Advances in hardware architecture regarding multi-core processors make parallel computing ubiquitous. To achieve the maximum utilization of multi-core processors, parallel programming techniques are required. However, there are several challenges standing in front of parallel programming. These problems are mainly divided into three major groups. First, although recent advancements in parallel programming languages (e.g. MPI, OpenCL, etc.) assist developers, still parallel programming is not desirable for most programmers. The second one belongs to the massive volume of old software and applications, which have been written in serial mode. However, converting millions of line of serial codes to parallel codes is highly time-consuming and requiring huge verification effort. Third, the production of software and applications in parallel mode is very expensive since it needs knowledge and expertise. Super-optimization provided by super compilers is the process of automatically determine the dependent and independent instructions to find any data dependency and loop-free sequence of instructions. Super compiler then runs these instructions on different processors in the parallel mode, if it is possible. Super-optimization is a feasible solution for helping the programmer to get relaxed from parallel programming workload. Since the most complexity of the sequential codes is in the nested loops, we try to parallelize the nested loops by using the idea of super-optimization. One of the underlying stages in the super-optimization is scheduling tiled space for iterating nested loops. Since the problem is NP-Hard, using the traditional optimization methods are not feasible. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based super-optimization method as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to reduce the cost of parallel programming. In addition, it increases the utilization of the processing capacity of the multi-core processor. As the result, an intermediate programmer can use the whole processing capacity of his/her system without knowing anything about writing parallel codes or super compiler functions by sending the serial code to a cloud server and receiving the parallel version of the code from the cloud server. In this paper, an evolutionary algorithm is leveraged to solve the scheduling problem of tiles. Our proposed super-optimization method will serve as software and provided as a hybrid (public and private) deployment model.

Protocols enable things to connect and communicate, thus making the Internet of Things possible. The performance aspect of the Internet of Things protocols, vital to its widespread utilization, have received much attention. However, one aspect of IoT protocols, essential to its adoption in the real world, is a protocols' feature set. Comparative analysis based on competing features and properties are rarely if ever, discussed in the literature. In this paper, we define 19 attributes in 5 categories that are essential for IoT stakeholders to consider. These attributes are then used to contrast four IoT protocols, MQTT, HTTP, CoAP and XMPP. Furthermore, we discuss scenarios where an assessment based on comparative strengths and weaknesses would be beneficial. The provided comparison model can be easily extended to include protocols like MQTT-SN, AMQP and DDS. 

In the current many-core architectures, network-on-chips (NoCs) have been efficiently utilized as communication backbones for enabling massive parallelism and high degree of integration on a chip. In spite of the advantages of conventional NoCs, wired multi-hop links impose limitations on their performance by long delay and much power consumption especially in large systems. To overcome these limitations, different solutions such as using wireless interconnections have been proposed. Utilizing long-range, high bandwidth and low power wireless links can lead to solve the problems corresponding to wired links. Meanwhile, the grid-like mesh is the most stable topology in conventional NoC designs. That is why most of the wireless network-on-chip (WNoC) architectures have been designed based on this topology. The goals of this article are to challenge mesh topology and to demonstrate the efficiency of honeycomb-based WNoC architectures. In this article, we propose HoneyWiN, hybrid wired/wireless NoC architecture with honeycomb topology. Also, a partition-based XYZ-planar routing algorithm for energy conservation is proposed. In order to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed architecture, first, an analytical comparison of HoneyWiN with a mesh-based WNoC, as the baseline architecture, is carried out. In order to compare the proposed architecture, we implement our partition-based routing algorithm in the form of 2-axes coordinate system in the baseline architecture. Simulation results show that HoneyWiN reduces about 17% of energy consumption while increases the throughput by 10% compared to the mesh-based WNoC. Then, HoneyWiN is compared with four state-of-the-art mesh-based NoC architectures. In all of the evaluations, HoneyWiN provides higher performance in term of delay, throughput and energy consumption. Overall, the results indicate that HoneyWiN is very effective in improving throughput, increasing speed and reducing energy consumption.

Autonomous vehicles have a great influence on our life. These vehicles are more convenient, more energy efficient providing higher safety level and cheaper driving solutions. In addition, decreasing the generation of CO 2 , and the risk vehicular accidents are other benefits of autonomous vehicles. However, leveraging a full autonomous system is challenging and the proposed solutions are newfound. Providing a testbed for evaluating new algorithms is beneficial for researchers and hardware developers to verify the real impact of their solutions. The existence of testing environment is a low-cost infrastructure leading to increase the time-to-market of novel ideas. In this paper, we propose Auto Rio, a cutting-edge indoor testbed for developing autonomous vehicles.

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of ongoing projects within the IEEE standardization to guarantee timeliness and low-latency communication based on switched Ethernet for industrial applications. The huge demand is mainly coming from industries where intensive data transmission is required, such as in the modern vehicles where cameras, lidars and high-bandwidth modern sensors are connected. The TSN standards are evolving over time, hence the hardware needs to change depending upon the modifications. In addition, high performance hardware is required to obtain a full benefit from the standards. In this paper, we present a research plan for developing novel techniques to support a parameterized and modular hardware IP core of the multi-stage TSN switch fabric in VHSIC (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit) Hardware Description Language (VHDL), which can be deployed in any Field-Programmable-Gate-Array (FPGA) devices. We present the challenges on the way towards the mentioned goal. 

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) suffer from energy-hungry implementation due to their computation and memory intensive processing patterns. This problem is even more significant by the proliferation of CNNs on embedded platforms. To overcome this problem, we offer NeuroPower as an automatic framework that designs a highly optimized and energy efficient set of CNN architectures for embedded systems. NeuroPower explores and prunes the design space to find improved set of neural architectures. Toward this aim, a multi-objective optimization strategy is integrated to solve Neural Architecture Search (NAS) problem by near-optimal tuning network hyperparameters. The main objectives of the optimization algorithm are network accuracy and number of parameters in the network. The evaluation results show the effectiveness of NeuroPower on energy consumption, compacting rate and inference time compared to other cutting-edge approaches. In comparison with the best results on CIFAR-10/CIFAR-100 datasets, a generated network by NeuroPower presents up to 2.1x/1.56x compression rate, 1.59x/3.46x speedup and 1.52x/1.82x power saving while loses 2.4%/-0.6% accuracy, respectively.

Fog computing offers a wide range of service levels including low bandwidth usage, low response time, support of heterogeneous applications, and high energy efficiency. Therefore, real-time embedded applications could potentially benefit from Fog infrastructure. However, providing high system utilization is an important challenge of Fog computing especially for processing embedded applications. In addition, although Fog computing extends cloud computing by providing more energy efficiency, it still suffers from remarkable energy consumption, which is a limitation for embedded systems. To overcome the above limitations, in this paper, we propose SoFA, a Spark-oriented Fog architecture that leverages Spark functionalities to provide higher system utilization, energy efficiency, and scalability. Compared to the common Fog computing platforms where edge devices are only responsible for processing data received from their IoT nodes, SoFA leverages the remaining processing capacity of all other edge devices. To attain this purpose, SoFA provides a distributed processing paradigm by the help of Spark to utilize the whole processing capacity of all the available edge devices leading to increase energy efficiency and system utilization. In other words, SoFA proposes a near- sensor processing solution in which the edge devices act as the Fog nodes. In addition, SoFA provides scalability by taking advantage of Spark functionalities. According to the experimental results, SoFA is a power-efficient and scalable solution desirable for embedded platforms by providing up to 3.1x energy efficiency for the Word-Count benchmark compared to the common Fog processing platform.

High computation demands and big memory resources are the major implementation challenges of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) especially for low-power and resource-limited embedded devices. Many binarized neural networks are recently proposed to address these issues. Although they have significantly decreased computation and memory footprint, they have suffered from accuracy loss especially for large datasets. In this paper, we propose TOT-Net, a ternarized neural network with [-1, 0, 1] values for both weights and activation functions that has simultaneously achieved a higher level of accuracy and less computational load. In fact, first, TOT-Net introduces a simple bitwise logic for convolution computations to reduce the cost of multiply operations. To improve the accuracy, selecting proper activation function and learning rate are influential, but also difficult. As the second contribution, we propose a novel piece-wise activation function, and optimized learning rate for different datasets. Our findings first reveal that 0.01 is a preferable learning rate for the studied datasets. Third, by using an evolutionary optimization approach, we found novel piece-wise activation functions customized for TOT-Net. According to the experimental results, TOT-Net achieves 2.15%, 8.77%, and 5.7/5.52% better accuracy compared to XNOR-Net on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet top-5/top-1 datasets, respectively.

Sequence alignment is the most widely used operation in bioinformatics. With the exponential growth of the biological sequence databases, searching a database to find the optimal alignment for a query sequence (that can be at the order of hundreds of millions of characters long) would require excessive processing power and memory bandwidth. Sequence alignment algorithms can potentially benefit from the processing power of massive parallel processors due their simple arithmetic operations, coupled with the inherent fine-grained and coarse-grained parallelism that they exhibit. However, the limited memory bandwidth in conventional computing systems prevents exploiting the maximum achievable speedup. In this paper, we propose a processing-in-memory architecture as a viable solution for the excessive memory bandwidth demand of bioinformatics applications. The design is composed of a set of simple and lightweight processing elements, customized to the sequence alignment algorithm, integrated at the logic layer of an emerging 3D DRAM architecture. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture results in up to 2.4x speedup and 41% reduction in power consumption, compared to a processor-side parallel implementation.