ERSA’2009
The International Conference on
Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms

Self-Scaling Stream Processing: a Bio-Inspired Task Scheduling Algorithm for Cellular Computing

Speaker: Dr. Gianluca Tempesti, University of York, UK
Dr. Pierre-André Mudry, EPFL, Switzerland

To face the stabilization of performance of single-threaded processors, the current trend in processor design seems to favor a switch to thread-level parallelization. In other words, high computational power is achieved not only by a single, very fast and very complex processor, but through the parallel operation of several processor cores, each executing a different thread.A tempting source of inspiration to solve the problems implied by a massively parallel organization and inherently error-prone substrates is biology. In fact, living beings possess characteristics, such as robustness to damage and self-organization, which were shown in previous research as interesting in the context of massively parallel processor arrays. In this paper, we will first introduce an application-dependent processor architecture at the heart of a bio-inspired hardware system. This processor, based on a single-instruction, features some key properties that allow it to maintain the versatility required by the implementation of bio-inspired mechanisms and to realize general computation. We will then analyze how large arrays of these processors can be implemented to explore various bio-inspired mechanisms using a dual software--hardware approach. In particular, we will show how self-replication can be exploited as a solution to issues related to standard embedded applications.

Dr. Pierre-André Mudry received a Master in Computer Science from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2004 and a PhD in Computer Science from the same institution in 2009, with a thesis entitled "A Hardware/Software Codesign Framework for Cellular Computing". Between 2006 and 2009 he has been a consultant for Jilli Consulting in Lausanne, Switzerland. His interests include digital and bio-inspired hardware development, FPGA design, and electronic design tools, and he is author of several papers on these subjects.

Dr. Gianluca Tempesti received a B.S.E. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991 and a M.S.E. in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1993. In 1998 he received a Ph.D. from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland with a thesis on the design of fault-tolerant bio-inspired FPGAs. In 2003 he was granted a young professorship award from the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS) and created the Cellular Architecture Research Group (CARG). In 2006 he joined the Department of Electronics at the University of York as a Reader in Intelligent Systems. His research interests include bio-inspired digital hardware, built-in self-test and self-repair, programmable logic, and cellular automata, and he has published over 80 articles in these areas.