Characterization of Speech Recognition Systems on GPU Architectures

This master thesis characterizes the performance and energy bottlenecks of speech recognition systems when running on modern GPU, with the aim of providing useful information for designing future GPU architectures, as well as proposing a GPU configuration more well-suited for speech recognition

Activació de l’enllaç CH d’imines amb compostos de ruteni

Treballs Finals de Grau de Química, Facultat de Química, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2020, Tutor: Jaume Granell SanvicenteThe synthesis of different Schiff’s bases has been described in order to use them as ligand for the subsequent cyclometallation reaction. The cyclometallation reaction has been described starting with a half sandwich ruthenium complex, [RuCl2(p-cymene)2]2, and different benzylimines via ortho – CH activation. The reaction takes place at room temperature in methanol and in a short period of time (4 hours), using 2 equivalents of potassium acetate as deprotonation agent. This cyclometallation reaction leads the endo cyclometallated ruthenium product. The resultant N – Ru – C metallocycle compound is formed by a five-member ring containing the C = N bond. The molecular structures of each compound have been characterised by different spectroscopic techniques (IR, NMR and Mass) showing that the obtained product is in agreement with the proposed structures

An ultra low-power hardware accelerator for automatic speech recognition

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, especially in the mobile segment. Fast and accurate ASR comes at a high energy cost which is not affordable for the tiny power budget of mobile devices. Hardware acceleration can reduce power consumption of ASR systems, while delivering high-performance. In this paper, we present an accelerator for large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition. It focuses on the Viterbi search algorithm, that represents the main bottleneck in an ASR system. The proposed design includes innovative techniques to improve the memory subsystem, since memory is identified as the main bottleneck for performance and power in the design of these accelerators. We propose a prefetching scheme tailored to the needs of an ASR system that hides main memory latency for a large fraction of the memory accesses with a negligible impact on area. In addition, we introduce a novel bandwidth saving technique that removes 20% of the off-chip memory accesses issued during the Viterbi search. The proposed design outperforms software implementations running on the CPU by orders of magnitude and achieves 1.7x speedup over a highly optimized CUDA implementation running on a high-end Geforce GTX 980 GPU, while reducing by two orders of magnitude (287x) the energy required to convert the speech into text.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Port de zeOS a arquitectura ARM: Raspberry pi

[CATALÀ] L’arquitectura ARM ha vist un important augment d’adopció i popularitat en els últims anys gràcies als dispositius mòbils i encastats, augment que no s’ha produït en arquitectures més populars com Intel x86. El document cobreix el desenvolupament del projecte de port del sistema operatiu ZeOS de l’arquitectura Intel x86 a ARM, concretament al dispositiu Raspberry Pi. Es detallen les característiques rellevants de l’arquitectura i els components principals del sistema operatiu. El resultat final és un sistema operatiu multiprocés, ZeOSpi, funcionant en la Raspberry Pi i fent ús dels perifèrics que ofereix el dispositiu.[CASTELLÀ] La arquitectura ARM ha visto un importante aumento de adopción y popularidad en los últimos años gracias a los dispositivos móviles y empotrados, aumento que no se ha producido en arquitecturas más populares como Intel x86. El documento cubre el desarrollo del proyecto de port del sistema operativo ZeOS de la arquitectura Intel x86 a ARM, concretamente el dispositivo Raspberry Pi. Se detallan las características relevantes de la arquitectura y los componentes principales del sistema operativo. El resultado final es un sistema operativo multiproceso, ZeOSpi, funcionando en la Raspberry Pi y haciendo uso de los periféricos que ofrece el dispositivo.[ANGLÈS] The ARM architecture has seen a significant increase in adoption and popularity in past years because of mobile and embedded devices, an increase that has not occurred to more popular architectures like Intel x86. The paper covers the development of the project to port the ZeOS operating system from Intel x86 to ARM architecture, specifically to the Raspberry Pi device. The relevant characteristics of the architecture and main components of the operating system are also detailed. The end result is a multithreaded operating system, ZeOSpi, running on the Raspberry Pi and using peripherals offered by the device

Libros y redes sociales:el poder de las estrategias de comunicación en BookTok

Treball Final de Grau en Publicitat i Relacions Públiques. Codi: PU0932. Curs acadèmic: 2021/2022La aparición de las redes sociales ha provocado una actualización constante de las estrategias de comunicación de las empresas, especialmente cuando su público objetivo son los jóvenes. Una generación que busca la inmediatez, compartir sus experiencias con los demás y con gran acceso a la tecnología en una sociedad globalizada en la que la figura de los influencers es crucial. Las comunidades virtuales juegan un papel extremadamente importante, especialmente en el caso de fomentar la lectura. En estas, los jóvenes crean contenido sobre libros, comparten sus recomendaciones y crean relaciones personales entre ellos, convirtiéndose en espacios de gran valor para ellos en los que poco a poco, las editoriales se van haciendo camino. En este trabajo se realiza una revisión bibliográfica y teórica, un análisis de contenidos sobre la comunidad literaria de TikTok, junto con una entrevista y una encuesta a sus usuarios. De esta manera, se busca mostrar la capacidad que tienen las redes sociales de fomentar la lectura entre los jóvenes. El estudio de caso se centra en BookTok y las posibilidades que esta comunidad ofrece en cuanto a la creación de contenido de valor para los lectores. Se observa que esta tiene gran influencia en los jóvenes, especialmente en las mujeres, y que la literatura de ficción, como la fantasía, es la que triunfa. Gracias a un contenido cercano y creativo, y las posibilidades que TikTok ofrece como plataforma, su popularidad es indiscutible. Junto con Bookstagram, actualmente es una de las comunidades que mejor funciona y muestra resultados positivos al llevar a cabo estrategias de comunicación, especialmente cuando se trabaja con los influencers de esta. Podemos confirmar que BookTok ha conseguido un aumento en las ventas de libros estos dos últimos años

A Linux Kernel Scheduler Extension for Multi-core Systems

The Linux kernel is mostly designed for multi-programed environments, but high-performance applications have other requirements. Such applications are run standalone, and usually rely on runtime systems to distribute the application's workload on worker threads, one per core. However, due to current OSes limitations, it is not feasible to track whether workers are actually running or blocked due to, for instance, a requested resource. For I/O intensive applications, this leads to a significant performance degradation given that the core of a blocked thread becomes idle until it is able to run again. In this paper, we present the proof-of-concept of a Linux kernel extension denoted User-Monitored Threads (UMT) which tackles this problem. Our extension allows a user-space process to be notified of when the selected threads become blocked or unblocked, making it possible for a runtime to schedule additional work on the idle core. We implemented the extension on the Linux Kernel 5.1 and adapted the Nanos6 runtime of the OmpSs-2 programming model to take advantage of it. The whole prototype was tested on two applications which, on the tested hardware and the appropriate conditions, reported speedups of almost 2x.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, conferenc