Increased reliability on Intel GPUs via software diverse redundancy

In the past decade, Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized various industries, including automotive, avionics, and health sectors. The installation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is now a reality, with the goal of achieving fully self-driving cars (SDCs) in the near future. ADAS and Autonomous Driving (AD) systems require processing vast amounts of data at high frequency using complex algorithms (Deep Learning (DL)) to meet tight time constraints (Real Time (RT)). Traditional computing has become a bottleneck, with CPUs unable to handle the data efficiently. High-performance GPUs have partially fulfilled these timing constraints, leading to continuous innovation in device performance and efficiency. For example, Nvidia introduced the Jetson AGX Xavier SoC in 2017, designed for machine learning applications in the automotive sector. However, AD and ADAS challenges also involve safety constraints, such as functional safety. Redundancy is necessary for identifying and correcting erroneous outcomes. To ensure high safety levels, diverse redundancy is used to avoid common cause faults (CCF). High-performance hardware for AD must be verified and validated (V&V) to ensure safety goals, but these processes can be costly. The automotive industry seeks to avoid non-recurring costs by using commercial off-the-shelf products (COTS). However, COTS devices have drawbacks, including limited redundancy and guarded implementation details. Researchers are developing software-only diverse redundancy solutions on top of COTS devices to overcome these limitations. Two main challenges are ensuring redundant computation for error detection and guaranteeing diverse redundancy to detect errors even when they affect all replicas. Current solutions are limited and mostly focused on NVIDIA GPUs. This thesis presents a software-only solution for diverse redundancy on Intel GPUs, providing strong diversity guarantees for the first time. Built on OpenCL, a hardware-agnostic programming language, the technique relies on intrinsics-special functions optimized by integrators. The intrinsics enable identifying hardware threads on the GPU and smart tailoring of workload geometry and allocation to specific computing elements. As a result, redundant threads use physically diverse execution units, meeting diverse redundancy requirements with affordable performance overheads. Several scenarios are developed to measure the impact of modifications to a standard OpenCL kernel execution. First, allocating only half of the available GPU resources; then, overriding the scheduler to use half of the resources; next, duplicating the work to mimic two kernel execution; and finally, executing both kernels in independent parts of the GPU

A software-only approach to enable diverse redundancy on Intel GPUs for safety-related kernels

Autonomous Driving (AD) systems rely on object detection and tracking algorithms that require processing high volumes of data at high frequency. High-performance graphics processing units (GPUs) have been shown to provide the required computing performance. AD also carries functional safety requirements such as diverse redundancy for critical software tasks like object detection. This implies that software must be executed redundantly (in a single GPU for efficiency reasons), and with some form of diversity so that a single fault does not cause the same error in both redundant executions. Unfortunately, high-performance GPUs lack explicit hardware means for diverse redundancy, and software-based solutions with limited guarantees have only been provided for NVIDIA GPUs. This paper presents a software-only solution to enable diverse redundancy on Intel GPUs achieving, for the first time, strong guarantees on the diversity provided. By smartly tailoring workload geometry and managing workload allocation to execution units with thread-level wrappers, we guarantee that redundant threads use physically diverse execution units, hence meeting diverse redundancy requirements with affordable performance overheads.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant PID2019-107255GB-C21/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, and by the project AUTOtech.agil of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (support code 01IS22088I)Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

How strong is the linkage between tourism and economic growth in Europe?

In this study, we examine the dynamic relationship between tourism growth and economic growth, using a newly introduced spillover index approach. Based on monthly data for 10 European countries over the period 1995{2012, our analysis reveals the following empirical regularities. First, the tourism-economic growth relationship is not stable over time in terms of both magnitude and direction, indicating that the tourism{led economic growth (TLEG) and the economic{driven tourism growth (EDTG) hypotheses are time{dependent. Second, the aforementioned relationship is also highly economic event{dependent, as it is influenced by the Great Recession of 2007 and the ongoing Eurozone debt crisis that began in 2010. Finally, the impact of these economic events is more pronounced in Cyprus,Greece, Portugal and Spain, which are the European countries that have witnessed the greatest economic downturn since 2009. Plausible explanations of these results are provided and policy implications are drawn

Aspects of sustainability in the destination branding process: a bottom-up approach

The concept of sustainability is based on the premise that the inhabitants of a destination should be involved in the way that destination is managed and promoted. At the same time, the literature of place branding emphasizes the important role of local stakeholders in the creation of a true and reliable place brand. In fact, the process of developing a destination brand begins with the aim of shaping the identity of a destination; what the destination stands for. The sustainable dimensions of the destination branding process are explored, while focus groups and structured questionnaires are used to evaluate the usefulness of projection techniques in the process of building a brand identity. It seems that the use of the personification technique could work as an effective destination positioning exercise and as an alternative proposal to the outdated clichés used in tourism promotion

Development and Characterization of Inkjet Printed Edible Films for Buccal Delivery of B-Complex Vitamins

Buccal films containing two vitamins, i.e., thiamine hydrochloride (THCl) and nicotinic acid (NA), were fabricated via two-dimensional (2D) inkjet printing. For the preparation of buccal films, solubility studies and rheological evaluations were conducted in distilled water and propylene-glycol (PG) as main solvent and viscosity/surface tension modifier, respectively. The increased solubility in the solvents’ mixture indicated that manufacturing of several doses of the THCl and NA is achievable. Various doses were deposited onto sugar-sheet substrates, by increasing the number of printing passes. The physiochemical characterization (SEM, DSC, FTIR) revealed that inkjet printing does not affect the solid state of the matrix. Water uptake studies were conducted, to compare the different vitamin-loaded formulations. The in vitro release studies indicated the burst release of both vitamins within 10 min, a preferable feature for buccal administration. The in vitro permeation studies indicated that higher concentrations of the vitamins onto the sugar sheet improved the in vitro permeation performance of printed formulations

Effect of Glyceryl Monoolein Addition on the Foaming Properties and Stability of Whipped Oleogels

Medium Chain Triglyceride (MCT) oil was successfully combined with Glyceryl Monostearate (GMS) and Glyceryl Monoolein (GMO) to form oleogels that were subsequently whipped to form stable oleofoams. The co-crystallization of GMS and GMO at a ratio of 20:1, 20:2.5, and 20:5 within MCT oil was studied through Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), X-ray Diffraction analysis (XRD), rheological analysis, Fluorescence Recovery after Photobleaching (FRAP), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), and polarized microscopy. The addition of 5% GMO resulted in the production of more stable oleogels in terms of crystal structure and higher peak melting point, rendering this formulation suitable for pharmaceutical applications that are intended to be used internally and those that require stability at temperatures close to 40 °C. All formulations were whipped to form oleofoams that were evaluated for their storage stability for prolonged period at different temperatures. The results show that oleofoams containing 5% MGO retained their foam characteristics even after 3 months of storage under different temperature conditions

Oral Drug Delivery Systems Based on Ordered Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles for Modulating the Release of Aprepitant

Two different types of ordered mesoporous nanoparticles, namely MCM-41 and MCM-48, with similar pore sizes but different pore connectivity, were loaded with aprepitant via a passive diffusion method. The percentage of the loaded active agent, along with the encapsulation efficiency, was evaluated using High-performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) analysis complemented by Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA). The determination of the pore properties of the mesoporous particles before and after the drug loading revealed the presence of confined aprepitant in the pore structure of the particles, while Powder X-ray Diffractometry(pXRD), Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), and FTIR experiments indicated that the drug is in an amorphous state. The release profiles of the drug from the two different mesoporous materials were studied in various release media and revealed an aprepitant release up to 45% when sink conditions are applied. The cytocompatibility of the silica nanoparticles was assessed in Caco-2 cell monolayers, in the presence and absence of the active agent, suggesting that they can be used as carriers of aprepitant without presenting any toxicity in vitro