Matching Items (7)
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- All Subjects: Embedded Systems
- All Subjects: Microprocessors--Design and construction.
- Creators: Shrivastava, Aviral
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
Description
Ever reducing time to market, along with short product lifetimes, has created a need to shorten the microprocessor design time. Verification of the design and its analysis are two major components of this design cycle. Design validation techniques can be broadly classified into two major categories: simulation based approaches and formal techniques. Simulation based microprocessor validation involves running millions of cycles using random or pseudo random tests and allows verification of the register transfer level (RTL) model against an architectural model, i.e., that the processor executes instructions as required. The validation effort involves model checking to a high level description or simulation of the design against the RTL implementation. Formal techniques exhaustively analyze parts of the design but, do not verify RTL against the architecture specification. The focus of this work is to implement a fully automated validation environment for a MIPS based radiation hardened microprocessor using simulation based approaches. The basic framework uses the classical validation approach in which the design to be validated is described in a Hardware Definition Language (HDL) such as VHDL or Verilog. To implement a simulation based approach a number of random or pseudo random tests are generated. The output of the HDL based design is compared against the one obtained from a "perfect" model implementing similar functionality, a mismatch in the results would thus indicate a bug in the HDL based design. Effort is made to design the environment in such a manner that it can support validation during different stages of the design cycle. The validation environment includes appropriate changes so as to support architecture changes which are introduced because of radiation hardening. The manner in which the validation environment is build is highly dependent on the specifications of the perfect model used for comparisons. This work implements the validation environment for two MIPS simulators as the reference model. Two bugs have been discovered in the RTL model, using simulation based approaches through the validation environment.
ContributorsSharma, Abhishek (Author) / Clark, Lawrence (Thesis advisor) / Holbert, Keith E. (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are being used in many safety-critical applications. Due to the important role in virtually every aspect of human life, it is crucial to make sure that a CPS works properly before its deployment. However, formal verification of CPS is a computationally hard problem. Therefore, lightweight verification methods such as testing and monitoring of the CPS are considered in the industry. The formal representation of the CPS requirements is a challenging task. In addition, checking the system outputs with respect to requirements is a computationally complex problem. In this dissertation, these problems for the verification of CPS are addressed. The first method provides a formal requirement analysis framework which can find logical issues in the requirements and help engineers to correct the requirements. Also, a method is provided to detect tests which vacuously satisfy the requirement because of the requirement structure. This method is used to improve the test generation framework for CPS. Finally, two runtime verification algorithms are developed for off-line/on-line monitoring with respect to real-time requirements. These monitoring algorithms are computationally efficient, and they can be used in practical applications for monitoring CPS with low runtime overhead.
ContributorsDokhanchi, Adel (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Cyber-physical systems and hard real-time systems have strict timing constraints that specify deadlines until which tasks must finish their execution. Missing a deadline can cause unexpected outcome or endanger human lives in safety-critical applications, such as automotive or aeronautical systems. It is, therefore, of utmost importance to obtain and optimize a safe upper bound of each task’s execution time or the worst-case execution time (WCET), to guarantee the absence of any missed deadline. Unfortunately, conventional microarchitectural components, such as caches and branch predictors, are only optimized for average-case performance and often make WCET analysis complicated and pessimistic. Caches especially have a large impact on the worst-case performance due to expensive off- chip memory accesses involved in cache miss handling. In this regard, software-controlled scratchpad memories (SPMs) have become a promising alternative to caches. An SPM is a raw SRAM, controlled only by executing data movement instructions explicitly at runtime, and such explicit control facilitates static analyses to obtain safe and tight upper bounds of WCETs. SPM management techniques, used in compilers targeting an SPM-based processor, determine how to use a given SPM space by deciding where to insert data movement instructions and what operations to perform at those program locations. This dissertation presents several management techniques for program code and stack data, which aim to optimize the WCETs of a given program. The proposed code management techniques include optimal allocation algorithms and a polynomial-time heuristic for allocating functions to the SPM space, with or without the use of abstraction of SPM regions, and a heuristic for splitting functions into smaller partitions. The proposed stack data management technique, on the other hand, finds an optimal set of program locations to evict and restore stack frames to avoid stack overflows, when the call stack resides in a size-limited SPM. In the evaluation, the WCETs of various benchmarks including real-world automotive applications are statically calculated for SPMs and caches in several different memory configurations.
ContributorsKim, Yooseong (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Broman, David (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Reducing device dimensions, increasing transistor densities, and smaller timing windows, expose the vulnerability of processors to soft errors induced by charge carrying particles. Since these factors are inevitable in the advancement of processor technology, the industry has been forced to improve reliability on general purpose Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). With the availability of increased hardware resources, redundancy based techniques are the most promising methods to eradicate soft error failures in CMP systems. This work proposes a novel customizable and redundant CMP architecture (UnSync) that utilizes hardware based detection mechanisms (most of which are readily available in the processor), to reduce overheads during error free executions. In the presence of errors (which are infrequent), the always forward execution enabled recovery mechanism provides for resilience in the system. The inherent nature of UnSync architecture framework supports customization of the redundancy, and thereby provides means to achieve possible performance-reliability trade-offs in many-core systems. This work designs a detailed RTL model of UnSync architecture and performs hardware synthesis to compare the hardware (power/area) overheads incurred. It then compares the same with those of the Reunion technique, a state-of-the-art redundant multi-core architecture. This work also performs cycle-accurate simulations over a wide range of SPEC2000, and MiBench benchmarks to evaluate the performance efficiency achieved over that of the Reunion architecture. Experimental results show that, UnSync architecture reduces power consumption by 34.5% and improves performance by up to 20% with 13.3% less area overhead, when compared to Reunion architecture for the same level of reliability achieved.
ContributorsHong, Fei (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Bazzi, Rida (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The ubiquity of embedded computational systems has exploded in recent years impacting everything from hand-held computers and automotive driver assistance to battlefield command and control and autonomous systems. Typical embedded computing systems are characterized by highly resource constrained operating environments. In particular, limited energy resources constrain performance in embedded systems often reliant on independent fuel or battery supplies. Ultimately, mitigating energy consumption without sacrificing performance in these systems is paramount. In this work power/performance optimization emphasizing prevailing data centric applications including video and signal processing is addressed for energy constrained embedded systems. Frameworks are presented which exchange quality of service (QoS) for reduced power consumption enabling power aware energy management. Power aware systems provide users with tools for precisely managing available energy resources in light of user priorities, extending availability when QoS can be sacrificed. Specifically, power aware management tools for next generation bistable electrophoretic displays and the state of the art H.264 video codec are introduced. The multiprocessor system on chip (MPSoC) paradigm is examined in the context of next generation many-core hand-held computing devices. MPSoC architectures promise to breach the power/performance wall prohibiting advancement of complex high performance single core architectures. Several many-core distributed memory MPSoC architectures are commercially available, while the tools necessary to effectively tap their enormous potential remain largely open for discovery. Adaptable scalability in many-core systems is addressed through a scalable high performance multicore H.264 video decoder implemented on the representative Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) architecture. The resulting agile performance scalable system enables efficient adaptive power optimization via decoding-rate driven sleep and voltage/frequency state management. The significant problem of mapping applications onto these architectures is additionally addressed from the perspective of instruction mapping for limited distributed memory architectures with a code overlay generator implemented on the CBE. Finally runtime scheduling and mapping of scalable applications in multitasking environments is addressed through the introduction of a lightweight work partitioning framework targeting streaming applications with low latency and near optimal throughput demonstrated on the CBE.
ContributorsBaker, Michael (Author) / Chatha, Karam S. (Thesis advisor) / Raupp, Gregory B. (Committee member) / Vrudhula, Sarma B. K. (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The holy grail of computer hardware across all market segments has been to sustain performance improvement at the same pace as silicon technology scales. As the technology scales and the size of transistors shrinks, the power consumption and energy usage per transistor decrease. On the other hand, the transistor density increases significantly by technology scaling. Due to technology factors, the reduction in power consumption per transistor is not sufficient to offset the increase in power consumption per unit area. Therefore, to improve performance, increasing energy-efficiency must be addressed at all design levels from circuit level to application and algorithm levels.
At architectural level, one promising approach is to populate the system with hardware accelerators each optimized for a specific task. One drawback of hardware accelerators is that they are not programmable. Therefore, their utilization can be low as they perform one specific function. Using software programmable accelerators is an alternative approach to achieve high energy-efficiency and programmability. Due to intrinsic characteristics of software accelerators, they can exploit both instruction level parallelism and data level parallelism.
Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) is a software programmable accelerator consists of a number of word-level functional units. Motivated by promising characteristics of software programmable accelerators, the potentials of CGRAs in future computing platforms is studied and an end-to-end CGRA research framework is developed. This framework consists of three different aspects: CGRA architectural design, integration in a computing system, and CGRA compiler. First, the design and implementation of a CGRA and its instruction set is presented. This design is then modeled in a cycle accurate system simulator. The simulation platform enables us to investigate several problems associated with a CGRA when it is deployed as an accelerator in a computing system. Next, the problem of mapping a compute intensive region of a program to CGRAs is formulated. From this formulation, several efficient algorithms are developed which effectively utilize CGRA scarce resources very well to minimize the running time of input applications. Finally, these mapping algorithms are integrated in a compiler framework to construct a compiler for CGRA
At architectural level, one promising approach is to populate the system with hardware accelerators each optimized for a specific task. One drawback of hardware accelerators is that they are not programmable. Therefore, their utilization can be low as they perform one specific function. Using software programmable accelerators is an alternative approach to achieve high energy-efficiency and programmability. Due to intrinsic characteristics of software accelerators, they can exploit both instruction level parallelism and data level parallelism.
Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) is a software programmable accelerator consists of a number of word-level functional units. Motivated by promising characteristics of software programmable accelerators, the potentials of CGRAs in future computing platforms is studied and an end-to-end CGRA research framework is developed. This framework consists of three different aspects: CGRA architectural design, integration in a computing system, and CGRA compiler. First, the design and implementation of a CGRA and its instruction set is presented. This design is then modeled in a cycle accurate system simulator. The simulation platform enables us to investigate several problems associated with a CGRA when it is deployed as an accelerator in a computing system. Next, the problem of mapping a compute intensive region of a program to CGRAs is formulated. From this formulation, several efficient algorithms are developed which effectively utilize CGRA scarce resources very well to minimize the running time of input applications. Finally, these mapping algorithms are integrated in a compiler framework to construct a compiler for CGRA
ContributorsHamzeh, Mahdi (Author) / Vrudhula, Sarma (Thesis advisor) / Gopalakrishnan, Kailash (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Pollution is an increasing problem around the world, and one of the main forms it takes is air pollution. Air pollution, from oxides and dioxides to particulate matter, continues to contribute to millions of deaths each year, which is more than the next three leading causes of environment-related death combined. Plus, the problem is only growing as industrial plants, factories, and transportation continues to rapidly increase across the globe. Those most affected include less developed countries and individuals with pre-existing respiratory conditions. Although many citizens know about this issue, it is often unclear what times and locations are worst in terms of pollutant concentration as it can vary on the time of day, local activity, and other variable factors. As a result, citizens lack the knowledge and resources to properly combat or avoid air pollution, as well as the data and evidence to support any sort of regulatory change. Many companies and organizations have tried to address this through Air Quality Indexes (AQIs) but are not focused enough to help the everyday citizen, and often fail to include many significant pollutants. Thus, we sought to address this issue in a cost-effective way through creating a network of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and deploying them in a select area of Tempe, Arizona. We utilized Arduino Microprocessors and Wireless Radio Frequency Transceivers to send and receive air pollution data in real time. Then, displayed this data in such a way that it could be released to the public via web or mobile app. Furthermore, the product is cheap enough to be reproduced and sold in bulk as well as scaled and customized to be compatible with dozens of different air quality sensors.
ContributorsCoury, Abrahm Philip (Co-author) / Gillespie, Cody (Co-author) / Ren, Fengbo (Thesis director) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05