33130698
Voltage-clock scaling for low energy consumption in real-time embedded systems
Low power and energy consumption will always be an essential requirement in many real-time embedded applications. Voltage scaling is a relatively novel approach to reducing energy consumption. The idea is that a processor can be run either at high or at low voltage: at high voltage, the clock rate is high but so is the power consumption; at low voltage the clock rate is lower, but the power consumption drops by a greater factor. This immediately suggests a powerful approach to lowering energy consumption in real-time systems. In this paper we introduce static and dynamic algorithms to control processor voltage to reduce energy consumption. We demonstrate by simulation that our algorithms can significantly reduce total energy consumption.
30590203
Efficient State-Saving Architectures for Power-Mode Switching
Time and energy is expended in switching between power modes (e.g., active, hibernate, sleep, etc.). Powering off cache is one major reason for this. When there is a switch in the power-mode involving cache power-off, the system spends time and energy in filling the cache with new data (inherent cache misses). In our technique, before powering off the cache, we save its state in Embedded DRAM and bring it back when the previous power mode is restored. Our experiments have showed that in a majority of cases the cache contents are too valuable to be erased. By saving the contents we can reduce switching speed and energy. We present a heuristic to save the most relevant cache contents so that power and delay overheads are minimized. To measure the area overhead a synthesizable VHDL model was designed.
10753893
Evaluation of Error Recovery Blocks Used for Cooperating Processes
Three alternatives for implementing recovery blocks (RB's) are conceivable for backward error recovery in concurrent processing. These are the asynchronous, synchronous, and the pseudorecovery point implementations. Asynchronous RB's are based on the concept of maximum autonomy in each of concurrent processes. Consequently, establishment of RB's in a process is made independently of others and unbounded rollback propagations become a serious problem. In order to completely avoid unbounded rollback propagations, it is necessary to synchronize the establishment of recovery blocks in all cooperating processes. Process autonomy is sacrificed and processes are forced to wait for commitments from others to establish a recovery line, leading to inefficiency in time utilization. As a compromise between asynchronous and synchronous RB's we propose to insert pseudorecovery points (PRP's) so that unbounded rollback propagations may be avoided while maintaining process autonomy. We developed probabilistic models for analyzing these three methods under standard assumptions in computer performance analysis, i.e., exponential distributions for related random variables. With these models we have estimated 1) the interval between two successive recovery lines for asynchronous RB's, 2) mean loss in computation power for the synchronized method, and 3) additional overhead and rollback distance in case PRP's are used.
920212
Resource scheduling in dependable integrated modular avionics
In the recent development of avionics systems, integrated modular avionics (IMA) is advocated for next generation architecture that needs integration of mixed criticality real-time applications. These integrated applications meet their own timing constraints while sharing avionics computer resources. To guarantee timing constraints and dependability of each application, an IMA-based system is equipped with the schemes for spatial and temporal partitioning. We refer the model as SP-RTS (strongly partitioned real-time system), which deals with processor partitions and communication channels as its basic scheduling entities. This paper presents a partition and channel-scheduling algorithm for the SP-RTS. The basic idea of the algorithm is to use a two-level hierarchical schedule that activates partitions (or channels) following a distance-constraints guaranteed cyclic schedule and then dispatches tasks (or messages) according to a fixed priority schedule. To enhance schedulability, we devised heuristic algorithms for deadline decomposition and channel combining. The simulation results show the schedulability analysis of the two-level scheduling algorithm and the beneficial characteristics of the proposed deadline decomposition and channel combining algorithms.
31591898
Scanning the issue - special issue on real-time systems
40618061
Transaction Recovery in Distributed DB/DC Systems: A Progressive Approach
6639595
An Uncertainty-Driven Hybrid of Intensity-Based and Feature-Based Registration with Application to Retinal and Lung CT Images
A new hybrid of feature-based and intensity-based registration is presented. The algorithm reflects a new understanding of the role of alignment error in the generation of registration constraints. This leads to an iterative process where distinctive image locations from the moving image are matched against the intensity structure of the fixed image. The search range of this matching process is controlled by both the uncertainty in the current transformation estimate and the properties of the image locations to be matched. The resulting hybrid algorithm is applied to retinal image registration by incorporating it as the main estimation engine within our recently published Dual-Bootstrap ICP algorithm. The hybrid algorithm is used to align serial and 4d CT images of the lung using a B-spline based deformation model.
591216
The HS File: A New Dynamic Signature File Method for Efficient Information Retrieval
Many works on the signature file methods have been made in the past, but they are mainly for static environments. However, many recent applications in practice require a dynamic information storage structure that effectively supports insertions, deletions and updates. Though there are a few signature file techiniques for dynamic environments, they suffer from serious performance degradation when query signature weights are light. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic signature file organization, called the hierarchical signature(HS) file, that solves the problem of light query signature weights. We perform simulation experiments by using wide range of parameter values. We show through performance comparison based on experiments that the HS file improves performance significantly in both the retrieval time and the storage over-head over the other dynamic signature file methods proposed earlier.
14456420
A replica control method for improving availability for read-only transactions
Data replication is often considered in distributed database systems to enhance availability and performance. The benefit of data replication, however can only be realized at the cost of maintaining the consistency of data. In particular, network partition failures make it more difficult to achieve high data availability while ensuring strong correctness criteria such as l-copy serializability. We propose a replica control method to improve the availability of data in the presence of network partition failures. Our method extends the traditional primary copy method by using the relaxed correctness criterion called insular consistency for large-scale distributed systems, where partition failures frequently occur. We focus on increasing the availability of data for read-only transactions. We introduce a version vector as a tool for guaranteeing insular consistency and present a mechanism that allows read-only transactions to be executed at any partition as long as the insular consistency is satisfied. An asynchronous update propagation mechanism is also employed to improve the performance of update operations. We also show that the proposed method is correct and give some performance considerations.
17546848
Analysis of Fuzzy Operators for High Quality Information Retrieval
Kim, M.H., J.H. Lee and Y.J. Lee, Analysis of fuzzy operators for high quality information retrieval. Information Processing Letters 46 (1993) 251-256. It has been argued that the conventional fuzzy set model based on the MIN and MAX operators is not appropriate for a model of information retrieval systems due to the properties of the MIN and MAX operators adverse to retrieval effectiveness. In this paper we investigate the behavioral aspects of various fuzzy operators and address the properties which are important in achieving high quality document rankings. We then present the fuzzy set model based on positively compensatory operators, which provides higher retrieval effectiveness than the conventional fuzzy set model. It is also described that the behavior of the proposed fuzzy set model almost coincides with that of the extended boolean model.
2543653
Extracting and Learning an Unknown Grammar with Recurrent Neural Networks
Simple second-order recurrent networks are shown to readily learn small known regular grammars when trained with positive and negative strings examples. We show that similar methods are appropriate for learning unknown grammars from examples of their strings. The training algorithm is an incremental real-time, recurrent learning (RTRL) method that computes the complete gradient and updates the weights at the end of each string. After or during training, a dynamic clustering algorithm extracts the production rules that the neural network has learned. The methods are illustrated by extracting rules from unknown deterministic regular grammars. For many cases the extracted grammar outperforms the neural net from which it was extracted in correctly classifying unseen strings.