Prof. Dr. Antonio Carlos Schneider Beck Filho


Associate Professor

Institute of Informatics
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS

Research interests


Students

Postdoc

PhD

MSc

Undergraduate


Professional Activities

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Book: Adaptable Embedded Systems (on amazon.com)

Antonio Carlos Schneider Beck Fl., Carlos Arthur Lang Lisbôa and Luigi Carro


As embedded systems become more complex, designers face a number of challenges at different levels: they need to boost performance, while keeping energy consumption as low as possible, they need to reuse existent software code, and at the same time they need to take advantage of the extra logic available in the chip, represented by multiple processors working together. This book describes several strategies to achieve such different and interrelated goals, by the use of adaptability.

Coverage includes reconfigurable systems, dynamic optimization techniques such as binary translation and trace reuse, new memory architectures including homogeneous and heterogeneous multiprocessor systems, communication issues and NOCs, fault tolerance against fabrication defects and soft errors, and finally, how one can combine several of these techniques together to achieve higher levels of performance and adaptability. The discussion also includes how to employ specialized software to improve this new adaptive system, and how this new kind of software must be designed and programmed.


Book: Dynamic Reconfigurable Architectures and Transparent Optimization Techniques (on amazon.com)

Antonio Carlos Schneider Beck Fl. and Luigi Carro


As Moore’s law is losing steam, one already sees the phenomenon of clock frequency reduction caused by the excessive power dissipation in general purpose processors. At the same time, embedded systems are being concentrating several heterogeneous applications in a single device, and hence new architectural alternatives are necessary. Reconfigurable computing has already shown to be a potential solution when it comes to accelerate specific code with a small power budget, but significant speedups are achieved only in very dedicated dataflow oriented software, without capturing the reality of nowadays complex heterogeneous systems. Moreover, any architecture solution should be able to execute legacy code, since there is already a large base of applications and standards.

This book presents a detailed study on new techniques to cope with the aforementioned limitations. First, characteristics of reconfigurable systems are discussed in details, and a large number of case studies is shown. Then, a detailed analysis of several benchmarks demonstrates that such architectures need to attack a diverse range of applications with very different behaviours, besides supporting code compatibility. This requires the used of dynamic optimization techniques, such as Binary Translation and Trace reuse. Finally, works that combine both reconfigurable systems and dynamic techniques are discussed and a quantitative analysis of one them, the DIM architecture, is presented.