Month: May 2023

Inaugural Lecture Explores Managing Complexity of High-Tech Systems

Posted on by bennyakesson

Today, I finally gave my inaugural lecture “Managing Complexity in High-tech Systems” to celebrate my appointment as Endowed Professor at the University of Amsterdam, which happened back in 2019.

The academic ceremony started at 16:00 with a small reception for fellow professors and members of the curatorium. Together, this group walked in a procession into the beautiful auditorium of the University of Amsterdam, where an audience of colleagues, family, and friends, where waiting in anticipation. The lecture discussed the challenge of increasing complexity in the high-tech equipment industry and how new (model-based) development methodologies leveraging abstraction, boundedness, and composition, are required to address it. I argued that the required innovation should come from collaboration in an innovation chain, where universities, applied research organizations, and industry work together in strategic partnerships. The presentation was concluded with a number of concrete examples of what this collaboration could look like, based on examples from my education and research at TNO and the University of Amsterdam. The inaugural lecture was followed by a reception full of networking and congratulations. I would like to thank everybody that showed up for the event, physically and online. Together, we created a memory that I will treasure for a lifetime.

If you did not manage to attend the lecture, or see it online, there is a recording available. Pop some popcorn, take a seat, and click the link below:

https://webcolleges.uva.nl/Mediasite/Play/99497b81432a49acb57f0ae7a32050d11d

Optimizing Efficiency and Performance: PhD Thesis Defense on Energy- and Time-aware Scheduling for High-Performance Embedded Systems

Posted on by bennyakesson

Yesterday, I participated in the PhD defense committee of Julius Röder, a PhD student in the Parallel Computing Systems group at the University of Amsterdam. The thesis “Energy- and Time-aware Scheduling for Heterogeneous High-Performance Embedded Systems” addresses the relevant problem of optimizing non-functional behavior, such as timing and energy consumption, of heterogeneous high-performance embedded systems. The goal of this optimization Is to reduce energy consumption, thereby also reducing carbon footprint and extending battery-life, as well as ensuring that real-time requirements of applications are satisfied, even at high resource utilizations. To this end, the thesis contributes a discussion on setups used for energy measurements, as well as experiments and a statistical analysis that demonstrate the Importance of sampling frequency on the accuracy of such measurements. The bulk of the thesis proposes heuristic algorithms, both conventional and based on reinforcement learning, for mapping and scheduling applications modelled as directed acyclic graphs (DAG) on heterogeneous platforms. The applications are assumed to be available In different versions, with different non-functional behavior, for the different types of processing elements In the heterogeneous architecture, which enables trade-offs between timing and energy. A key strength of the thesis is that theory is combined with a practical component; the scheduling algorithms are implemented and evaluated on a heterogeneous multi-core systems, where timing and energy behavior are carefully measured and analyzed.

In presence of family, friends, and colleagues, Julius confidently defended his PhD thesis and earned the right to call himself a doctor. Congratulations Julius with this great achievement!

Advancing Design Space Exploration: Literature Review Explores Network Delay Models for Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems

Posted on by bennyakesson

Another literature review has been completed in the context of the DSE2.0 research project. William Ford completed his review entitled “Network Delay Model Creation and Validation for Design Space Exploration of Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems“.

Design-space exploration (DSE) in early phases of design of a distributed cyber-physical system (dCPS) requires models. In the DSE2.0 project, we are particularly interested in models that capture the timing behavior of hardware and software, allowing temporal system performance to be evaluated for different design points. One important part of the system to model is the network that connects the subsystems of the CPS. This study reviews previous work in the fields of analytical network modeling, network simulation, and network model validation. In addition, a recommended plan is presented to create and validate such a network model for the DSE2.0 project, based on this previous work. Two main directions are recommended at different levels of abstraction. For the lower level of abstraction, we will make a model using the existing INET framework that models each network element explicitly. At a higher level of abstraction, we will use a latency-rate server to capture the behavior of the network using only two parameters, latency and rate.

Having delivered his literature review. William has started his master project to pursue this research along these directions. The team looks forward to working with him.