« September 2006 | Main | November 2006 »
October 13, 2006
Seminar - Design Automation of Configurable Processors
Date:
October 17, 2006 (Tuesday)
Time:
3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Venue:
Room 121, 1/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Shatin, N.T.
Speaker:
Professor Wayne Luk
Department of Computing
Imperial College London
United Kingdom
Enquiries:
Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444
Fee:
Free of Charge
ABSTRACT:
Design automation has a long history: the first Design Automation Workshop, which evolved into the Design Automation Conference, took place more than 40 years ago. While much success has been achieved in the last 40 years, the automatic development of optimised designs remains a key challenge.
This talk describes recent work at Imperial College London on design automation of configurable processors, which are often based on field-programmable gate array technology. Our aim is to produce, from a high-level description, optimised implementations that are competitive in speed, size, or power consumption.
Two research themes will be presented. The first theme involves the guided optimisation of high-level programs targeting configurable datapaths, based on source-level transformation. The second theme involves techniques for producing multi-threaded processors with customisable instruction sets. Several examples will be used to illustrate these approaches.
BIOGRAPHY:
Wayne Luk is Professor of Computer Engineering in Department of Computing at Imperial College London. He founded and leads the Computer Systems Section. His research interests include computer architecture, configurable computing, and design automation.
Posted by ymlam at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)
Seminar - BORPH, an operating system framework for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers
Date:
October 17, 2006 (Tuesday)
Time:
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Venue:
Room 121, 1/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Shatin, N.T.
Speaker:
Hayden So
Ph.D. candidate
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)
University of California
Berkeley
USA
Enquiries:
Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444
Fee:
Free of Charge
ABSTRACT:
Advances in FPGA-based reconfigurable computers have made them very attractive computing platforms for a vast variety of computation demanding areas such as bioinformatics, speech recognition, network security and high-end digital signal processing. The lack of common and intuitive operating system support, however, hinders their wide deployments.
In this talk, I will present BORPH, an operating system framework for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers with a goal to ease and accelerate development of high-level applications to run on these computers. It provides kernel support for FPGA resources by extending a standard Linux operating system. Users therefore compile and execute hardware processes on FPGA resources the same way they run software processes on conventional processor-based systems. BORPH offers run-time general file system support to hardware processes as if they were software. Furthermore, a virtual file system is built to allow access to memories and registers defined in the FPGA, which provides communication links between hardware and software.
Since the introduction of BORPH to our FPGA-based platform, BEE2, we have observed increased productivity among high-level application developers, who have few previous experience in hardware design. I will also briefly describe our Simulink-based design flow that our applications are developed with, and how it is integrated with BORPH.
BIOGRAPHY:
Hayden So is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses in operating system design for reconfigurable computers, computer architecture and hardware/software codesign methodology.
Posted by ymlam at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)