Using Speculative Computation and Parallelizing Techniques to Improve Scheduling of Control based Designs

partially_open5Recent research results have seen the application of parallelizing techniques to high-level synthesis. In particular, the effect of speculative code transformations on mixed control-data flow designs has demonstrated effective results on schedule lengths. In this paper we first analyze the use of the control and data dependence graph as an intermediate representation that provides the possibility of extracting the maximum parallelism. Then we analyze the scheduling problem by formulating an approach based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to minimize the number of control steps given the amount of resources. We improve the already proposed ILP scheduling approaches by introducing a new conditional resource sharing constraint which is then extended to the case of speculative computation. The ILP formulation has been solved by using a Branch and Cut framework which provides better results than standard branch and bound techniquesR. Cordone; F. Ferrandi; G. Palermo; M. Santambrogio; D. SciutoR., Cordone; Ferrandi, Fabrizio; Palermo, Gianluca; Santambrogio, MARCO DOMENICO; Sciuto, Donatell

Toward Smart Building Design Automation: Extensible CAD Framework for Indoor Localization Systems Deployment

Over the last years, many smart buildings applications, such as indoor localization or safety systems, have been subject of intense research. Smart environments usually rely on several hardware nodes equipped with sensors, actuators, and communication functionalities. The high level of heterogeneity and the lack of standardization across technologies make design of such environments a very challenging task, as each installation has to be designed manually and performed ad-hoc for the specific building. On the other hand, many different systems show common characteristics, like the strict dependency with the building floor plan, also sharing similar requirements such as a nodes allocation that provides sensing coverage and nodes connectivity. This paper provides a computer-aided design application for the design of smart building systems based on the installation of hardware nodes across the indoor space. The tool provides a site-specific algorithm for cost-effective deployment of wireless localization systems, with the aim to maximize the localization accuracy. Experimental results from real-world environment show that the proposed site-specific model can improve the positioning accuracy of general models from the state-of-the-art. The tool, available open-source, is modular and extensible through plug-ins allowing to model building systems with different requirements

SMASH: A heuristic methodology for designing partially reconfigurable MPSoCs

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The autonomic operating system research project - Achievements and future directions

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A flexible interconnection structure for reconfigurable FPGA dataflow applications

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ThermOS: System support for dynamic thermal management of chip multi-processors

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FASTER: Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration

The FASTER (Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration) EU FP7 project, aims to ease the design and implementation of dynamically changing hardware systems. Our motivation stems from the promise reconfigurable systems hold for achieving high performance and extending product functionality and lifetime via the addition of new features that operate at hardware speed. However, designing a changing hardware system is both challenging and time-consuming. FASTER facilitates the use of reconfigurable technology by providing a complete methodology enabling designers to easily specify, analyze, implement and verify applications on platforms with general-purpose processors and acceleration modules implemented in the latest reconfigurable technology. Our tool-chain supports both coarse- and fine-grain FPGA reconfiguration, while during execution a flexible run-time system manages the reconfigurable resources. We target three applications from different domains. We explore the way each application benefits from reconfiguration, and then we asses them and the FASTER tools, in terms of performance, area consumption and accuracy of analysis