Computer Engineering Commons^™

Generalized Techniques For Using System Execution Traces To Support Software Performance Analysis, Thelge Manjula Peiris

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation proposes generalized techniques to support software performance analysis using system execution traces in the absence of software development artifacts such as source code. The proposed techniques do not require modifications to the source code, or to the software binaries, for the purpose of software analysis (non-intrusive). The proposed techniques are also not tightly coupled to the architecture specific details of the system being analyzed. This dissertation extends the current techniques of using system execution traces to evaluate software performance properties, such as response times, service times. The dissertation also proposes a novel technique to auto-construct a dataflow model …

Implementation Of A Speech Recognition Algorithm To Facilitate Verbal Commands For Visual Analytics Law Enforcement Toolkit, Shubham S. Rastogi, David L. Wiszowaty, Hanye Xu, Abish Malik, David S. Ebert

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The VALET (Visual Analytics Law Enforcement Toolkit) system allows the user to visualize and predict crime hotspots and analyze crime data. Police officers have difficulty in using VALET in a mobile situation, since the system allows only conventional input interfaces (keyboard and mouse). This research focuses on introducing a new input interface to VALET in the form of speech recognition, which allows the user to interact with the software without losing functionality. First an Application Program Interface (API) that was compatible with the VALET system was found and initial code scripts to test its functionality were written. Next, the code …

Optimization In The Simulation Of Jammed Polyhedral Particles, Joseph W. Mynhier, Ishan Srivastava, Timothy S. Fisher

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Energy loss due to poor transport properties in electrically and thermally conducting materials, such as battery electrodes and thermoelectric composites, contributes to the energy inefficiency of electronic devices. For conductive materials composed of granular materials, particle-particle contact topology strongly governs the efficiency of energy transfer. Although there is a large body of existing work on the arrangements made by granular materials comprised of spherical particles, less is known about the mechanically stable arrangements of granular materials made of convex polyhedra. This project seeks to create a computer simulation of the solidification of convex polyhedra from a diffuse state into a …

Visualization Of The Growth And Production Of Grapes Through Analysis Of Sensory Data, Sung Yeon Choi, Luke Neumann, Brian Olsen, Sungahn Ko, David Ebert Ph.D

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Grapes used in the wine industry have been one of the highest value crops in the United States. However, with unpredictable weather changes and recent drought in the Western United States, vineyard owners and grape growers have faced difficulties on producing good quality grapes suited for wine making. Therefore, a technology that would keep record of environmental data and incorporate the data to support agricultural decisions will help the growers to produce quality grapes even in extreme conditions. As such, this research focuses on developing an interactive system that uses sensory data and visual analytics to facilitate vineyard management and …

Gpu/Cpu Performance Of Image Processing Tasks For Use In The Cam 2 System, Jonathan Cottom, Yung-Hsiang Lu, Young-Sol Koh

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Over the past several years, graphics processing units (GPU) have increasingly been viewed as the future of image processing engines. Currently, the Continuous Analysis of Many CAMeras (CAM²) project performs its processing on CPUs, which will potentially be more costly as the system scales to service more users. This study seeks to analyze the performance gains of GPU processing and evaluate the advantage of supporting GPU-accelerated analysis for CAM² users. The platform for comparing the CPU and GPU performance has been the NVIDIA Jetson TK1. The target hardware implementation is an Amazon cloud instance, where final cost …

Development Of A Web Application For Continuous Analysis Of Many Cameras (Cam2), Anurag Anjaria, Dr. Yung-Hsiang Lu, Young-Sol Koh, Charles Hansen

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

There are tens of thousands of web cameras located around the world and publicly available on the Internet. The images captured by these cameras contain data relating to our living environment such as traffic patterns, weather and crowd movement. Researchers can capture this data using image analysis techniques on the video and image from these cameras. However, there is a lack of a single, unified repository of all the public cameras on the Internet; this, coupled with the computational demands of image analysis means there is a need for a tool to help researchers perform large-scale image analyis on many …

Demonstration Of A Platform Architecture That Enables Ultra-Low Power Iot Applications, Jacob Stevens, Hrishikesh Jayakumar, Vijay Raghunathan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The coming years will see a surge of billions more devices connected in an “Internet of Things” (IoT) that aim to improve the day to day life of humans by sensing relevant physical phenomena and using the data to make intelligent decisions and predictions. But with current devices, this surge will result in billions more batteries needing to be used and changed regularly. The need for batteries—and its impact—can be mitigated through low power devices that harvest ambient energy (e.g. solar, vibrational, thermoelectric, radio wave), but energy harvesting devices require the ability to continue computations across power cycles, a paradigm …

Image Segmentation Using Fuzzy-Spatial Taxon Cut, Lauren Barghout

MODVIS Workshop

Images convey multiple meanings that depend on the context in which the viewer perceptually organizes the scene. This presents a problem for automated image segmentation, because it adds uncertainty to the process of selecting which objects to include or not include within a segment. I’ll discuss the implementation of a fuzzy-logic-natural-vision-processing engine that solves this problem by assuming the scene architecture prior to processing. The scene architecture, a standardized natural-scene-perception-taxonomy comprised of a hierarchy of nested spatial-taxons. Spatial-taxons are regions (pixel-sets) that are figure-like, in that they are perceived as having a contour, are either `thing-like', or a `group of …

Two Correspondence Problems Easier Than One, Aaron Michaux, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

Computer vision research rarely makes use of symmetry in stereo reconstruction despite its established importance in perceptual psychology. Such stereo reconstructions produce visually satisfying figures with precisely located points and lines, even when input images have low or moderate resolution. However, because few invariants exist, there are no known general approaches to solving symmetry correspondence on real images. The problem is significantly easier when combined with the binocular correspondence problem, because each correspondence problem provides strong non-overlapping constraints on the solution space. We demonstrate a system that leverages these constraints to produce accurate stereo models from pairs of binocular images …

Assessing Impact Of Exposure To Cyberphysical Systems On Student Interest In Information Technology Careers, Mayari I. Serrano Anazco

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

The main purpose of this project is to determine if the use of Information Technology (IT) tools, specifically cyberphysical devices, in outreach sessions will promote interest of young individuals in pursuing IT careers. The Diversity office of Purdue’s College of Technology offers a number of outreach sessions to a variety of target populations throughout the year. Each department in the college has an opportunity to present a session related to a field of study offered by the department. The research was carried out thru the Spring 2015 semester during the DOiT and Vision outreach programs offered through the college’s Diversity …

Cloud Enabled Attack Vectors, Ryan Jasper

Purdue Polytechnic Directed Projects

The purpose of this directed project and related research was to demonstrate and catalog a new attack vector that utilizes cloud managed infrastructure. Cloud computing is a recent trend that is creating significant hype in the IT sector. Being that cloud computing is a new theme in the computing world, there are many security concerns that remain unknown and unexplored. The product of this directed project provides a documented taxonomy of the new attack vector and how to mitigate risk from this kind of attack.

The new attack vector creates efficiencies throughout the lifecycle of an attack and greatly reduces …

Architectural Techniques To Extend Multi-Core Performance Scaling, Hamza Bin Sohail

Open Access Dissertations

Multi-cores have successfully delivered performance improvements over the past decade; however, they now face problems on two fronts: power and off-chip memory bandwidth. Dennard's scaling is effectively coming to an end which has lead to a gradual increase in chip power dissipation. In addition, sustaining off-chip memory bandwidth has become harder due to the limited space for pins on the die and greater current needed to drive the increasing load . My thesis focuses on techniques to address the power and off-chip memory bandwidth challenges in order to avoid the premature end of the multi-core era. ^ In the first …

Captured Open Book Image De-Warping And Shading Correction Using 3d Depth Information, Chyuan-Tyng Wu

Open Access Dissertations

Various three dimensional (3D) measuring or capturing devices are introduced to the society recently, and there are abundant possibilities that we can take advantage of this new technology. In this research, we worked on one useful application: to correct the distortion due to the curved shape of the pages of an open book in captured images using of depth information. This work is relevant to camera-based capture devices that can use a projector to cast structured light patterns to provide depth information. In order to improve the visual quality of captured documents, we established our algorithm from two perspectives. First, …

An Empirical Approach To The Re-Creation Of Vehicle Drive Cycles, Andrew J. Larson

Open Access Theses

Vehicles such as buses, delivery trucks, mining equipment, and motorsport vehicles often repeat a highly defined pattern, route, or track during normal use. For these vehicles, standard dynamometer drive cycles are of little use. It was proposed that deriving a vehicle drive cycle from empirical data collected from on-board vehicle sensors would produce more accurate vehicle characteristic predictions for special purpose vehicles. This study answers the question "Is it possible to use recorded vehicle data to replicate a real world driving scenario for the purpose of vehicle diagnostics?" To reduce the complexity of the project, an electric go-kart was used …

Hybrid Power System For Micro Air Vehicles, Bakytgul Khaday

Open Access Theses

Today Micro Air Vehicles are in need of a good power source that would enable them longer flight time and various functionalities. This work is focused on to this problem. A possible solution that is offered in this study is implementing a hybrid power system consisting of battery and supercapacitor (SCAP). The proposed hybrid power system was tested on an existing MAV platform (Cheerson CX-10). A separate hybrid power printed circuit board (PCB) was designed and manufactured. For experimental and system verification purposes, the PCB was not sized for on-board flight. The hybrid power PCB was connected to MAV through …

Hubcheck: Check The Hub, Derrick S. Kearney

Open Access Theses

The HUBzero Platform is a framework for building websites, referred to as "hubs," that promote research communities through online simulation, data management, and collaboration. With each software release, the HUBzero Team dedicates weeks of team members' time toward manually testing, fixing, and retesting hub components. The unique mixture of environments that make up a hub makes using existing automated testing solutions hard and shifts the burden of testing to humans, promoting variation, spot checking of fixes, and other shortcuts to avoid the high cost of completely retesting the system. With over twenty hubs being actively managed by the HUBzero Team, …

Diagnosis Of Systematic Defects Based On Design-For-Manufacturability Guidelines, Dhawal Krishana Gupta

Open Access Theses

All products in the Very-Large-Scale-Integrated-Circuit (VLSIC) industry go through three major stages of production - Design, Verification and Manufacturing. Unfortunately, neither of these stages are truly perfect, hence we need two more sub-stages of manufacturing, namely Testing and Defect Diagnosis to prevent imperfections in ICs. Testing is used to generate test vectors to validate the functionality of the Device-under-Test (DUT), and Defect Diagnosis is the process of identifying the root-cause of a failing chip, i.e., the location and nature of defect. Systematic defects are unintended structural and material changes at specific locations with a higher probability of failure due to …

Trajectory Generation For Lane-Change Maneuver Of Autonomous Vehicles, Ashesh Goswami

Open Access Theses

Lane-change maneuver is one of the most thoroughly investigated automatic driving operations that can be used by an autonomous self-driving vehicle as a primitive for performing more complex operations like merging, entering/exiting highways or overtaking another vehicle. This thesis focuses on two coherent problems that are associated with the trajectory generation for lane-change maneuvers of autonomous vehicles in a highway scenario: (i) an effective velocity estimation of neighboring vehicles under different road scenarios involving linear and curvilinear motion of the vehicles, and (ii) trajectory generation based on the estimated velocities of neighboring vehicles for safe operation of self-driving cars during …

Characterization Of Vectorization Strategies For Recursive Algorithms, Shruthi Balakrishna

Open Access Theses

A successful architectural trend in parallelism is the emphasis on data parallelism with SIMD hardware. Since SIMD extensions on commodity processors tend to require relatively little extra hardware, executing a SIMD instruction is essentially free from a power perspective, making vector computation an attractive target for parallelism. SIMD instructions are designed to accelerate the performance of applications such as motion video, real-time physics and graphics. Such applications perform repetitive operations on large arrays of numbers. While the key idea is to parallelize significant portions of data that get operated by several sequential instructions into a single instruction, not every application …

Exploiting Intra-Warp Address Monotonicity For Fast Memory Coalescing In Gpus, Hector Rodriguez-Simmonds

Open Access Theses

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are growing increasingly popular as general purpose compute accelerators. GPUs are best suited for applications which have abundant data parallelism wherein the computation expressed as a single thread can be applied over a large set of data items. One key constraint that affects application performance on GPUs is that the underlying hardware is single-instruction, multiple data (SIMD) hardware which requires parallel instructions from the multiple threads to execute in a lock-step manner. The benefits of lock-step execution can be seriously degraded if the threads diverge (because of memory or branches). Specifically in the case of memory, …

Recursive Tree Traversal Dependence Analysis, Yusheng Weijiang

Open Access Theses

While there has been much work done on analyzing and transforming regular programs that operate over linear arrays and dense matrices, comparatively little has been done to try to carry these optimizations over to programs that operate over heap-based data structures using pointers. Previous work has shown that point blocking, a technique similar to loop tiling in regular programs, can help increase the temporal locality of repeated tree traversals. Point blocking, however, has only been shown to work on tree traversals where each traversal is fully independent and would allow parallelization, greatly limiting the types of applications that this transformation …

Semcache: Semantics-Aware Caching For Efficient Gpu Offloading, Nabeel Al-Saber

Open Access Dissertations

Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) offer massive, highly-efficient parallelism, making them an attractive target for computation-intensive applications. However, GPUs have a separate memory space which introduces the complexity of manually handling explicit data movements between GPU and CPU memory spaces. Although GPU kernels/libraries have made it easy to improve application performance by offloading computation to GPUs, unfortunately it is very difficult to manually optimize CPU-GPU communication between multiple kernel invocations to avoid redundant communication when using these kernels with complex applications. ^ In this thesis, we introduce SemCache, a semantics-aware GPU cache that automatically manages CPU-GPU communication in addition to optimizing …

Black-Box Printer Models And Their Applications, Yanling Ju

Open Access Dissertations

In the electrophotographic printing process, the deposition of toner within the area of a given printer addressable pixel is strongly influenced by the values of its neighboring pixels. The interaction between neighboring pixels, which is commonly referred to as dot-gain, is complicated. The printer models which are developed according to a pre-designed test page can either be embedded in the halftoning algorithm, or used to predict the printed halftone image at the input to an algorithm being used to assess print quality. In our research, we examine the potential influence of a larger neighborhood (45?45) of the digital halftone image …

Improving Capacity-Performance Tradeoffs In The Storage Tier, Eric P. Villasenor

Open Access Dissertations

Data-set sizes are growing. New techniques are emerging to organize and analyze these data-sets. There is a key access pattern emerging with these new techniques, large sequential file accesses. The trend toward bigger files exists to help amortize the cost of data accesses from the storage layer, as many workloads are recognized to be I/O bound. The storage layer is widely recognized as the slowest layer in the system. This work focuses on the tradeoff one can make with that storage capacity to improve system performance. ^ Capacity can be leveraged for improved availability or improved performance. This tradeoff is …

Assessment Of High-Fidelity Collision Models In The Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method, Andrew Brian Weaver

Open Access Dissertations

Advances in computer technology over the decades has allowed for more complex physics to be modeled in the DSMC method. Beginning with the first paper on DSMC in 1963, 30,000 collision events per hour were simulated using a simple hard sphere model. Today, more than 10 billion collision events can be simulated per hour for the same problem. Many new and more physically realistic collision models such as the Lennard-Jones potential and the forced harmonic oscillator model have been introduced into DSMC. However, the fact that computer resources are more readily available and higher-fidelity models have been developed does not …

Linear Matrix Inequality-Based Nonlinear Adaptive Robust Control With Application To Unmanned Aircraft Systems, David William Kun

Open Access Theses

Unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are gaining popularity in civil and commercial applications as their lightweight on-board computers become more powerful and affordable, their power storage devices improve, and the Federal Aviation Administration addresses the legal and safety concerns of integrating UASs in the national airspace. Consequently, many researchers are pursuing novel methods to control UASs in order to improve their capabilities, dependability, and safety assurance. The nonlinear control approach is a common choice as it offers several benefits for these highly nonlinear aerospace systems (e.g., the quadrotor). First, the controller design is physically intuitive and is derived from well known …

Accelerating Mpi Collective Communications Through Hierarchical Algorithms With Flexible Inter-Node Communication And Imbalance Awareness, Benjamin Scott Parsons

Open Access Dissertations

This work presents and evaluates algorithms for MPI collective communication operations on high performance systems. Collective communication algorithms are extensively investigated, and a universal algorithm to improve the performance of MPI collective operations on hierarchical clusters is introduced. This algorithm exploits shared-memory buffers for efficient intra-node communication while still allowing the use of unmodified, hierarchy-unaware traditional collectives for inter-node communication. The universal algorithm shows impressive performance results with a variety of collectives, improving upon the MPICH algorithms as well as the Cray MPT algorithms. Speedups average 15x - 30x for most collectives with improved scalability up to 65536 cores.^ Further …