Computer and Systems Architecture Commons^™

Dividing And Conquering Meshes Within The Nist Fire Dynamics Simulator (Fds) On Multicore Computing Systems, Donald Charles Collins

Masters Theses

The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) provides a computational fluid dynamics model of a fire, which can be visualized by using NIST Smokeview (SMV). Users must create a configuration file (*.fds) that describes the environment and other characteristics of the fire scene so that the FDS software can produce the output file (*.smv) needed for visualization.The processing can be computationally intensive, often taking between several minutes and several hours to complete. In many cases, a user will create a file that is not optimized for a multicore computing system. By dividing meshes within the …

Implementation Of A Neuromorphic Development Platform With Danna, Jason Yen-Shen Chan

Masters Theses

Neuromorphic computing is the use of artificial neural networks to solve complex problems. The specialized computing field has been growing in interest during the past few years. Specialized hardware that function as neural networks can be utilized to solve specific problems unsuited for traditional computing architectures such as pattern classification and image recognition. However, these hardware platforms have neural network structures that are static, being limited to only perform a specific application, and cannot be used for other tasks. In this paper, the feasibility of a development platform utilizing a dynamic artificial neural network for researchers is discussed.

Modifying Instruction Sets In The Gem5 Simulator To Support Fault Tolerant Designs, Chuan Zhang

Masters Theses

Traditional fault tolerant techniques such as hardware or time redundancy incur high overhead and are inefficient for checking arithmetic operations. Our objective is to study an alternative approach of adding new instructions to check arithmetic operations. These checking instructions either rely on error detecting code or calculate approximate results and consequently, consume much less execution time. To evaluate the effectiveness of such an approach we wish to modify several benchmarks to use checking instructions and run simulation experiments to find out their execution time and memory usage. However, the checking instructions are not included in the instruction set and as …

Middleware And Services For Dynamic Adaptive Neural Network Arrays, Joshua Caleb Willis

Masters Theses

Dynamic Adaptive Neural Network Arrays (DANNAs) are neuromorphic systems that exhibit spiking behaviors and can be designed using evolutionary optimization. Array elements are rapidly reconfigurable and can function as either neurons or synapses with programmable interconnections and parameters. Visualization applications can examine DANNA element connections, parameters, and functionality, and evolutionary optimization applications can utilize DANNA to speedup neural network simulations. To facilitate interactions with DANNAs from these applications, we have developed a language-agnostic application programming interface (API) that abstracts away low-level communication details with a DANNA and provides a high-level interface for reprogramming and controlling a DANNA. The library has …

Energy Efficiency Exploration Of Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Architecture With Emerging Nonvolatile Memory, Xiaobin Liu

Masters Theses

With the rapid growth in consumer electronics, people expect thin, smart and powerful devices, e.g. Google Glass and other wearable devices. However, as portable electronic products become smaller, energy consumption becomes an issue that limits the development of portable systems due to battery lifetime. In general, simply reducing device size cannot fully address the energy issue.

To tackle this problem, we propose an on-chip interconnect infrastructure and pro- gram storage structure for a coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) with emerging non-volatile embedded memory (MRAM). The interconnect is composed of a matrix of time-multiplexed switchboxes which can be dynamically reconfigured with the …