On the wave of technology scaling, digital designers are quickly approaching the limits of current technologies. At the same time, deep submicron architectures are becoming more prone to transient errors and permanent faults. Swarm intelligence represents an interesting source of inspiration already used in the past for the design of decentralized-control hardware architectures with intrinsic properties of scalability, adaptability and fault tolerance, with a configuration-free approach. This paper presents the first swarm coprocessor for floating point array processing with native multitasking support. The coprocessor, designed around a nature-inspired processing fabric, has been integrated on a Virtex6 FPGA with a MicroBlaze host processor and preliminarily evaluated on common applications. The performance of the system, joined to its fault tolerance support, reveals the potentialities of the approach opening to architectural improvements and mapping of safety-critical digital signal processing applications.
A nature-inspired adaptive floating-point coprocessing system / Sau, C; Pani, D; Palumbo, Francesca; Raffo, L.. - (2012), pp. 1-8. (Intervento presentato al convegno 6th Annual Conference on Design and Architectures for Signal and Image Processing, DASIP 2012 tenutosi a Karlsruhe, Germany nel 23-25 October 2012).
A nature-inspired adaptive floating-point coprocessing system
PALUMBO, Francesca;
2012-01-01
Abstract
On the wave of technology scaling, digital designers are quickly approaching the limits of current technologies. At the same time, deep submicron architectures are becoming more prone to transient errors and permanent faults. Swarm intelligence represents an interesting source of inspiration already used in the past for the design of decentralized-control hardware architectures with intrinsic properties of scalability, adaptability and fault tolerance, with a configuration-free approach. This paper presents the first swarm coprocessor for floating point array processing with native multitasking support. The coprocessor, designed around a nature-inspired processing fabric, has been integrated on a Virtex6 FPGA with a MicroBlaze host processor and preliminarily evaluated on common applications. The performance of the system, joined to its fault tolerance support, reveals the potentialities of the approach opening to architectural improvements and mapping of safety-critical digital signal processing applications.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
