An FPGA Architecture and CAD Flow Supporting Dynamically Controlled Power Gating

© 2015 IEEE.Leakage power is an important component of the total power consumption in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) built using 90-nm and smaller technology nodes. Power gating was shown to be effective at reducing the leakage power. Previous techniques focus on turning OFF unused FPGA resources at configuration time; the benefit of this approach depends on resource utilization. In this paper, we present an FPGA architecture that enables dynamically controlled power gating, in which FPGA resources can be selectively powered down at run-time. This could lead to significant overall energy savings for applications having modules with long idle times. We also present a CAD flow that can be used to map applications to the proposed architecture. We study the area and power tradeoffs by varying the different FPGA architecture parameters and power gating granularity. The proposed CAD flow is used to map a set of benchmark circuits that have multiple power-gated modules to the proposed architecture. Power savings of up to 83% are achievable for these circuits. Finally, we study a control system of a robot that is used in endoscopy. Using the proposed architecture combined with clock gating results in up to 19% energy savings in this application

Economic scheduling in Grid computing using Tender models

Economic scheduling needs to be considered for Grid computing environment, because it gives an incentive for resource providers to supply their resources. Moreover, it enforces efficient use of resources, because the users have to pay for their use. Tendering is a suitable model for Grid scheduling because users start the negotiations for finding suitable resources for executing their jobs. Furthermore, the users specify their job requirements with their requests and therefore the resources reply with bids that are based on the cost of taking on the job and the availability of their processors. In this thesis, a framework for economic Grid scheduling using tendering is proposed. The framework entities such as users, brokers and resources employ tender/contract-net model to negotiate the prices and deadlines. The brokers' role is acting on behalf of users. During the negotiations, the entities aim to maximise their performance which is measured by a number of metrics. In order to evaluate the entities' performance under different scenarios, a Java- based simulator, called MICOSim, supporting event-driven simulation of economic Grid scheduling is presented. MICOSim can perform a simulation of more than one hundred entities faster than real time. It is concluded from the evaluation that users who are interested in increasing the job success rate and paying less for executing their jobs have to consider received prices to select the most appropriate bids, while users who are interested in improving the job average satisfaction rate have to consider either received completion time or both price and completion time to select the most suitable bids when the submission of jobs is static. The best broker strategy is the one that doesn't take into account meeting the job deadlines in the bids it sends to job owners. Finally, the resource strategy that considers the price to determine if to reply to a request or not is superior to other resource strategies. The only exception is employing this strategy with price that is too low. However, there is a tiny difference between the performances of different user strategies in dynamic submission. It is also concluded from the evaluation that broker strategies have the best performance when the revenue they target from the users is reasonable. Thus, the broker's aim has to be receiving reasonable revenue (neither too low nor too high) from acting on behalf of users. It is observed from the results that the strategy performance is influenced by the behaviour of other entities such as the submission time of user jobs. Finally, it is observed that the characteristics of entities have an effect on the performance of strategies. For example, the two user strategies that consider the received completion time and both price and completion time to determine if to accept a broker bid have similar performance, because of the existence of resources with various prices from cheap to expensive and existence of resources which don't care about the price paid for the execution. So, the price threshold doesn't have a large effect on the performance.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Mediatyzacja kampanii wyborczych na szczeblu lokalnym

"Wraz z rozwojem społeczeństwa informacyjnego powstały nowe technologie medialne, które w sposób radykalny zmieniły współczesną demokrację. Postęp technologiczny środków masowego komunikowania, a w szczególności mediów elektronicznych, takich jak: telewizja stacjonarna, kablowa i satelitarna, Internet, stworzył nowe możliwości jakościowe procesu komunikowania politycznego. Obserwując współczesne działania polityczne, można zauważyć, jak poważnym przeobrażeniom ulega sposób komunikowania się władzy i innych podmiotów ze społeczeństwem. Coraz częściej mówi się o aspekcie mediatyzacji życia publicznego, co w konsekwencji prowadzi do mediatyzacji życia politycznego, a szczególności m.in. kampanii wyborczych. Warto pamiętać, że proces mediatyzacji, z jednej strony, daje możliwość w miarę wiarygodnego przedstawienia polityki, z drugiej zaś strony, niesie ze sobą wiele niebezpieczeństw związanych z próbą jej wykorzystania do określonych celów politycznych"

PROCESSING AND CLASSIFICATION OF PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNALS USING WAVELET TRANSFORM AND MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS

Over the last century, physiological signals have been broadly analyzed and processed not only to assess the function of the human physiology, but also to better diagnose illnesses or injuries and provide treatment options for patients. In particular, Electrocardiogram (ECG), blood pressure (BP) and impedance are among the most important biomedical signals processed and analyzed. The majority of studies that utilize these signals attempt to diagnose important irregularities such as arrhythmia or blood loss by processing one of these signals. However, the relationship between them is not yet fully studied using computational methods. Therefore, a system that extract and combine features from all physiological signals representative of states such as arrhythmia and loss of blood volume to predict the presence and the severity of such complications is of paramount importance for care givers. This will not only enhance diagnostic methods, but also enable physicians to make more accurate decisions; thereby the overall quality of care provided to patients will improve significantly. In the first part of the dissertation, analysis and processing of ECG signal to detect the most important waves i.e. P, QRS, and T, are described. A wavelet-based method is implemented to facilitate and enhance the detection process. The method not only provides high detection accuracy, but also efficient in regards to memory and execution time. In addition, the method is robust against noise and baseline drift, as supported by the results. The second part outlines a method that extract features from ECG signal in order to classify and predict the severity of arrhythmia. Arrhythmia can be life-threatening or benign. Several methods exist to detect abnormal heartbeats. However, a clear criterion to identify whether the detected arrhythmia is malignant or benign still an open problem. The method discussed in this dissertation will address a novel solution to this important issue. In the third part, a classification model that predicts the severity of loss of blood volume by incorporating multiple physiological signals is elaborated. The features are extracted in time and frequency domains after transforming the signals with Wavelet Transformation (WT). The results support the desirable reliability and accuracy of the system