90 research outputs found
The FASTER vision for designing dynamically reconfigurable systems
Extending product functionality and lifetime requires constant addition of new features to satisfy the growing customer needs and the evolving market and technology trends. software component adaptivity is straightforward but not enough: recent products include hardware accelerators for reasons of performance and power efficiency that also need to adapt to new requirements. Reconfigurable logic allows the definition of new functions to be implemented in dynamically instantiated hardware units, combining adaptivity with hardware speed and efficiency. For the Intrusion Detection System example, new rules can be hardcoded into the reconfigurable logic, achieving high performance, while providing the necessary adaptivity to new threats. The FASTER (Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration) project aims at introducing a complete methodology to allow designers to easily implement a system specification on a platform combining a general purpose processor with multiple accelerators running on an FPGA, taking as input a high-level description and fully exploiting, both at design- and run-time, the capabilities of partial dynamic reconfiguration. The FASTER project will facilitate the use of reconfigurable hardware by providing a complete methodology that enables designers to easily implement and verify applications on platforms with general-purpose processors and acceleration modules implemented in the latest reconfigurable technology
Smart technologies for effective reconfiguration: the FASTER approach
Current and future computing systems increasingly require that their functionality stays flexible after the system is operational, in order to cope with changing user requirements and improvements in system features, i.e. changing protocols and data-coding standards, evolving demands for support of different user applications, and newly emerging applications in communication, computing and consumer electronics. Therefore, extending the functionality and the lifetime of products requires the addition of new functionality to track and satisfy the customers needs and market and technology trends. Many contemporary products along with the software part incorporate hardware accelerators for reasons of performance and power efficiency. While adaptivity of software is straightforward, adaptation of the hardware to changing requirements constitutes a challenging problem requiring delicate solutions. The FASTER (Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration) project aims at introducing a complete methodology to allow designers to easily implement a system specification on a platform which includes a general purpose processor combined with multiple accelerators running on an FPGA, taking as input a high-level description and fully exploiting, both at design time and at run time, the capabilities of partial dynamic reconfiguration. The goal is that for selected application domains, the FASTER toolchain will be able to reduce the design and verification time of complex reconfigurable systems providing additional novel verification features that are not available in existing tool flows
Quantitative Regular Expressions for Arrhythmia Detection Algorithms
Motivated by the problem of verifying the correctness of arrhythmia-detection
algorithms, we present a formalization of these algorithms in the language of
Quantitative Regular Expressions. QREs are a flexible formal language for
specifying complex numerical queries over data streams, with provable runtime
and memory consumption guarantees. The medical-device algorithms of interest
include peak detection (where a peak in a cardiac signal indicates a heartbeat)
and various discriminators, each of which uses a feature of the cardiac signal
to distinguish fatal from non-fatal arrhythmias. Expressing these algorithms'
desired output in current temporal logics, and implementing them via monitor
synthesis, is cumbersome, error-prone, computationally expensive, and sometimes
infeasible.
In contrast, we show that a range of peak detectors (in both the time and
wavelet domains) and various discriminators at the heart of today's
arrhythmia-detection devices are easily expressible in QREs. The fact that one
formalism (QREs) is used to describe the desired end-to-end operation of an
arrhythmia detector opens the way to formal analysis and rigorous testing of
these detectors' correctness and performance. Such analysis could alleviate the
regulatory burden on device developers when modifying their algorithms. The
performance of the peak-detection QREs is demonstrated by running them on real
patient data, on which they yield results on par with those provided by a
cardiologist.Comment: CMSB 2017: 15th Conference on Computational Methods for Systems
Biolog
Performance evaluation of CHP with heat storage in buildings
Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 1-4 July, 2007.Combined heat and power (CHP) production gains more
and more attention. Offices and public buildings often have a
large thermal power demand in combination with a fairly large
electrical power demand. On the other hand they are seldom
occupied by night and in weekends, reducing the actual
operational time of the heating system. This in turn brings
down the financial benefits of investing in CHP. A second
problem is that electrical and thermal demands are often shifted
in time. The running time of the engine is again limited this
way, as it is often not allowed to deliver electricity to the power
grid. A possible solution is using heat storage. This way the
CHP-engine can run when the electricity demand is high. In the
paper a simulation model of CHP with gas engine and heat
storage by means of a hot water vessel is developed. The model
is validated through experiments on an engine and a vessel.
This model is used to analyze the design, control and
performance of cogeneration plants. It is shown that storage is
marginal beneficial and the design has to be done with great
care.cs201
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
EXTRA: Towards the exploitation of eXascale technology for reconfigurable architectures
© 2016 IEEE. To handle the stringent performance requirements of future exascale-class applications, High Performance Computing (HPC) systems need ultra-efficient heterogeneous compute nodes. To reduce power and increase performance, such compute nodes will require hardware accelerators with a high degree of specialization. Ideally, dynamic reconfiguration will be an intrinsic feature, so that specific HPC application features can be optimally accelerated, even if they regularly change over time. In the EXTRA project, we create a new and flexible exploration platform for developing reconfigurable architectures, design tools and HPC applications with run-time reconfiguration built-in as a core fundamental feature instead of an add-on. EXTRA covers the entire stack from architecture up to the application, focusing on the fundamental building blocks for run-time reconfigurable exascale HPC systems: new chip architectures with very low reconfiguration overhead, new tools that truly take reconfiguration as a central design concept, and applications that are tuned to maximally benefit from the proposed run-time reconfiguration techniques. Ultimately, this open platform will improve Europe's competitive advantage and leadership in the field
EXTRA: Towards an efficient open platform for reconfigurable High Performance Computing
To handle the stringent performance requirements of future exascale-class applications, High Performance Computing (HPC) systems need ultra-efficient heterogeneous compute nodes. To reduce power and increase performance, such compute nodes will require hardware accelerators with a high degree of specialization. Ideally, dynamic reconfiguration will be an intrinsic feature, so that specific HPC application features can be optimally accelerated, even if they regularly change over time. In the EXTRA project, we create a new and flexible exploration platform for developing reconfigurable architectures, design tools and HPC applications with run-time reconfiguration built-in as a core fundamental feature instead of an add-on. EXTRA covers the entire stack from architecture up to the application, focusing on the fundamental building blocks for run-time reconfigurable exascale HPC systems: new chip architectures with very low reconfiguration overhead, new tools that truly take reconfiguration as a central design concept, and applications that are tuned to maximally benefit from the proposed run-time reconfiguration techniques. Ultimately, this open platform will improve Europe's competitive advantage and leadership in the field
Efficient Physical Embedding of Topologically Complex Information Processing Networks in Brains and Computer Circuits
Nervous systems are information processing networks that evolved by natural selection, whereas very large scale integrated (VLSI) computer circuits have evolved by commercially driven technology development. Here we follow historic intuition that all physical information processing systems will share key organizational properties, such as modularity, that generally confer adaptivity of function. It has long been observed that modular VLSI circuits demonstrate an isometric scaling relationship between the number of processing elements and the number of connections, known as Rent's rule, which is related to the dimensionality of the circuit's interconnect topology and its logical capacity. We show that human brain structural networks, and the nervous system of the nematode C. elegans, also obey Rent's rule, and exhibit some degree of hierarchical modularity. We further show that the estimated Rent exponent of human brain networks, derived from MRI data, can explain the allometric scaling relations between gray and white matter volumes across a wide range of mammalian species, again suggesting that these principles of nervous system design are highly conserved. For each of these fractal modular networks, the dimensionality of the interconnect topology was greater than the 2 or 3 Euclidean dimensions of the space in which it was embedded. This relatively high complexity entailed extra cost in physical wiring: although all networks were economically or cost-efficiently wired they did not strictly minimize wiring costs. Artificial and biological information processing systems both may evolve to optimize a trade-off between physical cost and topological complexity, resulting in the emergence of homologous principles of economical, fractal and modular design across many different kinds of nervous and computational networks
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