PiDRAM: A Holistic End-to-end FPGA-based Framework for Processing-in-DRAM

Implementing and debugging high-performance network subsystems is a challenging task. In this paper, we present our experiences from developing and debugging a network interface card (NIC). Our NIC targets networked storage subsystems (Marazakis et al., 2006). For this purpose it mainly provides support for remote direct-memory-access (RDMA) write, sender-side notification of RDMA write completion, and receiver-side interrupt generation. In our work we examine issues that arise during system implementation and debugging, both in terms of correctness as well as performance. We present an analysis of the individual problems we encounter and we discuss how we address each case. For most problems we encounter, it is not possible to rely on existing debugging tools. However, we find that most of the techniques we use in this process, rely on collecting some form of event records from software or hardware components. We believe that such capabilities can be provided for independent hardware or software components in isolation, a fairly straight-forward task, thus, significantly simplifying the debugging process in complex systems of this nature

The economics of semiconductor manufacturing have forced process engineers to develop techniques to increase wafer yield. Improvements in process controls and uniformities in all areas of the fab have reduced film thickness variations at the very edge of the wafer surface. This improved uniformity has provided the opportunity to consider decreasing edge exclusions, and now the outermost extents of the wafer must be considered in the yield model and expectations. These changes have increased the requirements on lithography to improve wafer edge printability in areas that previously were not even coated. This has taxed all software and hardware components used in defining the optical focal plane at the wafer edge. We have explored techniques to determine the capabilities of extreme wafer edge printability and the components of the systems that influence this printability. We will present current capabilities and new detection techniques and the influence that the individual hardware and software components have on edge printability. We will show effects of focus sensor designs, wafer layout, utilization of dummy edge fields, the use of non-zero overlay targets and chemical/optical edge bead optimization.

MOPS is a platform for surgical robotics research. It consists of hardware and software components for building surgical robot systems based on existing robot arms. The reference system presented in this paper has two robot arms, each with an adapter for mounting and actuating different types of surgical instruments. Additionally, the system has a high-resolution stereo camera and a simple operator console with haptic devices and foot pedals for teleoperating the manipulators. Software components are based on Robot Operating System (ROS) to keep them modular and reusable for different types of hardware. We evaluate the precision of our system for vision-based tasks and demonstrate its potential for surgical task automation. The mean end-to-end error, including that of the vision system, for a trajectory following task was 1.2mm / 0.3° for one manipulator and 2.7mm / 0.7° for the other. MOPS software and hardware components are made available under an open-source license to encourage collaboration and facilitate the advancement of surgical robotics research.

The public transport system of New South Wales (NSW), Australia is impotent to receive 100% of the fare from light rail and buses due to the unavailability of a continuous real-time monitoring system. This scheme thereby seeks to help update the NSW public transport ticket collection system, with the aid of a counter that will be integrated into the public transportation within the Ticket Tapping Machine, to provide passenger count against the number of touches occurring at each stop; and thus, increasing the revenue. The product comprises of hardware and software components - the hardware system is located within the public transport while the software system incorporating a web portal is positioned for the authorities to have access to the real-time passenger data. At the hardware end, the ultrasonic sensors and the raspberry pi would detect the number of passengers on the transport and the LCD screen would display the number of passengers who had not tapped their smart card ticket. Additionally, the raspberry pi module used in the hardware component can denote the transportation location with the help of an in-built Wi-Fi component. With this designed technology, the authorities would be able to monitor and record the movements of the passenger in real-time system addressing the existing challenges faced by the NSW public transport authority, especially in the case of light rail and buses being used for free by certain passengers.

The attendance recording system is expected to provide data visualization to detect students who have attendance problems. The system consists of hardware and software components. The hardware components are data acquisition devices that can record student's attendance based on fingerprint identification. In addition to identifying users, the devices also perform registration and managing user identity data storage for identification purposes. This paper will discuss about the detail system design and implementation of the attendance recording devices, starts from an explanation of the general system architecture, then brief description about the subsystem for identification, registration, and data management on the device, and lastly the implementation and integration of overall system on the device.

This study aimed to measure the impact of management information systems (MIS) across its dimensions (software components, human resources, hardware components, data, and networks) on the performance of employees at the Hope Center in Taiz. The study followed a descriptive-analytical approach and relied on a questionnaire as a data collection tool. The study population included all employees at the Hope Center, totaling 160 employees, at the levels of administrative director, department head, and technician. An electronic questionnaire was developed and distributed to members of the study population, and the number of respondents who constituted the study sample was 96 employees. The study found a statistically significant impact at a significance level of (α ≤ 0.05) of management information systems across its combined dimensions on the performance of employees at the Hope Center. It also found an impact at a significance level of (α ≤ 0.05) of the individual dimensions of information systems (software components, human resources, hardware components, data, and networks) on employee performance. The study recommended updating the software used at the center and training employees on how to use the systems.

As the development of technology, the mobile phone world also has developed very quickly. Mobile communication and services, over emerging wireless technologies, provide anyone, anytime and anywhere access. Moreover, the intelligence is now often embedded into modern applications, such as surveillance and supervising systems. This work presents an intelligent and a pervasive supervising platform for information system (IS) security based on multi-agent systems (MAS) which detects and classifies malware events that occurs on software and hardware components and sends real time notification to smart phone users. The proposed platform is formed by two components: The first one consists of a Central Software Component (CSC); the supervisor application that manages devices and evaluates logs and alarms of the supervised components. The second one consists of an Embedded Software Component (ESC) on the Mobile Device (MD) with an ANDROID OS. In our platform, we have implemented agents on ESC using JADE-LEAP android, note that the ESC is targeted to smart phones and tablet that run the operating system Android, JADE API on CSC and the communication between these two components is performed using the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol implemented using the JADE-S plug-in.

In the state-of-the-art hardware/software (HW/SW) co- design of embedded systems, there is a lack of sufficient support for architectural specifications across HW/SW boundaries. Such an architectural specification ought to capture both hardware and software components and their interactions, and facilitate effective design exploitation of HW/SW trade-offs and scalable HW/SW co-verification. In this paper, we present the embedded architecture description language (EADL). It is based on a component model for embedded systems that unifies hardware and software components. EADL does not dictate execution and interface semantics of hardware and software components while supporting flexible platform-oriented semantics instantiation. EADL supports concise representation of embedded system architectures and also formulation of architectural patterns of embedded systems. Besides facilitating design reuse, architectural patterns also facilitate verification reuse via association of properly templates with these patterns. Effectiveness of EADL has been demonstrated by its successful application in integrating component-based co-design, co- simulation, co-verification, and system synthesis.

Modern systems are enormously complex; many applications today comprise millions of lines of code, make extensive use of software frameworks, and run on complex, multi‐tiered, run‐time systems. Understanding the performance of these applications is challenging because it depends on the interactions between the many software and the hardware components. This paper describes and evaluates an interactive and iterative methodology, temporal vertical profiling, for understanding the performance of applications. There are two key insights behind temporal vertical profiling. First, we need to collect and reason across information from multiple layers of the system before we can understand an application's performance. Second, application performance changes over time and thus we must consider the time‐varying behavior of the application instead of aggregate statistics. We have developed temporal vertical profiling from our own experience of analyzing performance anomalies and have found it very helpful for methodically exploring the space of hardware and software components. By representing an application's behavior as a set of metrics, where each metric is represented as a time series, temporal vertical profiling provides a way to reason about performance across system layers, regardless of their level of abstraction, and independent of their semantics. Temporal vertical profiling provides a methodology to explore a large space of metrics, hundreds of metrics even for small benchmarks, in a systematic way. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The problem of trying to view and comprehend large amounts of data is a well-known one. A specialised variant of this problem is the visualisation of software code and components for the purposes of understanding, decision-making, reuse and even integration. In particular the visualisation of software components, at a much higher level than source code, has received very little research. Visualisation is a powerful tool in situations such as this. This paper presents the application of real world metaphor based visualisations that address this problem. The application of visualisation to selecting software components is especially novel. It seeks to decrease the effort required by system integrators when locating suitable components in what is an increasingly crowded marketplace. Accurate information and understanding are vital if correct and informed decisions and judgements are to be made.

: Recent years have seen rapidly growing interest in the development of networks of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as aerial sensor networks for the purpose of coordinated monitoring, surveillance, and rapid emergency response. This has triggered a great deal of research in higher levels of planning and control, including collaborative sensing and exploration, synchronized motion planning, and formation or cooperative control. In this paper, we describe our recently developed experimental testbed at the University of Pennsylvania, which consists of multiple, fixed-wing UAVs. We describe the system architecture, software and hardware components, and overall system integration. We then derive high-fidelity models that are validated with hardware-in-the-loop simulations and actual experiments. Our models are hybrid, capturing not only the physical dynamics of the aircraft, but also the mode switching logic that supervises lower level controllers. We conclude with a description of cooperative control experiments involving two fixed-wing UAVs.

The field of computing has struggled since its inception with the tension between specialization and generalization. Specialized architectures, programming languages, and system software promise better performance (across many metrics, including efficiency, productivity, etc.) for workloads that match their specialization objective. General-purpose architectures, languages, and system software sacrifice extremes of performance for specific workloads, seeking acceptable performance across a much wider range. While specialized alternatives have always had their place, general-purpose architectures, languages, and system software have dominated main-stream computing systems for the past several decades. But with Dennard scaling already gone and the end of Moore's Law looming, some have argued that general-purpose computing platforms must naturally give way to specialization. In this debate, two teams of highly-opinionated experts will debate the proposition that specialized architectures, languages, and system software should largely supplant general-purpose alternatives within the next decade. Arguments in favor of specialization include energy efficiency in the post-Dennard scaling era, performance scaling in the post-Moore's law era, and improvements in programmer productivity. Arguments against include the large investment needed to create specialized hardware and software components, lack of tools and interfaces to create reusable components, the semantic gap from overspecialization, and security vulnerabilities and general correctness issues due to interoperation of specialized components.

The vision behind industry 4.0 is to create even smarter manufacturing facilities. Industry 4.0 includes both hardware and software components, which are expected to seamlessly interact in a secure manner. Thus, machinery and software components from different manufacturers should be able to communicate in a common language. Such a challenge is typically met by introducing a “middleware” to serve as a joint communication platform. In this paper we discuss the use of OPC UA standard for communication between hardware and software components in a typical manufacturing system. Further we develop a digital twin and present an demonstration of our digital laboratory.

Component based software development (CBSD) endeavors to deliver cost-effective and quality software systems through the selection and integration of commercially available software components. CBSD emphasizes the design and development of software systems using preexisting components. Software component reusability is an indispensable part of component based software development life cycle (CBSDLC), which consumes a significant amount of organization’s resources, that is, time and effort. It is convenient in component based software system (CBSS) to select the most suitable and appropriate software components that provide all the required functionalities. Selecting the most appropriate components is crucial for the success of the entire system. However, decisions regarding software component reusability are often made in an ad hoc manner, which ultimately results in schedule delay and lowers the entire quality system. In this paper, we have discussed the analytic network process (ANP) method for software component selection. The methodology is explained and assessed using a real life case study.

The design and development process for internet of things (IoT) applications is more complicated than that for desktop, mobile, or web applications. First, IoT applications require both software and hardware to work together across many different types of nodes with different capabilities under different conditions. Second, IoT application development involves different types of software engineers such as desktop, web, embedded, and mobile to work together. Furthermore, non-software engineering personnel such as business analysts are also involved in the design process. In addition to the complexity of having multiple software engineering specialists cooperating to merge different hardware and software components together, the development process requires different software and hardware stacks to be integrated together (e.g., different stacks from different companies such as Microsoft Azure and IBM Bluemix). Due to the above complexities, non-functional requirements (such as security and privacy, which are highly important in the context of the IoT) tend to be ignored or treated as though they are less important in the IoT application development process. This article reviews techniques, methods, and tools to support security and privacy requirements in existing non-IoT application designs, enabling their use and integration into IoT applications. This article primarily focuses on design notations, models, and languages that facilitate capturing non-functional requirements (i.e., security and privacy). Our goal is not only to analyse, compare, and consolidate the empirical research but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability for the IoT.