Benny Akesson

Senior Research Fellow @ TNO-ESI | Endowed Professor @ University of Amsterdam

Paper Accepted at ESTIMedia 2012

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Andrew Nelson just had a paper “Power Versus Quality Trade-offs for Adaptive Real-Time Applications” accepted at ESTIMedia 2012. The paper is based on the work of Sjoerd te Pas, one of my graduated master students, and discusses how power consumption can be traded for application quality for adaptive real-time applications using existing DVFS techniques. The techniques are demonstrated for an H.263 application on an FPGA instance of the CompSOC platform. Stay tuned for the camera-ready version.

Update: The paper is now available online. Click here to read it.

Visiting Researcher at CISTER

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For the next six months, I am a visiting resarcher at CISTER (Research Centre in Real-Time Computing Systems) based at the School of Engineering (ISEP) of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (IPP), Portugal. This gives me a great opportunity to work with some of the great minds in the real-time community, broaden my knowledge by exploring new applications and research areas, as well as contribute with my experiences to the group. At this point, I am familiarizing myself with the work carried out in the group and the work plan will be defined during the coming month.

Update: After settling in at CISTER, I am now working on two projects. The first one relates to their work on bus contention analysis, which is a familiar topic with a different twist. The second project is related to implementation and evaluation of scheduling algorithms in the Linux kernel, which is a completely new topic. Of course, I am also still spending time managing the work of the memory team in Eindhoven. Some new, some old, but in the end I am learning many new things both technically and culturally, and I am meeting many extraordinary people.

Tutorial Accepted at HiPEAC 2013

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Our tutorial Designing Next-Generation Real-Time Streaming Systems was accepted at HiPEAC 2013, which takes place in Berlin January 2013. The tutorial is a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology, ST-Ericsson and Saarland University, and presents, among other things, predictability concepts from the CompSOC platform and its associated toolchain. We hope to see you there!

The tutorial webpage is available here.

5th Workshop on Compositional Theory and Technology for Real-Time Embedded Systems

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I have been appointed program co-chair of the on 5th Workshop Compositional Theory and Technology for Real-Time Embedded Systems (CRTS 2012) together with Bjorn Andersson from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. The workshop is co-located with the Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) in Puerto Rico and takes place on December 4th, 2012. The goal of the workshop is to reduce the increasing design and analysis cost of real-time embedded systems by proposing solutions based on compositional platforms and methodologies. These enable decomposition of a complex systems into components that can be designed and analyzed in isolation and then integrated using interfaces with clearly defined temporal and functional properties. We gladly invite you to submit contributions to the workshop or to participate during your stay at RTSS.

Click here to visit the workshop website.

Karthik Chandrasekar Receives HiPEAC Collaboration Grant

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Today, we celebrate that Karthik Chandrasekar has received a 3 month HiPEAC collaboration grant to visit the group of Prof. Norbert Wehn at Kaiserslautern Institute of Technology. The application process was competitive with approximately 30% of 67 proposals being funded. The grant serves to extend the existing collaboration between our two groups and will be used to conduct research on the hot topic of “Mobile and 3D-Stacked Wide I/O DRAM Power Modeling and Optimization”.

Paper Accepted at DSD 2012

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The memory team congratulates Gervin Thomas from TU Berlin for having his paper entitled “A Predictor-based Power-Saving Policy for DRAM Memories” accepted at DSD 2012. This work is the result of Gervin’s HiPEAC collaboration visit in Eindhoven between August and October 2011. During this time, he worked closely with Karthik Chandrasekar on finding a way to use the self-refresh mode of DRAMs to reduce the power consumption in soft real-time systems without significantly reducing performance. The camera-ready version of the paper will be available shortly.

Update: The paper is now available online. Click here to read it.

CoMPSoC Website Launched – compsoc.eu

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The CoMPSoC project has launched an official website, www.compsoc.eu, with information about the research, references to key publications, and links to the websites of the individual websites of the researchers. I recommend having a look at this website, since it shows the system-level context, the bigger picture, of the memory controller research done by the memory team.

Update: The DATE demo is now posted on compsoc.eu for those that were unable to see it in Dresden.
Click here to enjoy the demo.

Paper Accepted at DAC 2012

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Today, we congratulate Karthik Chandrasekar on getting his paper “Run-Time Power-Down Strategies for Real-Time SDRAM Memory Controllers” accepted at Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2012, where it will be presented in early June. The paper proposes two run-time power down strategies for real-time SDRAM controllers that reduce power without sacrificing guaranteed bandwidth. One strategy is conservative and saves power without affecting latency, whereas the second is more aggressive and saves additional power at a slightly increased latency. The paper also presents an algorithm to select the most energy-efficient power-down mode at run-time.

Update: The camera-ready version is now available. Click here to download it.