Technologies for High-Performance Computing in the Next Millennium

HW/SW co-emulation technique combing software simulation with hardware acceleration is one of the popular techniques for SOC verification, where interrupt-based communication mechanism is usually utilized. However, communication overhead will be resulted from data exchange between hardware side and software side at every cycle. A stream-mode based HW/SW co-emulation technique is proposed and presented in the paper. In the proposed technique, software side executes, sends stimulus data and receives response data continuously while hardware side is testing SUT and generating response data in parallel. Experiment result demonstrates that, compared to interrupt-based communication mode, stream-based communication mechanism can improve communication throughput by more than 10 times.

The coexistence of second and third generation wireless system requires multi-mode, multi-band and multi-standard mobile communication systems, therefore, requiring a configurable RF signal source (VCO) that may replace several narrow band VCO modules by a single low noise ultrawideband (UWB) adaptable RF signal source. The performance of the wireless communication systems strongly depends on the speed of devices, and technological scaling has driven this momentum towards achieving faster speed and high level of integration. This paper investigates the impact of device scaling on phase noise of the UWB (2-8GHz) configurable coupled N-Push voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) in SiGe HBT, which has recently emerged as a strong contender for RF and mixed signal applications.

Reliability considerations had little influence in the design of the first generation of computers. Notable exceptions being, on the hardware side, some circuitry incorporated into the UNIVAC I for checking purposes, and on the software side, the frequency counts employed by von Neumann and Goldstine for measurement purposes. The second generation of computers witnessed a wider interest in hardware reliability while essentially ignoring the software reliability problem. Current computer systems (e.g., IBM/370) incorporate elaborate hardware reliability considerations in their design while continuing to ignore reliable software design.

An integrated QR-based identification and multi-participant quiz system is developed for classroom and competition scenarios. It reduces the check-in latency, removes fixed buzz-in timing, and lifts hardware-imposed limits on the participant count. On the software side, a MATLAB-R2022b-based module integrates the generation and recognition of linear barcodes and QR Codes, enabling fast, accurate acquisition of contestant information while reducing the latency and error risk of manual entry. On the hardware side, control circuits for compulsory and buzz-in modules are designed and simulated in Multisim-14.3. To accommodate diverse scenarios, the team-versus-team buzz-in mode is extended to support two- or three-member teams. Functional tests demonstrate the stable display of key states—including contestant identity, buzz-in priority group ID, and response duration. Compared with typical MCU-channel-based designs, the proposed system relaxes hardware-channel constraints, decoupling the participant count from fixed input channels. It also overcomes fixed-timing limitations by supporting scenario-dependent configuration. The Participant Information Registration subsystem achieved a mean accuracy of 86.7% and a mean per-sample computation time of 14 ms. The 0–99 s configurable timing aligns with question difficulty and instructional procedures. It enhances fairness, adaptability, and usability in formative assessments and competition-based learning.

This design has realized a new granary temperature wireless measurement node by hardware and software. On the hardware side, the node is composed of MCU, power supply, wireless RF module, combined buttons, watchdog and sensors in the temperature measurement cables. On the software side, design has realized real-time detection temperature and power supply voltage, build sensor topology, wireless reporting and abnormal alarming. Its acquisition accuracy is 0.625 degrees Celsius, meets the requirements. Design reduces power consumption by frequent acquisition temperature and periodically reporting, ensures the communication stability by clock synchronization and communication back-off principle. Proved by practice, it has a certain practical value for monitoring the grain situation.

Industrial machines are generally expensive to implement due to their requirement of being fast and robust. In this paper, we proposed a new approach to the problem, particularly, a walnut sorting machine that was built cheaply using open solution. On hardware side, we used readily available electronics and on the software side, Robot Operating System was adopted to handle low level hardware abstraction. Machine Learning, Computer Vision and data processing techniques were implemented on top of them using high level programming language. This resulted in a highly functional, easy to maintain yet inexpensive walnuts sorting machine - which was confirmed by our Austrian partner’s testing. This success, hopefully, will pave the way for more projects using similar approaches.

Commercial cache-coherent nonuniform memory access (ccNUMA) systems often require extensive investments in hardware design and operating system support. A different approach to building these systems is to use Standard High Volume (SHV) hardware and stock software components as building blocks and assemble them with minimal investments in hardware and software. This design approach trades the performance advantages of specialized hardware design for simplicity and implementation speed, and relies on application-level tuning for scalability and performance. We present our experience with this approach in this paper. We built a 16-way ccNUMA Intel system consisting of four commodity four-processor Fujitsu® Teamserver™ SMPs connected by a Synfinity™ cache-coherent switch. The system features a total of sixteen 350-MHz Intel® Xeon™ processors and 4 GB of physical memory, and runs the standard commercial Microsoft Windows NT® operating system. The system can be partitioned statically or dynamically, and uses an innovative, combined hardware/software approach to support application-level performance tuning. On the hardware side, a programmable performance-monitor card measures the frequency of remote-memory accesses, which constitute the predominant source of performance overhead. The monitor does not cause any performance overhead and can be deployed in production mode, providing the possibility for dynamic performance tuning if the application workload changes over time. On the software side, the Resource Set abstraction allows application-level threads to improve performance and scalability by specifying their execution and memory affinity across the ccNUMA system. Results from a performance-evaluation study confirm the success of the combined hardware/software approach for performance tuning in computation-intensive workloads. The results also show that the poor local-memory bandwidth in commodity Intel-based systems, rather than the latency of remote-memory access, is often the main contributor to poor scalability and performance. The contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: • The Resource Set abstraction allows control over resource allocation in a portable manner across ccNUMA architectures; we describe how it was implemented without modifying the operating system. • An innovative hardware design for a programmable performance-monitor card is designed specifically for a ccNUMA environment and allows dynamic, adaptive performance optimizations. • A performance study shows that performance and scalability are often limited by the local-memory bandwidth rather than by the effects of remote-memory access in an Intel-based architecture.

Abstract. Most Earth system models (ESMs) are running under different high-performance computing (HPC) environments. This has several advantages, from allowing different groups to work with the same tool in parallel to leveraging the burden of ensemble climate simulations, but it also offers alternative solutions in the case of shutdown (expected or not) of any of the environments. However, for obvious scientific reasons, it is critical to ensure that ESMs provide identical results under changes in computing environment. While strict bit-for-bit reproducibility is not always guaranteed with ESMs, it is desirable that results obtained under one computing environment are at least statistically indistinguishable from those obtained under another environment, which we term a “replicability” condition following the metrology nomenclature. Here, we develop a protocol to assess the replicability of the EC-Earth ESM. Using two versions of EC-Earth, we present one case of non-replicability and one case of replicability. The non-replicable case occurs with the older version of the model and likely finds its origin in the treatment of river runoff along Antarctic coasts. By contrast, the more recent version of the model provides replicable results. The methodology presented here has been adopted as a standard test by the EC-Earth consortium (27 institutions in Europe) to evaluate the replicability of any new model version across platforms, including for CMIP6 experiments. To a larger extent, it can be used to assess whether other ESMs can safely be ported from one HPC environment to another for studying climate-related questions. Our results and experience with this work suggest that the default assumption should be that ESMs are not replicable under changes in the HPC environment, until proven otherwise.

In the last three decades, there has been an exponential growth in the area of information technology providing the information processing needs of data-driven businesses in government, science, and private industry in the form of capturing, staging, integrating, conveying, analyzing, and transferring data that will help knowledge workers and decision makers make sound business decisions. Data integration across enterprise warehouses is one of the most challenging steps in the big data analytics strategy. Several levels of data integration have been identified across enterprise warehouses: data accessibility, common data platform, and consolidated data model. Each level of integration has its own set of complexities that requir es a certain amount of time, budget, and re sources to implement. Such levels of integration are designed to address the technical challenges inherent in consolidating the disparate data sources. In this paper, we present a methodology based on industry best practices to measure the readiness of an organization and its data sets against the different levels of data integration. We introduce a new Integration Level Model (ILM) tool, which is used for quantifying an organization and data system’s readine ss to share data at a certain level of data integration. It is based largely on the established and accepted framework provided in the Data Mana gement Association (DAMA-DMBOK). It comprises several key data management functions and supporting activities, together with several environmental elements that describe and apply to each functi on. The proposed model scores the maturity of a system’s data governance processes and provides a pragmatic methodology for evaluating integration risks. The higher the computed scores, the better managed the source data system a nd the greater the likelihood that the data system can be brought in at a higher level of integration. Keywords: Big data, multi-agency data integration, data management, data warehouse

The energy consumption of supercomputers is one of the critical problems for the upcoming Exascale supercomputing era. The awareness of power an energy consumption is required on both software and hardware side. This poster deals with the energy consumption evaluation of the Total-Finite Element Tearing and Interconnect (TFETI) based solvers [2] of linear systems implemented in PERMON toolbox [1], which is an established method for solving real-world engineering problems, and with the energy consumption evaluation of the BLAS routines. The experiments performed in the poster deal with CPU frequency. This work is performed in the scope of the READEX project (Runtime Exploitation of Application Dynamism for Energy-efficient eXascale computing) [6]. The measurements were performed on the Intel Xeon E5-2680 (Intel Haswell micro-architecture) based Taurus system installed at TU Dresden. The system contains over 1400 nodes that have an FPGA-based power instrumentation called HDEEM (High Definition Energy Efficiency Monitoring), that allows for fine-grained and more accurate power and energy measurements. The measurements can be accessed through the HDEEM library, allowing developers to take energy measurements before and after the region of interest. We have evaluated the effect of the CPU frequency on the energy consumption of the TFETI solver for a linear elasticity 3D cube synthetic benchmark. On the dualized problem MPFX=MPd, we have evaluated the effect of frequency tuning on the energy consumption of the essential processing kernels of the TFETI method. There are two main phases in TFETI — preprocessing and solve. In preprocessing it is necessary to regularize the stiffness matrix K and factorize it and to assemble the G and GGT matrices and the second one to factorize. Both operations belong to the most time and also energy consuming operations. The solve employs the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) algorithm, which consists of sparse matrix-vector multiplications (by F, P, M L , M D matrices) and vector dot products and AXPY functions. In each iteration, we need to apply the direct solver twice, i.e., for forward and backward solves for the pseudoinverse K+ action and for the coarse problem solution, the (GGT)−1 action. The multiplication by the dense Schur complement matrix adds an additional operator with different computational characteristics, potentially increasing the exploitable dynamism. The poster provides results for two types of frequency tuning: (1) static tuning and (2) dynamic tuning. For static tuning experiments, the frequency is set before execution and kept constant during the runtime. For dynamic tuning, the frequency is changed during the program execution to adapt the system to the actual needs of the application. The poster shows that static tuning brings up 11.84% energy savings when compared to default CPU settings (the highest clock rate). The dynamic tuning improves this further by up to 2.68%. In total, the approach presented in this paper shows the potential to save up to 14.52% of energy for TFETI based solvers, see Table1. Another energy consumption evaluations were done with selected Sparse and Dense BLAS Level 1, 2 and 3 routines. For benchmarking we have used a set of matrices from University Florida collection [4]. We have employed AXPY, Sparse Matrix-Vector, Sparse MatrixMatrix, Dense Matrix-Vector, Dense Matrix-Matrix and Sparse Matrix-Dense Matrix multiplication routines from Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) [3]. The measured characteristics illustrate the different energy consumption of BLAS routines, as some operations are memory-bounded and others are compute-bounded. Based on our recommendations one can explore dynamic frequency switching to achieve significant energy savings up to 23%, for more details see Table 2.

This book presents cutting-edge emerging technologies and approaches in the areas of service-oriented architectures, intelligent devices and cloud-based cyber-physical systems. It provides a clear view on their applicability to the management and automation of manufacturing and process industries. It offers a holistic view of future industrial cyber-physical systems and their industrial usage and also depicts technologies and architectures as well as a migration approach and engineering tools based on these. By providing a careful balance between the theory and the practical aspects, this book has been authored by several experts from academia and industry, thereby offering a valuable understanding of the vision, the domain, the processes and the results of the research. It has several illustrations and tables to clearly exemplify the concepts and results examined in the text and these are supported by four real-life case-studies. We are witnessing rapid advances in the industrial automation, mainly driven by business needs towards agility and supported by new disruptive advances both on the software and hardware side, as well as the cross-fertilization of concepts and the amalgamation of information and communication technology-driven approaches in traditional industrial automation and control systems. This book is intended for technology managers, application designers, solution developers, engineers working in industry, as well as researchers, undergraduate and graduate students of industrial automation, industrial informatics and production engineering.

We live in an era where typical measures towards the mitigation of environmental degradation follow the identification and recording of natural parameters closely associated with it. In addition, current scientific knowledge on the one hand may be applied to minimize the environmental impact of anthropogenic activities, whereas informatics on the other, playing a key role in this ecosystem, do offer new ways of implementing complex scientific processes regarding the collection, aggregation and analysis of data concerning environmental parameters. Furthermore, another related aspect to consider is the fact that almost all relevant data recordings are influenced by their given spatial characteristics. Taking all aforementioned inputs into account, managing such a great amount of complex and remote data requires specific digital structures; these structures are typically deployed over the Web on an attempt to capitalize existing open software platforms and modern developments of hardware technology. In this paper we present an effort to provide a technical solution based on sensing devices that are based on the well-known Arduino platform and operate continuously for gathering and transmitting of environmental state information. Controls, user interface and extensions of the proposed project rely on the Android mobile device platform (both from the software and hardware side). Finally, a crucial novel aspect of our work is the fact that all herein gathered data carry spatial information, which is rather fundamental for the successful correlation between pollutants and their place of origin. The latter is implemented by an interactive Web GIS platform operating oversight in situ and on a timeline basis.

In the past three years, the so-called second wave of Virtual Reality (VR) has brought us a vast amount of new displays and input devices. Not only new hardware has entered the consumer market providing affordable pricing models but also completely new technologies are being designed and developed. Additionally new concepts for handling existing problems on the hardware and software side of the VR technology are constantly being introduced. This software and hardware development is mainly lead by enthusiasts interested in the domain of VR opposed to the established scientific community, which already partially makes use of the newly available technology. Besides Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), either cable-based or mobile, other devices like haptics devices, controllers, vests, omnidirectional treadmills, tracking technologies, as well as optical scanners for gesture-based interaction are gaining importance in the field of commodity VR. Most of these technologies are already precise and robust enough to be used for professional operation and scientific experiments. The topics discussed are the common issues with the new technologies including the approaches to solve them as for example motion-to-photon latency, barrel distortion, and low-persistence displays. Additionally an in-depth analysis of the available solutions expected to hit the market is provided. A taxonomy categorising the current developments with the chosen implementation approaches will be given. The paper analyses the state of technological advancements in the field and provides an extensive overview on the current development considering the upcoming devices and the advancements from the software side.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems may allow to y an uninhabited airplane or satellite with an autonomous control and monitored by the supervisor on ground. Safety y must be guarantee as the rest of airworthiness airplanes or space compliance satellites. The Unmanned Aircraft Systems were designed to operate in dangerous situations, like military missions bud nowadays, civil commercial applications come to be feasible due to the evolution in distributed embedded avionics systems. Dull and tedious surveillance applications are desired for this Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. A pico-satellite is a less than a kilogram mass satellite used mainly on educational projects for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) missions. Due to short time of live, down-link communications are implemented in a very high level of integration and non-gravity conditions in order to deliberate the scienti c information before drop down to the atmosphere. Both, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and pico-satellites present same electromagnetic compatibility problems. This high level of integration, some times brings an electromagnetic interference situation between embedded systems especially because the near eld of emissions are present in the Unmanned Aircraft System reduced con ned avionics bay. Emission, Susceptibility, and Path are playing in this environment. That was our experience with an UAV Megastar model. The near earth antenna re ection produced a multi-path coupling. The radio transmitter antenna makes unserviceable the entire ight control surfaces, situation that makes an unsafe y. Also, during the pico-satellite design we must take in consideration the near eld for a good electromagnetic compatibility requirements. This paper is an electromagnetic compatibility study for Unmanned Aircraft System. We will show a case of real electromagnetic interference in our particular UAV Megastar, and how was solved. We will present some good EMC practices in order to translate the distributed embedded avionics platform to our new UAV Shadow MK1. Also we present our pico-satellite design and many examples of solutions of electromagnetic interferences. Finally we will consider an electromagnetic interference reduction check list applied on Unmanned Aircraft System where avionics bay con guration may change depending on the requirements of the mission.

Low integrity is a challenge for any organization. However, most organizations emphasize integrity without explaining what is required of an individual with high integrity. Exhibiting high integrity is necessary for academics; yet, the level of academic integrity remains unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the integrity level of academicians in a Malaysian public university. This paper shares the findings on the level of integrity of academics based on a questionnaire completed by 213 academicians. Data were collected by survey questionnaire and was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. An overall mean score of 9.45 from a possible 10.0 indicated a high level of integrity among academics. The self-evaluation results by academics also demonstrated that they have attained integrity at a high level for their generic task, teaching and learning, research and publications and service for community with a mean score between 9.36 and 9.49. The value with the highest mean score was for “service to community”, whereas the lowest was for “research and publication”. These findings show that the university has successfully instilled values of integrity among academicians. Nevertheless, the university must continue to enhance academic integrity by exploring religiosity. Using Google Scholar, a literature search identified an Islam-based academic integrity model to explain the quantitative findings. Finally, a mixed method approach and involving all universities in Malaysia are recommended to further the findings of this study.