| 1. |
- Liu, Ming, et al.
(författare)
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Hardware/Software co-design of a general-purpose computation platform in particle physics
- 2007
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Ingår i: ICFPT 2007. - 9781424414710 ; , s. 177-183
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper we present a hardware/software co-design based computation platform for online data processing in particle physics experiments. Our goal is to ease and accelerate the development and make it universal and scalable for multiple applications, on the premise of guaranteeing high communicating and processing capabilities. The entire computation network consists of quite a few interconnected compute nodes, each of which has multiple FPGAs to implement specific algorithms for data processing. High-speed communication features including RocketIO multi-gigabit transceiver and Gigabit Ethernet are supported by FPGAs to construct internal and external connections. An embedded Linux operating system is fitted on the PowerPC CPU core inside the Xilinx Virtex-4 FX FPGA. Thus programmers can access hardware resources via device drivers and write application programs to manage the system from the high level. Furthermore measurements have been executed using the development board to investigate both communicating and processing performances of the system. Results show that the computation platform is able to communicate at a UDP/IP data rate of around 400 Mbps per Ethernet link, and the event selection engine could process an event rate of 25%.
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| 2. |
- Al Khatib, Iyad, et al.
(författare)
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Hardware/Software architecture for real-time ECG monitoring and analysis leveraging MPSoC technology
- 2007
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Ingår i: Transactions on High-Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers I. - Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer Berlin Heidelberg. - 9783540715276 ; , s. 239-258
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The interest in high performance chip architectures for biomedical applications is gaining a lot of research and market interest. Heart diseases remain by far the main cause of death and a challenging problem for biomedical engineers to monitor and analyze. Electrocardiography (ECG) is an essential practice in heart medicine. However, ECG analysis still faces computational challenges, especially when 12 lead signals are to be analyzed in parallel, in real time, and under increasing sampling frequencies. Another challenge is the analysis of huge amounts of data that may grow to days of recordings. Nowadays, doctors use eyeball monitoring of the 12-lead ECG paper readout, which may seriously impair analysis accuracy. Our solution leverages the advance in multi-processor system-on-chip architectures, and it is centered on the parallelization of the ECG computation kernel. Our Hardware- Software (HW/SW) Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoQ design improves upon state-of-the-art mostly for its capability to perform real-time analysis of input data, leveraging the computation horsepower provided by many concurrent DSPs, more accurate diagnosis of cardiac diseases, and prompter reaction to abnormal heart alterations. The design methodology to go from the 12-lead ECG application specification to the final HW/SW architecture is the focus of this paper. We explore the design space by considering a number of hardware and software architectural variants, and deploy industrial components to build up the system.
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| 3. |
- Al Khatib, Iyad, 1975-
(författare)
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Performance Analysis of Application-Specific Multicore Systems on Chip
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The last two decades have witnessed the birth of revolutionary technologies in data communications including wireless technologies, System on Chip (SoC), Multi Processor SoC (MPSoC), Network on Chip (NoC), and more. At the same time we have witnessed that performance does not always keep pace with expectations in many services like multimediaservices and biomedical applications. Moreover, the IT market has suffered from some crashes. Hence, this triggered us to think of making use of available technologies and developing new ones so that the performance level is suitable for given applications and services. In the medical field, from a statistical viewpoint, the biggest diseases in number of deaths are heart diseases, namely Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) and Stroke. The application with the largest market for CVD is the electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) analysis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report in 2003, 29.2% of global deaths are due to CVD and Stroke, half of which could be prevented if there was proper monitoring. We found in the new advance in microelectronics, NoC, SoC, and MPSoC, a chance of a solution for such a big problem. We look at the communication technologies, wireless networks, and MPSoC and realize that many projects can be founded, and they may affect people's lives positively, as for example, curing people more rapidly, as well as homecare of such large scale diseases. These projects have a medical impact as well as economic and social impacts. The intention is to use performance analysis of interconnected microelectronic systems and combine it with MPSoC and NoC technologies in order to evolve to new systems on chip that may make a difference. Technically, we aim at rendering more computations in less time, on a chip with smaller volume, and with less expense. The performance demand and the vision of having a market success, i.e. contributing to lower healthcare costs, pose many challenges on the hardware/software co-design to meet these goals. This calls upon the development of new integrated circuits featuring increased energy efficiency while providing higher computation capabilities, i.e. better performance. The biomedical application of ECG analysis is an ideal target for an application-specific SoC implementation. However, new 12-lead ECG analyses algorithms are needed to meet the aforementioned goals. In this thesis, we present two novel algorithms for ECG analysis, namely the Autocorrelation-Function (ACF) based algorithm and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based algorithm. In this respect, we explore the design space by analyzing different hardware and software architectures. As a result, we realize a design with twelve processors that can compute 3.5 million arithmetic computations and respect the real time hard deadline for our biomedical application (3.5-4seconds), and that can deploy the ACF-based and FFT-based algorithms. Then, we investigate the configuration space looking for the most effective solution, performance and energy-wise. Consequently, we present three interconnect architectures (Single Bus, Full Crossbar, and Partial Crossbar) and compare them with existing solutions. The sampling frequencies of 2.2 KHz and 4 KHz, with 12 DSPs, are found to be the critical points for our Shared-Bus design and Crossbar architecture, respectively. We also show how our performance analysis methods can be applied to such a field of SoC design and with a specific purpose application in order to converge to a solution that is acceptable from a performance viewpoint, meets the real-time demands, and can be implemented with the present technologies while at the same time paving the way for easier and faster development. In order to connect our MPSoC solution to communication networks to transmit the medical results to a healthcare center, we come up with new protocols that will allow the integration of multiple networks on chips in a communication network. Finally, we present a methodology for HW/SW Codesign for application-specific systems (with focus on biomedical applications) that require a large number of computations since this will foster the convergence to solutions that are acceptable from a performance point of view.
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| 4. |
- Chen, Xiaowen, et al.
(författare)
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Reducing Virtual-to-Physical address translation overhead in Distributed Shared Memory based multi-core Network-on-Chips according to data property
- 2013
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Ingår i: Computers & electrical engineering. - : Elsevier BV. - 0045-7906 .- 1879-0755. ; 39:2, s. 596-612
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In Network-on-Chip (NoC) based multi-core platforms, Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) preferably uses virtual addressing in order to hide the physical locations of the memories. However, this incurs performance penalty due to the Virtual-to-Physical (V2P) address translation overhead for all memory accesses. Based on the data property which can be either private or shared, this paper proposes a hybrid DSM which partitions a local memory into a private and a shared part. The private part is accessed directly using physical addressing and the shared part using virtual addressing. In particular, the partitioning boundary can be configured statically at design time and dynamically at runtime. The dynamic configuration further removes the V2P address translation overhead for those data with changeable property when they become private at runtime. In the experiments with three applications (matrix multiplication, 2D FFT, and H.264/AVC encoding), compared with the conventional DSM, our techniques show performance improvement up to 37.89%.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Kanduri, Anil, et al.
(författare)
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Approximation Knob : Power Capping Meets Energy Efficiency
- 2016
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Ingår i: 2016 IEEE/ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN (ICCAD). - New York, NY, USA : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 9781450344661
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Power Capping techniques are used to restrict power consumption of computer systems to a thermally safe limit. Current many-core systems employ dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), power gating (PG) and scheduling methods as actuators for power capping. These knobs are oriented towards power actuation, while the need for performance and energy savings are increasing in the dark silicon era. To address this, we propose approximation (APPX) as another knob for close-looped power management, lending performance and energy efficiency to existing power capping techniques. We use approximation in a pro-active way for long-term performance-energy objectives, complementing the short-term reactive power objectives. We implement an approximation-enabled power management framework, APPEND, that dynamically chooses an application with appropriate level of approximation from a set of variable accuracy implementations. Subject to the system dynamics, our power manager chooses an effective combination of knobs APPX, DVFS and PG, in a hierarchical way to ensure power capping with performance and energy gains. Our proposed approach yields 1.5x higher throughput, improved latency upto 5x, better performance per energy and dark silicon mitigation compared to state-of-the-art power management techniques over a set of applications ranging from high to no error resilience.
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| 8. |
- Liu, Ming, 1982-
(författare)
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Adaptive Computing based on FPGA Run-time Reconfigurability
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the past two decades, FPGA has been witnessed from its restricted use as glue logic towards real System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms. Profiting from the great development on semiconductor and IC technologies, the programmability of FPGAs enables themselves wide adoption in all kinds of aspects of embedded designs. Modern FPGAs provide the additional capability of being dynamically and partially reconfigured during the system run-time. The run-time reconfigurability enhances FPGA designs from the sole spatial to both spatial and temporal parallelism, providing more design flexibility for advanced system features. Adaptive computing delegates an advanced computing paradigm in which computation tasks and resources are intelligently managed in correspondence with conditional requirements. In this thesis, we investigate adaptive designs on FPGA platforms: We present a comprehensive and practical design framework for adaptive computing based on the FPGA run-time reconfigurability. It concerns several design key issues in different hardware/software layers, specifically hardware architecture, run-time reconfiguration technical support, OS and device drivers, hardware process scheduler, context switching as well as Inter-Process Communications (IPC). Targeting a special application of data acquisition (DAQ) and trigger systems in nuclear and particle physics experiments, we set up the data streaming model and conduct theoretical analysis on the adaptive system. Three application studies are employed to verify the proposed adaptive design framework: The first application demonstrates a peripheral controller adaptable system aiming at general embedded designs. Through dynamically loading/unloading a NOR flash memory controller and an SRAM controller, both flash memory and SRAM accesses may be accomplished with less resource consumption than in traditional static designs. In the second case, two real algorithm processing engines are adaptively time-multiplexed in the same reconfigurable slot for particle recognition computation. Experimental results reveal the reduced on-chip resource requirements, as well as an approximate processing capability of the peer static design. Taking advantage of the FPGA dynamic reconfigurability, we present in the third application a novel on-FPGA interconnection microarchitecture named RouterLess NoC (RL-NoC). RL-NoC employs the novel design concept of Move Logic Not Data (MLND), and significantly distinguishes itself from the existing interconnection architectures such as buses, crossbars or NoCs. It does not rely on routers to deliver packets hop by hop as canonical NoCs do, but buffers data packets in virtual channels and brings various nodes using run-time reconfiguration to produce or consume them. In comparison with canonical packet-switching NoCs, the routerless architecture features lower design complexity, less resource consumption, higher work frequency, more efficient power dissipation as well as comparable or even higher packet delivery efficiency. It is regarded as a promising interconnection approach in some design scenarios on FPGAs, especially for light-weight applications.
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| 9. |
- Liu, Ming, et al.
(författare)
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System-on-an-FPGA Design for Real-time Particle Track Recognition and Reconstruction in Physics Experiments
- 2008
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Ingår i: 11TH EUROMICRO CONFERENCE ON DIGITAL SYSTEM DESIGN - ARCHITECTURES, METHODS AND TOOLS. - LOS ALAMITOS : IEEE COMPUTER SOC. ; , s. 599-605
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In particle physics experiments, the momenta of charged particles are studied by observing their deflection in a magnetic field. Dedicated detectors measure the particle tracks and complex algorithms are required for track recognition and reconstruction. This CPU-intensive task is usually implemented as off-line software running on PC clusters. In this paper we present a system-on-chip design for the track recognition and reconstruction based on modern FPGA technologies. The basic principle of the algorithm is polled from software into the FPGA fabric. The fundamental architecture of the tracking processor is described in detail. Working as processing engines in compute nodes, the tracking processor contributes to recognize potential track candidates in real-time and promotes the selection efficiency of the data acquisition and trigger system. Our design study shows that the tracking module can be integrated in a single Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA. The processing capability of the design is about 16.7K sub-events per second per module with our experimental setup, which achieves 20 times speedup compared to the software implementation.
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| 10. |
- Lu, Zhonghai, et al.
(författare)
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A power efficient flit-admission scheme for wormhole-switched networks on chip
- 2005
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Ingår i: WMSCI 2005. - 9789806560567 ; , s. 25-30
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Reducing power consumption is a main challenge when adopting a network as a global on-chip communication interconnect since the reduction in power dissipation should not at the expense of degrading the system performance. We investigate power in a wormhole-switched network with focus on the impact of flit-admission schemes, i.e., when and how the flits of packets are admitted into the network We have proposed a novel flit-admission scheme that shows significant shrink of the switch complexity while maintaining equivalent network performance. This paper investigates its influence in network power involving both switches and links. We conduct experiments on a 2D mesh network. The results show that our flit-admission scheme achieves significant power and area reduction without performance penalty. To our knowledge, our work is the first study of power dissipation on flit admission schemes.
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