Matching Items (18)
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- All Subjects: Computer Engineering
- Creators: Ren, Fengbo
- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Description
Graph theory is a critical component of computer science and software engineering, with algorithms concerning graph traversal and comprehension powering much of the largest problems in both industry and research. Engineers and researchers often have an accurate view of their target graph, however they struggle to implement a correct, and efficient, search over that graph.
To facilitate rapid, correct, efficient, and intuitive development of graph based solutions we propose a new programming language construct - the search statement. Given a supra-root node, a procedure which determines the children of a given parent node, and optional definitions of the fail-fast acceptance or rejection of a solution, the search statement can conduct a search over any graph or network. Structurally, this statement is modelled after the common switch statement and is put into a largely imperative/procedural context to allow for immediate and intuitive development by most programmers. The Go programming language has been used as a foundation and proof-of-concept of the search statement. A Go compiler is provided which implements this construct.
To facilitate rapid, correct, efficient, and intuitive development of graph based solutions we propose a new programming language construct - the search statement. Given a supra-root node, a procedure which determines the children of a given parent node, and optional definitions of the fail-fast acceptance or rejection of a solution, the search statement can conduct a search over any graph or network. Structurally, this statement is modelled after the common switch statement and is put into a largely imperative/procedural context to allow for immediate and intuitive development by most programmers. The Go programming language has been used as a foundation and proof-of-concept of the search statement. A Go compiler is provided which implements this construct.
ContributorsHenderson, Christopher (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
The last decade has witnessed a paradigm shift in computing platforms, from laptops and servers to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. These devices host an immense variety of applications many of which are computationally expensive and thus are power hungry. As most of these mobile platforms are powered by batteries, energy efficiency has become one of the most critical aspects of such devices. Thus, the energy cost of the fundamental arithmetic operations executed in these applications has to be reduced. As voltage scaling has effectively ended, the energy efficiency of integrated circuits has ceased to improve within successive generations of transistors. This resulted in widespread use of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC), which provide incredible energy efficiency. However, these are not flexible and have high non-recurring engineering (NRE) cost. Alternatively, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) offer flexibility to implement any application, but at the cost of higher area and energy compared to ASIC.
In this work, a spatially programmable architecture customized for image processing applications is proposed. The intent is to bridge the efficiency gap between ASICs and FPGAs, by offering FPGA-like flexibility and ASIC-like energy efficiency. This architecture minimizes the energy overheads in FPGAs, which result from the use of fine-grained programming style and global interconnect. It is flexible compared to an ASIC and can accommodate multiple applications.
The main contribution of the thesis is the feasibility analysis of the data path of this architecture, customized for image processing applications. The data path is implemented at the register transfer level (RTL), and the synthesis results are obtained in 45nm technology cell library from a leading foundry. The results of image-processing applications demonstrate that this architecture is within a factor of 10x of the energy and area efficiency of ASIC implementations.
In this work, a spatially programmable architecture customized for image processing applications is proposed. The intent is to bridge the efficiency gap between ASICs and FPGAs, by offering FPGA-like flexibility and ASIC-like energy efficiency. This architecture minimizes the energy overheads in FPGAs, which result from the use of fine-grained programming style and global interconnect. It is flexible compared to an ASIC and can accommodate multiple applications.
The main contribution of the thesis is the feasibility analysis of the data path of this architecture, customized for image processing applications. The data path is implemented at the register transfer level (RTL), and the synthesis results are obtained in 45nm technology cell library from a leading foundry. The results of image-processing applications demonstrate that this architecture is within a factor of 10x of the energy and area efficiency of ASIC implementations.
ContributorsSatapathy, Saktiswarup (Author) / Brunhaver, John (Thesis advisor) / Clark, Lawrence T (Committee member) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs) are promising accelerators capable
of accelerating even non-parallel loops and loops with low trip-counts. One challenge
in compiling for CGRAs is to manage both recurring and nonrecurring variables in
the register file (RF) of the CGRA. Although prior works have managed recurring
variables via rotating RF, they access the nonrecurring variables through either a
global RF or from a constant memory. The former does not scale well, and the latter
degrades the mapping quality. This work proposes a hardware-software codesign
approach in order to manage all the variables in a local nonrotating RF. Hardware
provides modulo addition based indexing mechanism to enable correct addressing
of recurring variables in a nonrotating RF. The compiler determines the number of
registers required for each recurring variable and configures the boundary between the
registers used for recurring and nonrecurring variables. The compiler also pre-loads
the read-only variables and constants into the local registers in the prologue of the
schedule. Synthesis and place-and-route results of the previous and the proposed RF
design show that proposed solution achieves 17% better cycle time. Experiments of
mapping several important and performance-critical loops collected from MiBench
show proposed approach improves performance (through better mapping) by 18%,
compared to using constant memory.
of accelerating even non-parallel loops and loops with low trip-counts. One challenge
in compiling for CGRAs is to manage both recurring and nonrecurring variables in
the register file (RF) of the CGRA. Although prior works have managed recurring
variables via rotating RF, they access the nonrecurring variables through either a
global RF or from a constant memory. The former does not scale well, and the latter
degrades the mapping quality. This work proposes a hardware-software codesign
approach in order to manage all the variables in a local nonrotating RF. Hardware
provides modulo addition based indexing mechanism to enable correct addressing
of recurring variables in a nonrotating RF. The compiler determines the number of
registers required for each recurring variable and configures the boundary between the
registers used for recurring and nonrecurring variables. The compiler also pre-loads
the read-only variables and constants into the local registers in the prologue of the
schedule. Synthesis and place-and-route results of the previous and the proposed RF
design show that proposed solution achieves 17% better cycle time. Experiments of
mapping several important and performance-critical loops collected from MiBench
show proposed approach improves performance (through better mapping) by 18%,
compared to using constant memory.
ContributorsDave, Shail (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Ogras, Umit Y. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
With the massive multithreading execution feature, graphics processing units (GPUs) have been widely deployed to accelerate general-purpose parallel workloads (GPGPUs). However, using GPUs to accelerate computation does not always gain good performance improvement. This is mainly due to three inefficiencies in modern GPU and system architectures.
First, not all parallel threads have a uniform amount of workload to fully utilize GPU’s computation ability, leading to a sub-optimal performance problem, called warp criticality. To mitigate the degree of warp criticality, I propose a Criticality-Aware Warp Acceleration mechanism, called CAWA. CAWA predicts and accelerates the critical warp execution by allocating larger execution time slices and additional cache resources to the critical warp. The evaluation result shows that with CAWA, GPUs can achieve an average of 1.23x speedup.
Second, the shared cache storage in GPUs is often insufficient to accommodate demands of the large number of concurrent threads. As a result, cache thrashing is commonly experienced in GPU’s cache memories, particularly in the L1 data caches. To alleviate the cache contention and thrashing problem, I develop an instruction aware Control Loop Based Adaptive Bypassing algorithm, called Ctrl-C. Ctrl-C learns the cache reuse behavior and bypasses a portion of memory requests with the help of feedback control loops. The evaluation result shows that Ctrl-C can effectively improve cache utilization in GPUs and achieve an average of 1.42x speedup for cache sensitive GPGPU workloads.
Finally, GPU workloads and the co-located processes running on the host chip multiprocessor (CMP) in a heterogeneous system setup can contend for memory resources in multiple levels, resulting in significant performance degradation. To maximize the system throughput and balance the performance degradation of all co-located applications, I design a scalable performance degradation predictor specifically for heterogeneous systems, called HeteroPDP. HeteroPDP predicts the application execution time and schedules OpenCL workloads to run on different devices based on the optimization goal. The evaluation result shows HeteroPDP can improve the system fairness from 24% to 65% when an OpenCL application is co-located with other processes, and gain an additional 50% speedup compared with always offloading the OpenCL workload to GPUs.
In summary, this dissertation aims to provide insights for the future microarchitecture and system architecture designs by identifying, analyzing, and addressing three critical performance problems in modern GPUs.
First, not all parallel threads have a uniform amount of workload to fully utilize GPU’s computation ability, leading to a sub-optimal performance problem, called warp criticality. To mitigate the degree of warp criticality, I propose a Criticality-Aware Warp Acceleration mechanism, called CAWA. CAWA predicts and accelerates the critical warp execution by allocating larger execution time slices and additional cache resources to the critical warp. The evaluation result shows that with CAWA, GPUs can achieve an average of 1.23x speedup.
Second, the shared cache storage in GPUs is often insufficient to accommodate demands of the large number of concurrent threads. As a result, cache thrashing is commonly experienced in GPU’s cache memories, particularly in the L1 data caches. To alleviate the cache contention and thrashing problem, I develop an instruction aware Control Loop Based Adaptive Bypassing algorithm, called Ctrl-C. Ctrl-C learns the cache reuse behavior and bypasses a portion of memory requests with the help of feedback control loops. The evaluation result shows that Ctrl-C can effectively improve cache utilization in GPUs and achieve an average of 1.42x speedup for cache sensitive GPGPU workloads.
Finally, GPU workloads and the co-located processes running on the host chip multiprocessor (CMP) in a heterogeneous system setup can contend for memory resources in multiple levels, resulting in significant performance degradation. To maximize the system throughput and balance the performance degradation of all co-located applications, I design a scalable performance degradation predictor specifically for heterogeneous systems, called HeteroPDP. HeteroPDP predicts the application execution time and schedules OpenCL workloads to run on different devices based on the optimization goal. The evaluation result shows HeteroPDP can improve the system fairness from 24% to 65% when an OpenCL application is co-located with other processes, and gain an additional 50% speedup compared with always offloading the OpenCL workload to GPUs.
In summary, this dissertation aims to provide insights for the future microarchitecture and system architecture designs by identifying, analyzing, and addressing three critical performance problems in modern GPUs.
ContributorsLee, Shin-Ying (Author) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Caches pose a serious limitation in scaling many-core architectures since the demand of area and power for maintaining cache coherence increases rapidly with the number of cores. Scratch-Pad Memories (SPMs) provide a cheaper and lower power alternative that can be used to build a more scalable many-core architecture. The trade-off of substituting SPMs for caches is however that the data must be explicitly managed in software. Heap management on SPM poses a major challenge due to the highly dynamic nature of of heap data access. Most existing heap management techniques implement a software caching scheme on SPM, emulating the behavior of hardware caches. The state-of-the-art heap management scheme implements a 4-way set-associative software cache on SPM for a single program running with one thread on one core. While the technique works correctly, it suffers from signifcant performance overhead. This paper presents a series of compiler-based efficient heap management approaches that reduces heap management overhead through several optimization techniques. Experimental results on benchmarks from MiBenchGuthaus et al. (2001) executed on an SMM processor modeled in gem5Binkert et al. (2011) demonstrate that our approach (implemented in llvm v3.8Lattner and Adve (2004)) can improve execution time by 80% on average compared to the previous state-of-the-art.
ContributorsLin, Jinn-Pean (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Ogras, Umit Y. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The information era has brought about many technological advancements in the past
few decades, and that has led to an exponential increase in the creation of digital images and
videos. Constantly, all digital images go through some image processing algorithm for
various reasons like compression, transmission, storage, etc. There is data loss during this
process which leaves us with a degraded image. Hence, to ensure minimal degradation of
images, the requirement for quality assessment has become mandatory. Image Quality
Assessment (IQA) has been researched and developed over the last several decades to
predict the quality score in a manner that agrees with human judgments of quality. Modern
image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms are quite effective at prediction accuracy, and
their development has not focused on improving computational performance. The existing
serial implementation requires a relatively large run-time on the order of seconds for a single
frame. Hardware acceleration using Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) provides
reconfigurable computing fabric that can be tailored for a broad range of applications.
Usually, programming FPGAs has required expertise in hardware descriptive languages
(HDLs) or high-level synthesis (HLS) tool. OpenCL is an open standard for cross-platform,
parallel programming of heterogeneous systems along with Altera OpenCL SDK, enabling
developers to use FPGA's potential without extensive hardware knowledge. Hence, this
thesis focuses on accelerating the computationally intensive part of the most apparent
distortion (MAD) algorithm on FPGA using OpenCL. The results are compared with CPU
implementation to evaluate performance and efficiency gains.
few decades, and that has led to an exponential increase in the creation of digital images and
videos. Constantly, all digital images go through some image processing algorithm for
various reasons like compression, transmission, storage, etc. There is data loss during this
process which leaves us with a degraded image. Hence, to ensure minimal degradation of
images, the requirement for quality assessment has become mandatory. Image Quality
Assessment (IQA) has been researched and developed over the last several decades to
predict the quality score in a manner that agrees with human judgments of quality. Modern
image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms are quite effective at prediction accuracy, and
their development has not focused on improving computational performance. The existing
serial implementation requires a relatively large run-time on the order of seconds for a single
frame. Hardware acceleration using Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) provides
reconfigurable computing fabric that can be tailored for a broad range of applications.
Usually, programming FPGAs has required expertise in hardware descriptive languages
(HDLs) or high-level synthesis (HLS) tool. OpenCL is an open standard for cross-platform,
parallel programming of heterogeneous systems along with Altera OpenCL SDK, enabling
developers to use FPGA's potential without extensive hardware knowledge. Hence, this
thesis focuses on accelerating the computationally intensive part of the most apparent
distortion (MAD) algorithm on FPGA using OpenCL. The results are compared with CPU
implementation to evaluate performance and efficiency gains.
ContributorsGunavelu Mohan, Aswin (Author) / Sohoni, Sohum (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Fengbo (Thesis advisor) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Achieving human level intelligence is a long-term goal for many Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers. Recent developments in combining deep learning and reinforcement learning helped us to move a step forward in achieving this goal. Reinforcement learning using a delayed reward mechanism is an approach to machine intelligence which studies decision making with control and how a decision making agent can learn to act optimally in an environment-unaware conditions.
Q-learning is one of the model-free reinforcement directed learning strategies which uses temporal differences to estimate the performances of state-action pairs called Q values. A simple implementation of Q-learning algorithm can be done using a Q table memory to store and update the Q values. However, with an increase in state space data due to a complex environment, and with an increase in possible number of actions an agent can perform, Q table reaches its space limit and would be difficult to scale well. Q-learning with neural networks eliminates the use of Q table by approximating the Q function using neural networks.
Autonomous agents need to develop cognitive properties and become self-adaptive to be deployable in any environment. Reinforcement learning with Q-learning have been very efficient in solving such problems. However, embedded systems like space rovers and autonomous robots rarely implement such techniques due to the constraints faced like processing power, chip area, convergence rate and cost of the chip. These problems present a need for a portable, low power, area efficient hardware accelerator to accelerate the process of such learning.
This problem is targeted by implementing a hardware schematic architecture for Q-learning using Artificial Neural networks. This architecture exploits the massive parallelism provided by neural network with a dedicated fine grain parallelism provided by a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) thereby processing the Q values at a high throughput. Mars exploration rovers currently use Xilinx-Space-grade FPGA devices for image processing, pyrotechnic operation control and obstacle avoidance. The hardware resource consumption for the architecture has been synthesized considering Xilinx Virtex7 FPGA as the target device.
Q-learning is one of the model-free reinforcement directed learning strategies which uses temporal differences to estimate the performances of state-action pairs called Q values. A simple implementation of Q-learning algorithm can be done using a Q table memory to store and update the Q values. However, with an increase in state space data due to a complex environment, and with an increase in possible number of actions an agent can perform, Q table reaches its space limit and would be difficult to scale well. Q-learning with neural networks eliminates the use of Q table by approximating the Q function using neural networks.
Autonomous agents need to develop cognitive properties and become self-adaptive to be deployable in any environment. Reinforcement learning with Q-learning have been very efficient in solving such problems. However, embedded systems like space rovers and autonomous robots rarely implement such techniques due to the constraints faced like processing power, chip area, convergence rate and cost of the chip. These problems present a need for a portable, low power, area efficient hardware accelerator to accelerate the process of such learning.
This problem is targeted by implementing a hardware schematic architecture for Q-learning using Artificial Neural networks. This architecture exploits the massive parallelism provided by neural network with a dedicated fine grain parallelism provided by a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) thereby processing the Q values at a high throughput. Mars exploration rovers currently use Xilinx-Space-grade FPGA devices for image processing, pyrotechnic operation control and obstacle avoidance. The hardware resource consumption for the architecture has been synthesized considering Xilinx Virtex7 FPGA as the target device.
ContributorsGankidi, Pranay Reddy (Author) / Thangavelautham, Jekanthan (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Seo, Jae-Sun (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs) are emerging accelerators that promise low-power acceleration of compute-intensive loops in applications. The acceleration achieved by CGRA relies on the efficient mapping of the compute-intensive loops by the CGRA compiler onto the CGRA. The CGRA mapping problem, being NP-complete, is performed in a two-step process, scheduling, and mapping. The scheduling algorithm allocates timeslots to the nodes of the DFG, and the mapping algorithm maps the scheduled nodes onto the PEs of the CGRA. On a mapping failure, the initiation interval (II) is increased, and a new schedule is obtained for the increased II. Most previous mapping techniques use the Iterative Modulo Scheduling algorithm (IMS) to find a schedule for a given II. Since IMS generates a resource-constrained ASAP (as-soon-as-possible) scheduling, even with increased II, it tends to generate a similar schedule that is not mappable and does not explore the schedule space effectively. The problems encountered by IMS-based scheduling algorithms are explored and an improved randomized scheduling algorithm for scheduling of the application loop to be accelerated is proposed. When encountering a mapping failure for a given schedule, existing mapping algorithms either exit and retry the mapping anew, or recursively remove the previously mapped node to find a valid mapping (backtrack).Abandoning the mapping is extreme, but even backtracking may not be the best choice, since the root of the problem may not be the previous node. The challenges in existing algorithms are systematically analyzed and a failure-aware mapping algorithm is presented. The loops in general-purpose applications are often complicated loops, i.e., loops with perfect and imperfect nests and loops with nested if-then-else's (conditionals). The existing hardware-software solutions to execute branches and conditions are inefficient. A co-design approach that efficiently executes complicated loops on CGRA is proposed. The compiler transforms complex loops, maps them to the CGRA, and lays them out in the memory in a specific manner, such that the hardware can fetch and execute the instructions from the right path at runtime. Finally, a CGRA compilation simulator open-source framework is presented. This open-source CGRA simulation framework is based on LLVM and gem5 to extract the loop, map them onto the CGRA architecture, and execute them as a co-processor to an ARM CPU.
ContributorsBalasubramanian, Mahesh (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Pozzi, Laura (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Uncertainty is intrinsic in Cyber-Physical Systems since they interact with human and work with both analog and digital worlds. Since even minute deviation from the real values can make catastrophe in a safety-critical application, considering uncertainties in CPS behavior is essential. On the other side, time is a foundational aspect of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Correct timing of system events is critical to optimize responsiveness to the environment, in terms of timeliness, accuracy, and precision in the knowledge, measurement, prediction, and control of CPS behavior. In order to design a more resilient and reliable CPS, first and foremost, there should be a way to specify the timing constraints that a constructed Cyber-Physical System must meet with considering existing uncertainties. Only then, we can seek systematic approaches to check if all timing constraints are being met, and develop correct-by-construction methodologies. In this regard, Timestamp Temporal Logic (TTL) is developed to specify the timing constraints on a distributed CPS. By TTL designers can specify the timing requirements that a CPS must satisfy in a succinct and intuitive manner and express the tolerable error as a part of the language. The proposed deduction system on TTL (TTL reasoning system) gives the ability to check the consistency among expresses system specifications and simplify them to be implemented on FPGA for run-time verification. Regarding CPS run-time verification, Timestamp-based Monitoring Approach(TMA) has been designed that can hook up to a CPS and take its timing specifications in TTL and verify if the timing constraints are being met with considering existing uncertainties in the system. TMA does not need to compute whether the constraint is being met at each and every instance of time but it re-evaluates constraint only when there is an event that can affect the outcome. This enables it to perform online timing monitoring of CPS for less computation and resources. Furthermore, the minimum design parameters of the timing CPS that are required to enable testing the timing of CPS are defined in this dissertation
ContributorsMehrabian, Mohammadreza (Author) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Thesis advisor) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Sarjoughian, Hessam (Committee member) / Derler, Patricia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Data-intensive systems such as big data and large machine learning (ML) systems experience serious scalability challenges due to the ever-increasing data demand from ML and analytics applications and the resource fragmentation caused by conventional monolithic server architecture. Memory and storage disaggregation emerges as a pivotal technology to address these challenges by decoupling memory and storage resources from individual servers and managing and provisioning them to applications as a shared resource pool. This dissertation investigates several important aspects of memory and storage disaggregation and proposes novel solutions to support data-intensive applications.First, caching is a fundamental way to utilize disaggregated storage, but building a large disaggregated cache is challenging because the commonly-used fix-sized cache block allocation scheme is unable to provide good cache performance with low memory overhead for diverse cloud workloads with vastly different I/O patterns. The dissertation proposes a novel adaptive cache block allocation approach that dynamically adjusts cache block sizes based on changing I/O patterns. This approach significantly improves I/O performance while reducing memory usage, outperforming traditional fixed-size cache systems in diverse cloud workloads. Evaluation shows that it improves read latency by 20% and write latency by 9%. It also reduces the amount of I/O traffic to cloud block storage by up to 74% while achieving up to 41% memory savings with only 2 ms.
Second, large ML applications such as large language model (LLM) inference are memory demanding, but to support them using disaggregated memory brings challenges to memory management since disaggregated memory has higher memory access latency compared to local memory. The dissertation proposes latency-aware memory aggregation which cautiously distributes memory accesses to minimize the latency gap between local and disaggregated memory. It also proposes NUMA-aligned tensor parallelism to further improve the computing efficiency. With these optimizations, LLM inference achieves substantial speedups. For example, first token latency improves by 61%, and end-to-end latency improves by 43% for a LLM inference task which uses a model of 66 billion parameters when the batch size is 8.
Finally, to address the cost, power consumption, and volatility of DRAM, the dissertation proposes to incorporate flash memory into memory pools within the disaggregation framework. By establishing a tiered memory architecture which combines fast-tier local DRAM with slow-tier DRAM and flash memory in the memory pool and effectively migrates data based on hotness across memory tiers, this approach not only reduces expenses but also maintains the overall performance and scalability of data-intensive systems. For example, with 50% saving in memory cost, the performance degradation of training ResNet50 on ImageNet dataset is only 2.68%.
Together, these contributions systematically optimize the use of memory and storage disaggregation to deliver more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective systems for supporting the data explosion in today’s and future computing systems.
ContributorsYang, Qirui (Author) / Zhao, Ming (Thesis advisor) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Ren, Fengbo (Committee member) / Zou, Jia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024