| 1. |
- Badawi, Mohammad, 1981-
(författare)
-
Adaptive Coarse-grain Reconfigurable Protocol Processing Architecture
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Digital signal processors and their variants have provided significant benefit to efficient implementation of Physical Layer (PHY) of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model’s seven-layer protocol processing stack compared to the general purpose processors. Protocol processors promise to provide a similar advantage for implementing higher layers in the (OSI)'s seven-layer model. This thesis addresses the problem of designing customizable coarse-grain reconfigurable protocol processing fabrics as a solution to achieving high performance and computational efficiency. A key requirement that this thesis addresses is the ability to not only adapt to varying applications and standards, and different modes in each standard but also to time varying load and performance demands while maintaining quality of service.This thesis presents a tile-based multicore protocol processing architecture that can be customized at design time to meet the requirements of the target application. The architecture can then be reconfigured at boot time and tuned to suit the desired use-case. This architecture includes a packet-oriented memory system that has deterministic access time and access energy costs, and hence can be accurately dimensioned to fulfill the requirements of the desired use-case. Moreover, to maintain quality of service as predicted, while minimizing the use of energy and resources, this architecture encompasses an elastic management scheme that controls run-time configuration to deploy processing resources based on use-case and traffic demands.To evaluate the architecture presented in this thesis, different case studies were conducted while quantitative and qualitative metrics were used for assessment. Energy-delay product, energy efficiency, area efficiency and throughput show the improvements that were achieved using the processing cores and the memory of the presented architecture, compared with other solutions. Furthermore, the results show the reduction in latency and power consumption required to evaluate controlling states when using the elastic management scheme. The elasticity of the scheme also resulted in reducing the total area required for the controllers that serve multiple processing cores in comparison with other designs. Finally, the results validate the ability of the presented architecture to support quality of service without misutilizing available energy during a real-life case study of a multi-participant Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) call.
|
|
| 2. |
- Chen, Xiaowen, 1982-
(författare)
-
Efficient Memory Access and Synchronization in NoC-based Many-core Processors
- 2019
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In NoC-based many-core processors, memory subsystem and synchronization mechanism are always the two important design aspects, since mining parallelism and pursuing higher performance require not only optimized memory management but also efficient synchronization mechanism. Therefore, we are motivated to research on efficient memory access and synchronization in three topics, namely, efficient on-chip memory organization, fair shared memory access, and efficient many-core synchronization.One major way of optimizing the memory performance is constructing a suitable and efficient memory organization. A distributed memory organization is more suitable to NoC-based many-core processors, since it features good scalability. We envision that it is essential to support Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) because of the huge amount of legacy code and easy programming. Therefore, we first adopt the microcoded approach to address DSM issues, aiming for hardware performance but maintaining the flexibility of programs. Second, we further optimize the DSM performance by reducing the virtual-to-physical address translation overhead. In addition to the general-purpose memory organization such as DSM, there exists special-purpose memory organization to optimize the performance of application-specific memory access. We choose Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) as the target application, and propose a multi-bank data memory specialized for FFT computation.In 3D NoC-based many-core processors, because processor cores and memories reside in different locations (center, corner, edge, etc.) of different layers, memory accesses behave differently due to their different communication distances. As the network size increases, the communication distance difference of memory accesses becomes larger, resulting in unfair memory access performance among different processor cores. This unfair memory access phenomenon may lead to high latencies of some memory accesses, thus negatively affecting the overall system performance. Therefore, we are motivated to study on-chip memory and DRAM access fairness in 3D NoC-based many-core processors through narrowing the round-trip latency difference of memory accesses as well as reducing the maximum memory access latency.Barrier synchronization is used to synchronize the execution of parallel processor cores. Conventional barrier synchronization approaches such as master-slave, all-to-all, tree-based, and butterfly are algorithm oriented. As many processor cores are networked on a single chip, contended synchronization requests may cause large performance penalty. Motivated by this, different from the algorithm-based approaches, we choose another direction (i.e., exploiting efficient communication) to address the barrier synchronization problem. We propose cooperative communication as a means and combine it with the master-slave algorithm and the all-to-all algorithm to achieve efficient many-core barrier synchronization. Besides, a multi-FPGA implementation case study of fast many-core barrier synchronization is conducted.
|
|
| 3. |
|
|
| 4. |
|
|
| 5. |
- Liu, Ming, 1982-
(författare)
-
A High-end Reconfigurable Computation Platform for Particle Physics Experiments
- 2008
-
Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Modern nuclear and particle physics experiments run at a very high reaction rate and are able to deliver a data rate of up to hundred GBytes/s. This data rate is far beyond the storage and on-line analysis capability. Fortunately physicists have only interest in a very small proportion among the huge amounts of data. Therefore in order to select the interesting data and reject the background by sophisticated pattern recognition processing, it is essential to realize an efficient data acquisition and trigger system which results in a reduced data rate by several orders of magnitude. Motivated by the requirements from multiple experiment applications, we are developing a high-end reconfigurable computation platform for data acquisition and triggering. The system consists of a scalable number of compute nodes, which are fully interconnected by high-speed communication channels. Each compute node features 5 Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGAs and up to 10 GBytesDDR2 memory. A hardware/software co-design approach is proposed to develop custom applications on the platform, partitioning performance-critical calculation to the FPGA hardware fabric while leaving flexible and slow controls to the embedded CPU plus the operating system. The system is expected to be high-performance and general-purpose for various applications especially in the physics experiment domain. As a case study, the particle track reconstruction algorithm for HADES has been developed and implemented on the computation platform in the format of processing engines. The Tracking Processing Unit (TPU) recognizes peak bins on the projection plane and reconstructs particle tracks in realtime. Implementation results demonstrate its acceptable resource utilization and the feasibility to implement the module together with the sys-tem design on the FPGA. Experimental results show that the online track reconstruction computation achieves 10.8 - 24.3 times performance acceleration per TPU module when compared to the software solution on a Xeon2.4 GHz commodity server.
|
|
| 6. |
- Liu, Ming, 1982-
(författare)
-
Adaptive Computing based on FPGA Run-time Reconfigurability
- 2011
-
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.
|
|
| 7. |
- Lu, Zhonghai
(författare)
-
Design and Analysis of On-Chip Communication for Network-on-Chip Platforms
- 2007
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Due to the interplay between increasing chip capacity and complex applications, System-on-Chip (SoC) development is confronted by severe challenges, such as managing deep submicron effects, scaling communication architectures and bridging the productivity gap. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been a rapidly developed concept in recent years to tackle the crisis with focus on network-based communication. NoC problems spread in the whole SoC spectrum ranging from specification, design, implementation to validation, from design methodology to tool support. In the thesis, we formulate and address problems in three key NoC areas, namely, on-chip network architectures, NoC network performance analysis, and NoC communication refinement. Quality and cost are major constraints for micro-electronic products, particularly, in high-volume application domains. We have developed a number of techniques to facilitate the design of systems with low area, high and predictable performance. From flit admission and ejection perspective, we investigate the area optimization for a classical wormhole architecture. The proposals are simple but effective. Not only offering unicast services, on-chip networks should also provide effective support for multicast. We suggest a connection-oriented multicasting protocol which can dynamically establish multicast groups with quality-of-service awareness. Based on the concept of a logical network, we develop theorems to guide the construction of contention-free virtual circuits, and employ a back-tracking algorithm to systematically search for feasible solutions. Network performance analysis plays a central role in the design of NoC communication architectures. Within a layered NoC simulation framework, we develop and integrate traffic generation methods in order to simulate network performance and evaluate network architectures. Using these methods, traffic patterns may be adjusted with locality parameters and be configured per pair of tasks. We propose also an algorithm-based analysis method to estimate whether a wormhole-switched network can satisfy the timing constraints of real-time messages. This method is built on traffic assumptions and based on a contention tree model that captures direct and indirect network contentions and concurrent link usage. In addition to NoC platform design, application design targeting such a platform is an open issue. Following the trends in SoC design, we use an abstract and formal specification as a starting point in our design flow. Based on the synchronous model of computation, we propose a top-down communication refinement approach. This approach decouples the tight global synchronization into process local synchronization, and utilizes synchronizers to achieve process synchronization consistency during refinement. Meanwhile, protocol refinement can be incorporated to satisfy design constraints such as reliability and throughput. The thesis summarizes the major research results on the three topics.
|
|
| 8. |
|
|
| 9. |
|
|
| 10. |
|
|
