COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LANDSCAPE FEATURES OF THE MINOR CAUCASUS (INCLUDING NAKHCHIVAN IN THE AZERBAIJAN TERRITORY) AND THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, USA (DEATH VALLEY AND THE MOJAVE DESERT) FOR DEVELOPMENT OF TOURISM ECONOMY

In this report authors describe similar peculiarities of landscapes of Azerbaijan and the State of California, USA. Authors present natural features of these territories in order to analyze similarities of landscapes or their elements

Hardware Support for FPGA Resource Elasticity

FPGAs are commonly used in cloud computing due to their ability  to be  programmed  as a processor that serves a specific purpose; hence, achieving high performance at low power. On the other hand, FPGAs have a lot of resources available, which are wasted if they host a single application or serve a single user’s request. Partially Reconfiguration technology enables FPGAs to divide their resources into different regions and then dynamically reprogram those regions with various applications during runtime. Therefore, they are considered as a good solution to eliminate the underutilization resource problem. Nevertheless, the sizes of these regions are static; they cannot be increased or decreased once they are defined. Thereby, it leads to the underutilization of reconfigurable region resources. This thesis addresses this problem, i.e., how to dynamically increase/decrease partially reconfigurable FPGA resources matching an application’s needs. Our solution enables expanding and contracting the FPGA resources allocated to an application by 1) application acceleration requirements expressed in multiple smaller modules which are configured into multiple reconfigurable regions assigned to the application dynamically  and 2) providing a low - area - overhead, configurable, and isolated communication mechanism by adjusting crossbar interconnect and WISHBONE interface among those multiple reconfigurable regions. FPGA - kretsar har en förmåga  att programmeras som processorer med ett specifikt syfte vilket gör att de ofta används i molnlösningar. Det tager hög prestanda med låg effektförbrukning. Å andra sidan disponerar FPGA - kretsar över stora resurser, vilka är bortkastade om de enbart används av en applikation eller endast på en användares förfrågan. Partiellt omkonfigurerbara teknologier tillåter FPGA - kretsar att fördela resurser mellan olika regioner, och sen dynamiskt omprogrammera regioner med olika applikationer vid körning. Därför betraktas partiellt omkonfigurerbara teknologier som en bra lösning för att minimera underutnyttjande av resurser. Storleken på regionerna är statiska och kan inte ändras när de väl definierats, vilket leder till underutnyttjande av de omkonfigurerbara regionernas resurser. Denna uppsats angriper problemet med dynamisk allokering av partiellt omkonfigurerbara FPGA - resurser utifrån applikationens behov. Vår lösning möjliggör ökning och minskning av FPGA - resurser allokerade till en applikation genom 1) accelerering av applikationen genom att applikationen tilldelas flera mindre moduler konfigurerade till dynamiskt omkonfigurerbara regioner, och 2) tillhanda hållande av en effektiv konfigurerbar och isolerad kommunikationsmekanism, genom justering av crossbar - sammankoppling en  och  WISHBONE - gränssnittet hos de omkonfigurerbara regionerna

Hardware Support for FPGA Resource Elasticity

FPGAs are commonly used in cloud computing due to their ability  to be  programmed  as a processor that serves a specific purpose; hence, achieving high performance at low power. On the other hand, FPGAs have a lot of resources available, which are wasted if they host a single application or serve a single user’s request. Partially Reconfiguration technology enables FPGAs to divide their resources into different regions and then dynamically reprogram those regions with various applications during runtime. Therefore, they are considered as a good solution to eliminate the underutilization resource problem. Nevertheless, the sizes of these regions are static; they cannot be increased or decreased once they are defined. Thereby, it leads to the underutilization of reconfigurable region resources. This thesis addresses this problem, i.e., how to dynamically increase/decrease partially reconfigurable FPGA resources matching an application’s needs. Our solution enables expanding and contracting the FPGA resources allocated to an application by 1) application acceleration requirements expressed in multiple smaller modules which are configured into multiple reconfigurable regions assigned to the application dynamically  and 2) providing a low - area - overhead, configurable, and isolated communication mechanism by adjusting crossbar interconnect and WISHBONE interface among those multiple reconfigurable regions. FPGA - kretsar har en förmåga  att programmeras som processorer med ett specifikt syfte vilket gör att de ofta används i molnlösningar. Det tager hög prestanda med låg effektförbrukning. Å andra sidan disponerar FPGA - kretsar över stora resurser, vilka är bortkastade om de enbart används av en applikation eller endast på en användares förfrågan. Partiellt omkonfigurerbara teknologier tillåter FPGA - kretsar att fördela resurser mellan olika regioner, och sen dynamiskt omprogrammera regioner med olika applikationer vid körning. Därför betraktas partiellt omkonfigurerbara teknologier som en bra lösning för att minimera underutnyttjande av resurser. Storleken på regionerna är statiska och kan inte ändras när de väl definierats, vilket leder till underutnyttjande av de omkonfigurerbara regionernas resurser. Denna uppsats angriper problemet med dynamisk allokering av partiellt omkonfigurerbara FPGA - resurser utifrån applikationens behov. Vår lösning möjliggör ökning och minskning av FPGA - resurser allokerade till en applikation genom 1) accelerering av applikationen genom att applikationen tilldelas flera mindre moduler konfigurerade till dynamiskt omkonfigurerbara regioner, och 2) tillhanda hållande av en effektiv konfigurerbar och isolerad kommunikationsmekanism, genom justering av crossbar - sammankoppling en  och  WISHBONE - gränssnittet hos de omkonfigurerbara regionerna

Towards Hardware Support for FPGA Resource Elasticity

FPGAs are increasingly being deployed in the cloud to accelerate diverse applications. They are to be shared among multiple tenants to improve the total cost of ownership. Partial reconfiguration technology enables multi-tenancy on FPGA by partitioning it into regions, each hosting a specific application's accelerator. However, the region's size can not be changed once they are defined, resulting in the underutilization of FPGA resources. This paper argues to divide the acceleration requirements of an application into multiple small computation modules. The devised FPGA shell can reconfigure the available PR regions with those modules and enable them to communicate with each other over Crossbar interconnect with the Wishbone bus interface. For each PR region being reconfigured, it updates the register file with the valid destination addresses and the bandwidth allocation of the interconnect. Any invalid communication request originating from the Wishbone master interface is masked in the corresponding master port of the crossbar. The allocated bandwidth for the PR region is ensured by the weighted round-robin arbiter in the slave port of the crossbar. Finally, the envisioned resource manager can increase or decrease the number of PR regions allocated to an application based on its acceleration requirements and PR regions' availability.Comment: Preprint of paper presented at Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD'22