Hardware compatibility list

About: Hardware compatibility list is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2311 publications have been published within this topic receiving 38304 citations.

System architecture for wireless sensor networks

Abstract: In this thesis we present and operating system and three generations of a hardware platform designed to address the needs of wireless sensor networks. Our operating system, called TinyOS uses an event based execution model to provide support for fine-grained concurrency and incorporates a highly efficient component model. TinyOS enables us to use a hardware architecture that has a single processor time shared between both application and protocol processing. We show how a virtual partitioning of computational resources not only leads to efficient resource utilization but allows for a rich interface between application and protocol processing. This rich interface, in turn, allows developers to exploit application specific communication protocols that significantly improve system performance. The hardware platforms we develop are used to validate a generalized architecture that is technology independent. Our general architecture contains a single central controller that performs both application and protocol-level processing. For flexibility, this controller is directly connected to the RF transceiver. For efficiency, the controller is supported by a collection of hardware accelerators that provide basic communication primitives that can be flexibility composed into application specific protocols. The three hardware platforms we present are instances of this general architecture with varying degrees of hardware sophistication. The Rene platform serves as a baseline and does not contain any hardware accelerators. It allows us to develop the TinyOS operating system concepts and refine its concurrency mechanisms. The Mica node incorporates hardware accelerators that improve communication rates and synchronization accuracy within the constraints of current microcontrollers. As an approximation of our general architecture, we use Mica to validate the underlying architectural principles. The Mica platform has become the foundation for hundreds of wireless sensor network research efforts around the world. It has been sold to more than 250 organizations. Spec is the most advanced node presented and represents the full realization of our general architecture. It is a 2.5 mm x 2.5 mm CMOS chip that includes processing, storage, wireless communications and hardware accelerators. We show how the careful selection of the correct accelerators can lead to orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency without sacrificing flexibility. In addition to performing a theoretical analysis on the strengths of our architecture, we demonstrate its capabilities through a collection of real-world application deployments.

Hardware/software co-design

Abstract: Most electronic systems, whether self contained or embedded, have a predominant digital component consisting of a hardware platform which executes software application programs. Hardware/software co-design means meeting system level objectives by exploiting the synergism of hardware and software through their concurrent design. Co-design problems have different flavors according to the application domain, implementation technology and design methodology. Digital hardware design has increasingly more similarities to software design. Hardware circuits are often described using modeling or programming languages, and they are validated and implemented by executing software programs, which are sometimes conceived for the specific hardware design. Current integrated circuits can incorporate one (or more) processor core(s) and memory array(s) on a single substrate. These "systems on silicon" exhibit a sizable amount of embedded software, which provides flexibility for product evolution and differentiation purposes. Thus the design of these systems requires designers to be knowledgeable in both hardware and software domains to make good design tradeoffs. The paper introduces various aspects of co-design. We highlight the commonalities and point out the differences in various co-design problems in some application areas. Co-design issues and their relationship to classical system implementation tasks are discussed to help develop a perspective on modern digital system design that relies on computer aided design (CAD) tools and methods.

Why Aren't Operating Systems Getting Faster As Fast as Hardware?

Abstract: This note evaluates several hardware platforms and operating systems using a set of benchmarks that test memory bandwidth and various operating system features such as kernel entry/exit and file systems. The overall conclusion is that operating system performance does not seem to be improving at the same rate as the base speed of the underlying hardware. Copyright  1989 Digital Equipment Corporation d i g i t a l Western Research Laboratory 100 Hamilton Avenue Palo Alto, California 94301 USA

hwloc: A Generic Framework for Managing Hardware Affinities in HPC Applications

Abstract: The increasing numbers of cores, shared caches and memory nodes within machines introduces a complex hardware topology. High-performance computing applications now have to carefully adapt their placement and behavior according to the underlying hierarchy of hardware resources and their software affinities. We introduce the Hardware Locality (hwloc) software which gathers hardware information about processors, caches, memory nodes and more, and exposes it to applications and runtime systems in a abstracted and portable hierarchical manner. hwloc may significantly help performance by having runtime systems place their tasks or adapt their communication strategies depending on hardware affinities. We show that hwloc can already be used by popular high-performance OpenMP or MPI software. Indeed, scheduling OpenMP threads according to their affinities or placing MPI processes according to their communication patterns shows interesting performance improvement thanks to hwloc. An optimized MPI communication strategy may also be dynamically chosen according to the location of the communicating processes in the machine and its hardware characteristics.

System and method for configuring an instrument to perform measurement functions utilizing conversion of graphical programs into hardware implementations

Abstract: A system and method for configuring an instrument to perform measurement functions, wherein the instrument includes a programmable hardware element. A graphical program is first created, wherein the graphical program implements a measurement function. The graphical program may include a front panel and a block diagram. The method then generates a hardware description based on at least a portion of the graphical program. The hardware description describes a hardware implementation of the at least a portion of the graphical program. The method then configures the programmable hardware element in the instrument utilizing the hardware description to produce a configured hardware element. The configured hardware element thus implements a hardware implementation of the at least a portion of the graphical program. The instrument then acquires a signal from an external source, and the programmable hardware element in the instrument executes to perform the measurement function on the signal. The front panel may be used by a user to control the instrument during the measurement.