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Modern Boolean satisfiability solvers can emit proofs of unsatisfiability. There is substantial interest in being able to verify such proofs and also in using them for further computations. In this paper, we present an FPGA accelerator for checking resolution proofs, a popular proof format. Our accelerator exploits parallelism at the low level by implementing the basic resolution step in hardware, and at the high level by instantiating a number of parallel modules for proof checking. Since proof checking involves highly irregular memory accesses, we employ Hybrid Memory Cube technology for accelerator memory. The results show that while the accelerator is scalable and achieves speedups for all benchmark proofs, performance improvements are currently limited by the overhead of transitioning the proof into the accelerator memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profiling applications on a heterogeneous compute node is challenging since the way to retrieve data from the resources and interpret them varies between resource types and manufacturers. This holds especially true for measuring the energy consumption. In this paper we present Ampehre, a novel open source measurement framework that allows developers to gather comparable measurements from heterogeneous compute nodes, e.g., nodes comprising CPU, GPU, and FPGA. We explain the architecture of Ampehre and detail the measurement process on the example of energy measurements on CPU and GPU. To characterize the probing effect, we quantitatively analyze the trade-off between the accuracy of measurements and the CPU load imposed by Ampehre. Based on this analysis, we are able to specify reasonable combinations of sampling periods for the different resource types of a compute node. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) represents a principal statistical method for tracking objects in video sequences by on-line estimation of the state of a non-linear dynamic system. The performance of individual stages of the SMC algorithm is usually data-dependent, making the prediction of the performance of a real-time capable system difficult and often leading to grossly overestimated and inefficient system designs. Also, the considerable computational complexity is a major obstacle when implementing SMC methods on purely CPU-based resource constrained embedded systems. In contrast, heterogeneous multi-cores present a more suitable implementation platform. We use hybrid CPU/FPGA systems, as they can efficiently execute both the control-centric sequential as well as the data-parallel parts of an SMC application. However, even with hybrid CPU/FPGA platforms, determining the optimal HW/SW partitioning is challenging in general, and even impossible with a design time approach. Thus, we need self-adaptive architectures and system software layers that are able to react autonomously to varying workloads and changing input data while preserving real-time constraints and area efficiency. In this article, we present a video tracking application modeled on top of a framework for implementing SMC methods on CPU/FPGA-based systems such as modern platform FPGAs. Based on a multithreaded programming model, our framework allows for an easy design space exploration with respect to the HW/SW partitioning. Additionally, the application can adaptively switch between several partitionings during run-time to react to changing input data and performance requirements. Our system utilizes two variants of a add/remove self-adaptation technique for task partitioning inside this framework that achieve soft real-time behavior while trying to minimize the number of active cores. To evaluate its performance and area requirements, we demonstrate the application and the framework on a real-life video tracking case study and show that partial reconfiguration can be effectively and transparently used for realizing adaptive real-time HW/SW systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wearable computers are embedded into the mobile environment of their users. A design challenge for wearable systems is to combine the high performance required for tasks such as video decoding with the low energy consumption required to maximise battery runtimes and the flexibility demanded by the dynamics of the environment and the applications. In this paper, we demonstrate that reconfigurable hardware technology is able to answer this challenge. We present the concept and the prototype implementation of an autonomous wearable unit with reconfigurable modules (WURM). We discuss experiments that show the uses of reconfigurable hardware in WURM: ASICs-on-demand and adaptive interfaces. Finally, we present an experiment with an operating system layer for WURM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the acceleration of minimum-cost covering problems by instance-specific hardware. First, we formulate the minimum-cost covering problem and discuss a branch & bound algorithm to solve it. Then we describe instance-specific hardware architectures that implement branch & bound in 3-valued logic and use reduction techniques similar to those found in software solvers. We further present prototypical accelerator implementations and a corresponding design tool flow. Our experiments reveal significant raw speedups up to five orders of magnitude for a set of smaller unate covering problems. Provided that hardware compilation times can be reduced, we conclude that instance-specific acceleration of hard minimum-cost covering problems will lead to substantial overall speedups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on the prerouting of field programmable gate array (FPGA) cores in a dynamic reconfigurable system and another on the efficient integration of pipelined Internet protocol (IP) blocks.