Ivan Shcherbakov

Bio: Ivan Shcherbakov is an academic researcher from Kaiserslautern University of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Electrical impedance & Wireless sensor network. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 8 publications receiving 117 citations.

An Energy Efficient FPGA Accelerator for Monte Carlo Option Pricing with the Heston Model

Abstract: Today, pricing of derivates (particularly options) in financial institutions is a challenge. Besides the increasing complexity of the products, obtaining fair prices requires more realistic (and therefore complex) models of the underlying asset behavior. Not only due to the increasing costs, energy efficient and accurate pricing of these models becomes more and more important. In this paper we present - to the best of our knowledge - the first FPGA based accelerator for option pricing with the state-of-the-art Heston model. It is based on advanced Monte Carlo simulations. Compared to an 8-core Intel Xeon Server running at 3.07GHz, our hybrid FPGA-CPU-system saves 89% of the energy and provides around twice the speed. The same system reduces the energy consumption per simulation to around 40% of a fully-loaded Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU. For a three-Virtex-5 chip only accelerator, we expect to achieve the same simulation speed as a Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU, by consuming less than 3% of the energy at the same time.

An operating system abstraction layer for portable applications in wireless sensor networks

Abstract: Portability of software modules is a major concern in application development for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), stressed by the typical lack of resources in embedded systems. Abstractions of the hardware platform which are introduced by the operating system (OS) allow the development of modules which can be reused in new applications. However, the lack of standards in this domain, restricts the chances to achieve efficient portability to those systems running on very similar platforms (e.g. same OS).In this paper, we present an Operating System Abstraction Layer (OSAL), which unifies the OS architecture and establishes a common API across multiple OS. Portability of applications is effectively granted thanks to a common set of primitives, which are independent of the underlaying OS and its particular architecture.We highlight the efficiency of the OSAL as well as detailed description of its main features and design considerations. We have implemented the OSAL on top of two well known OS and performed extensive evaluations, which show that it effectively reduces portability efforts at the expenses of minimal run-time overhead as well as negligible increase of memory footprint.

A High-Performance FPGA-Based Implementation of the LZSS Compression Algorithm

Abstract: The increasing growth of embedded networking applications has created a demand for high-performance logging systems capable of storing huge amounts of high-bandwidth, typically redundant data. An efficient way of maximizing the logger performance is doing a real-time compression of the logged stream. In this paper we present a flexible high-performance implementation of the LZSS compression algorithm capable of processing up to 50 MB/s on a Virtex-5 FPGA chip. We exploit the independently addressable dual-port block RAMs inside the FPGA chip to achieve an average performance of 2 clock cycles per byte. To make the compressed stream compatible with the ZLib library we encode the LZSS algorithm output using a fixed Huffman table defined by the Deflate specification. We also demonstrate how changing the amount of memory allocated to various internal tables impacts the performance and compression ratio. Finally, we provide a cycle-accurate estimation tool that allows finding a trade-off between FPGA resource utilization, compression ratio and performance for a specific data sample.

TinySEP – A Tiny Platform for Ambient Assisted Living

Abstract: Many AAL software platforms developed in the last years are not widely accepted outside of their projects, because of their high complexity. Moreover, many successful software frameworks are based on the thin architecture approach: they implement only basic functionality, being more flexible in practical use cases. In this work we present the Tiny Smart Environment Platform. TinySEP is a compact platform, which makes use of two approved concepts of the software engineering. It combines the benefits of complex modular platforms and proprietary monolithic solutions.

A Parallel Adaptive Range Coding Compressor: Algorithm, FPGA Prototype, Evaluation

Abstract: Loss less compression algorithms are employed in a wide variety of communication- and storage-related systems. Many embedded applications, such as real-time communication log compression used in automotive systems, impose strict throughput constraints on the compression unit, creating a demand for hardware-accelerated designs. In this paper we present a modification of the Adaptive Range Coding algorithm used by 7-Zip compressor implemented in an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). We have improved the algorithm to support massive parallelization that allows making use of the distributed FPGA logic and achieving compression throughput of more than 50MB/s when implemented on a Virtex5 FPGA in conjunction with a hardware LZSS coder. Compared to a fixed-table Huffman encoder, our implementation provides the same high throughput and a 20% better compression ratio. Furthermore we explore several variations of algorithm parameters and show various trade-offs between compression efficiency, FPGA utilization and throughput.

Wireless Sensor Network Virtualization: A Survey

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the key components of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. They are now ubiquitous and used in a plurality of application domains. WSNs are still domain specific and usually deployed to support a specific application. However, as WSNs' nodes are becoming more and more powerful, it is getting more and more pertinent to research how multiple applications could share a very same WSN infrastructure. Virtualization is a technology that can potentially enable this sharing. This paper is a survey on WSN virtualization. It provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art and an in-depth discussion of the research issues. We introduce the basics of WSN virtualization and motivate its pertinence with carefully selected scenarios. Existing works are presented in detail and critically evaluated using a set of requirements derived from the scenarios. The pertinent research projects are also reviewed. Several research issues are also discussed with hints on how they could be tackled.

A Survey on Resource Management in IoT Operating Systems

Abstract: Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) concept has attracted a lot of attention due to its capability to translate our physical world into a digital cyber world with meaningful information. The IoT devices are smaller in size, sheer in number, contain less memory, use less energy, and have more computational capabilities. These scarce resources for IoT devices are powered by small operating systems (OSs) that are specially designed to support the IoT devices’ diverse applications and operational requirements. These IoT OSs are responsible for managing the constrained resources of IoT devices efficiently and in a timely manner. In this paper, discussions on IoT devices and OS resource management are provided. In detail, the resource management mechanisms of the state-of-the-art IoT OSs, such as Contiki, TinyOS, and FreeRTOS, are investigated. The different dimensions of their resource management approaches (including process management, memory management, energy management, communication management, and file management) are studied, and their advantages and limitations are highlighted.

A Survey of Methods for Analyzing and Improving GPU Energy Efficiency

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed phenomenal growth in the computational capabilities and applications of GPUs. However, this trend has also led to a dramatic increase in their power consumption. This article surveys research works on analyzing and improving energy efficiency of GPUs. It also provides a classification of these techniques on the basis of their main research idea. Further, it attempts to synthesize research works that compare the energy efficiency of GPUs with other computing systems (e.g., FPGAs and CPUs). The aim of this survey is to provide researchers with knowledge of the state of the art in GPU power management and motivate them to architect highly energy-efficient GPUs of tomorrow.

A Survey of Methods For Analyzing and Improving GPU Energy Efficiency

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a phenomenal growth in the computational capabilities and applications of GPUs. However, this trend has also led to dramatic increase in their power consumption. This paper surveys research works on analyzing and improving energy efficiency of GPUs. It also provides a classification of these techniques on the basis of their main research idea. Further, it attempts to synthesize research works which compare energy efficiency of GPUs with other computing systems, e.g. FPGAs and CPUs. The aim of this survey is to provide researchers with knowledge of state-of-the-art in GPU power management and motivate them to architect highly energy-efficient GPUs of tomorrow.

Wireless Sensor Network Virtualization: A Survey

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the key components of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. They are now ubiquitous and used in a plurality of application domains. WSNs are still domain specific and usually deployed to support a specific application. However, as WSN nodes are becoming more and more powerful, it is getting more and more pertinent to research how multiple applications could share a very same WSN infrastructure. Virtualization is a technology that can potentially enable this sharing. This paper is a survey on WSN virtualization. It provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art and an in-depth discussion of the research issues. We introduce the basics of WSN virtualization and motivate its pertinence with carefully selected scenarios. Existing works are presented in detail and critically evaluated using a set of requirements derived from the scenarios. The pertinent research projects are also reviewed. Several research issues are also discussed with hints on how they could be tackled.