Harnessing the power of reconfigurable computing platforms

Reconfigurable computing platforms are emerging as the most promising architectures to design general purpose systems due to their high flexibility and power efficiency. This talk will discuss several aspects of FPGA programming, analysing different languages that are available and their tradeoffs, and explaining a novel collection of benchmarks we proposed to evaluate them. Furthermore, the talk will discuss some of our previous works covering standard uses of FPGAs as accelerators (e.g. big data analytics, real-time vision) as well as some newer possibilities FPGAs have enabled, such as prototyping of HPC systems (both the computing and processing elements of exascale systems) or real-time architectural exploration of novel architectures (SpiNNaker neuromorphic computer).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Valoraciones del profesorado del área de Fresno (California Central) sobre la influencia de la tecnología móvil en el aprendizaje de sus estudiantes

En este artículo se presentan  los resultados más relevantes de una investigación en la que se analizan las opiniones del profesorado del área de Fresno (California Central, EEUU) respecto a los efectos que tiene el uso de los dispositivos móviles en los procesos de aprendizaje de los estudiantes. Entre otros objetivos, se ha tratado de reconocer la influencia del uso de los dispositivos móviles en tres dimensiones importantes del aprendizaje: la afectivo-emocional (motivación), la ético-social (habilidades sociales) y la cognitiva (habilidades cognitivas). Para llevar a cabo el proceso de estudio se adoptó un enfoque metodológico de carácter descriptivo, considerando la técnica de encuesta como el procedimiento más adecuado para recoger la opinión del profesorado de una forma relativamente rápida y precisa. Los resultados obtenidos ponen de manifiesto un acuerdo bastante generalizado del profesorado sobre el potencial pedagógico de la tecnología móvil para mejorar la calidad del aprendizaje. En términos generales, las conclusiones vienen a corroborar un aumento del interés de los estudiantes por la tarea, el incremento de la actividad durante el estudio, un trabajo más colaborativo, así como la mejora de la creatividad y el proceso de adquisición de información de los estudiante

Opinions from teachers in the Fresno area of Central California regarding the influence of mobile technology on their students’ learning

This paper presents the most relevant results of a study in which opinions of the teachers in the area of Fresno (Central California, USA) about the effects of the integration of mobile devices into the teaching-learning process. Among other objectives, this study has tried to analyze the influence of mobile learning over three very important learning factors: affective-emotional (motivation), ethic-social (social skills) and the cognitive one (cognitive skills). In order to carry out this study, a descriptive methodological approach was adopted, using the survey technique as the most adequate method to collect teachers´ opinions in a relatively fast and precise way. Obtained results show a widespread agreement among teachers about the pedagogical potential of mobile devices as a tool to improve learning quality. In general terms, conclusions suggest an improvement in the students’ interest on educational tasks, an increase during study activities, a better collaborative work, as well as an improvement of creativity and information acquisitio

Opinions from teachers in the Fresno area of Central California regarding the influence of mobile technology on their students’ learning

This paper presents the most relevant results of a study in which opinions of the teachers in the area of Fresno (Central California, USA) about the effects of the integration of mobile devices into the teaching-learning process. Among other objectives, this study has tried to analyze the influence of mobile learning over three very important learning factors: affective-emotional (motivation), ethic-social (social skills) and the cognitive one (cognitive skills). In order to carry out this study, a descriptive methodological approach was adopted, using the survey technique as the most adequate method to collect teachers´ opinions in a relatively fast and precise way. Obtained results show a widespread agreement among teachers about the pedagogical potential of mobile devices as a tool to improve learning quality. In general terms, conclusions suggest an improvement in the students’ interest on educational tasks, an increase during study activities, a better collaborative work, as well as an improvement of creativity and information acquisitio

Opinions from teachers in the Fresno area of Central California regarding the influence of mobile technology on their students’ learning

This paper presents the most relevant results of a study in which opinions of the teachers in the area of Fresno (Central California, USA) about the effects of the integration of mobile devices into the teaching-learning process. Among other objectives, this study has tried to analyze the influence of mobile learning over three very important learning factors: affective-emotional (motivation), ethic-social (social skills) and the cognitive one (cognitive skills). In order to carry out this study, a descriptive methodological approach was adopted, using the survey technique as the most adequate method to collect teachers´ opinions in a relatively fast and precise way. Obtained results show a widespread agreement among teachers about the pedagogical potential of mobile devices as a tool to improve learning quality. In general terms, conclusions suggest an improvement in the students’ interest on educational tasks, an increase during study activities, a better collaborative work, as well as an improvement of creativity and information acquisitio

Efficient Sharing of Optical Resources in Low-Power Optical Networks-on-Chip

With the ever-growing core counts in modern computing systems, NoCs consume an increasing part of the power budget due to bandwidth and power density limitations of electrical interconnects. To maintain performance and power scaling, alternative technologies are required, with silicon photonics, sophisticated network designs are required to minimize static power overheads. In this paper, we propose Amon, a low-power ONoC that decreases number of μRings, wavelengths and path losses to reduce power consumption. Amom performs destination checking prior to data transmission on an underlying control network, allowing the sharing per-Watt by at least 23% (up to 70%), while reducing power without latency overheads on both synthetic and realistic applications. For aggressive optical technology parameters, Amom considerably outperforms all alternative NoCs in terms of power, outlining its increasing superiority as technology matures

Subchannel Scheduling for Shared Optical On-chip Buses

Maximizing bandwidth utilization of optical on-chip interconnects in essential to compensate for static power overheads in optical networks-on-chip. Shared optical buses were shown to be a power-efficient, modular design solution with tremendous power saving potential by allowing optical bandwidth to be shared by all connected nodes. Previous proposals resolve bus contention by scheduling senders sequentially on the entire optical bandwidth; however, logically splitting a bus into sub-channels to allow both sequential and parallel data transmission has been shown to be highly efficient in electrical interconnects and could also be applied to shared optical buses. In this paper, we propose an efficient subchannel scheduling algorithm that aims to minimize the number of bus utilization cycles by assigning sender-receiver pairs both to subchannels and time slots. We present both a distributed and a centralized bus arbitration scheme and show that both can be implemented with low overheads. Our results show that subchannel scheduling can more than double throughput on shared optical buses compared to sequential scheduling without any power overheads in most cases. Arbitration latency overheads compared to state-of-the-art sequential schemes are moderate-to-low for significant bus bandwidths and only noticeable for low injection rates