managing all the resources available in the elderly's house. The Home Gateway architecture is based on service-oriented architecture using OSGi. The resources are all available through Web services, hence some of the implemented services are described. The developed Home Gateway responds effectively to the needs of being autonomous, of interoperability, security, scalability, monitoring, customization, adaptation, being impregnated and distributed, providing explicit interaction, among others. The system that has been developed may be used in other health areas and with different age ranges in addition to supporting the elderly in their own homes. In brief, and taking into account the conclusions and limitations of the developed work, it becomes clear the possibility of future work on the field focused on solutions that can be implemented