26357528
An advanced instruction folding mechanism for a stackless Java processor
In order to improve the execution speed of Java in hardware, a new advanced instruction folding technique has been developed. In this paper an instruction folding scheme based on an advanced Producer, Operator and Consumer (POC) model is proposed and demonstrates improvement in bytecode execution over the existing techniques. The proposed POC model is able to detect and fold all possible instruction sequence types dynamically in hardware, including a sequence that is separated by other bytecode instructions. SPEC JMV98 benchmark results show that the proposed POC model-based folder can save more than 90% of folding operations. In this research, the proposed instruction folding technique can eliminate most of the stack operations and the use of a physical operand stack, and can thereby achieve the performance of high-end RISC processors.
39527990
FPGA-based reconfigurable computing
12198410
Scalable hardware-algorithm for mark-sweep garbage collection
The memory-intensive nature of object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java has created the need for high-performance dynamic memory management. Object-oriented applications often generate higher memory intensity in the heap region. Thus, a high-performance memory manager is needed to cope with such applications. As today's VLSI technology advances, it becomes increasingly attractive to map software algorithms such as malloc(), free() and garbage collection into hardware. This paper presents a hardware design of a sweeping function (for mark-and-sweep garbage collection) that fully utilizes the advantages of combinational logic. In our scheme, the bit sweep can detect and sweep the garbage in a constant time. Bit-map marking in software can improve the cache performance and reduce number of page faults; however, it often requires several instructions to perform a single mark. In our scheme, only one hardware instruction is required per mark. Moreover, since the complexity of the sweeping phase is often higher than the marking phase, the garbage collection time may be substantially improved. The hardware complexity of the proposed scheme (bit-sweeper) is O(n), where n represents the size of the bit map.
46189070
Optimal use of timing resources: a crucial step in test program generation
A modified timing set priority strategy and a lookahead register-replacement algorithm is presented for automatic test program generation. These methodologies are introduced to satisfy the testing requirements in complex VLSI chips, and are made possible by the increasing timing flexibility of modern ATE (automatic test equipment). It is shown that by applying optimization algorithms in allocating timing resources and a published timing set determination algorithm, that testing capability of modern ATE can be greatly extended. Further enhancements to these approaches are contingent on further improvements from ATE manufacturers in the number and flexibility of timing resources. However, the development of test programs will be greatly aided by this enhanced hardware.<<ETX>>
18001825
Architectural support for dynamic memory management
Recent advances in software engineering, such as graphical user interfaces and object-oriented programming, have caused applications to become more memory intensive. These applications tend to allocate dynamic memory prolifically. Moreover, automatic dynamic memory reclamation (garbage collection, GC) has become a popular feature in modern programming languages. As a result, the time consumed by dynamic storage management can be up to one-third of the program execution time. This illustrates the need for a high-performance memory management scheme. This paper presents a top-level design and evaluation of the proposed instruction extensions to facilitate heap management.
1021056
A performance perspective on the Active Memory System
Abstract One major problem of using Java in real-time and embedded devices is the non-deterministic turnaround time of dynamic memory management systems (memory allocation and garbage collection). For the allocation, the non-determinism is often contributed by the time to perform searching, splitting, and coalescing. For the garbage collection, the turnaround time is usually determined by the size of the heap, the number of live objects, the number of object collected, and the amount of garbage collected. Even with the current state-of-the-art garbage collectors (generational and incremental schemes), they may or may not guarantee the worst-case latency. Moreover, such schemes often prolong overall garbage collection time. In this paper, the performance analysis of the proposed Active Memory Module (AMM) for embedded systems is presented. Unlike the software counterparts, the AMM can perform a memory allocation in a predictable and bounded fashion (14 cycles). Moreover, it can also yield a bounded sweeping time regardless of the number of live objects or heap size. By utilizing the proposed system, the overall speedup can be as high as 23% compared to the garbage collection system of the JDK 1.2.2 running in classic mode.
14086063
A modular eigen subspace scheme for high-dimensional data classification
In this paper, a novel filter-based greedy modular subspace (GMS) technique is proposed to improve the accuracy of high-dimensional data classification. The proposed approach initially divides the whole set of high-dimensional features into several arbitrary number of highly correlated subgroups by performing a greedy correlation matrix reordering transformation for each class. These GMS can be treated as not only a preprocess of GMS filter-based classifiers but also a unique feature extractor to generate a particular feature subspaces for each different class presented in high-dimensional data. The similarity measures are next calculated by projecting the samples into different modular feature subspaces. Finally, a GMS filter-based architecture based on the mean absolute errors criterion is adopted to build a non-linear multi-class classifier. The proposed GMS filter-based classification scheme is developed to find non-linear boundaries of different classes for high-dimensional data. It not only significantly improves the classification accuracy but also dramatically reduces the computational complexity of feature extraction compared with the conventional principal components analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GMS feature extraction method suits the GMS filter-based classifier best as a classification preprocess. It significantly improves the precision of high-dimensional data classification.
38826941
Effect of Count Estimation in Finding Frequent Itemsets over Online Transactional Data Streams
A data stream is a massive unbounded sequence of data elements continuously generated at a rapid rate. Due to this reason, most algorithms for data streams sacrifice the correctness of their results for fast processing time. The processing time is greatly influenced by the amount of information that should be maintained. This issue becomes more serious in finding frequent itemsets or frequency counting over an online transactional data stream since there can be a large number of itemsets to be monitored. We have proposed a method called theestDec method for finding frequent itemsets over an online data stream. In order to reduce the number of monitored itemsets in this method, monitoring the count of an itemset is delayed until its support is large enough to become a frequent itemset in the near future. For this purpose, the count of an itemset should be estimated. Consequently, how to estimate the count of an itemset is a critical issue in minimizing memory usage as well as processing time. In this paper, the effects of various count estimation methods for finding frequent itemsets are analyzed in terms of mining accuracy, memory usage and processing time.
17498259
estWin: adaptively monitoring the recent change of frequent itemsets over online data streams
Knowledge embedded in a data stream is likely to be changed as time goes by. Consequently, identifying the recent change of the knowledge quickly can provide valuable information for the analysis of the data stream. However, most of mining algorithms or frequency approximation algorithms for a data stream do not able to extract the recent change of information in a data stream adaptively. This paper proposes a sliding window-based method that finds recently frequent itemsets over an online data stream adaptively. The size of a window defines a desired life-time of the information in a newly generated transaction. Consequently, only recently generated transactions in the range of the window are considered to find the frequent itemsets of a data stream.
17166482
Benchmarking the effectiveness of sequential pattern mining methods
Recently, there is an increasing interest in new intelligent mining methods to find more meaningful and compact results. In intelligent data mining research, accessing the quality and usefulness of the results from different mining methods is essential. However, there is no general benchmarking criteria to evaluate whether these new methods are indeed more effective compared to the traditional methods. Here we propose a novel benchmarking criteria that can systematically evaluate the effectiveness of any sequential pattern mining method under a variety of situations. The benchmark evaluates how well a mining method finds known common patterns in synthetic data. Such an evaluation provides a comprehensive understanding of the resulting patterns generated from any mining method empirically. In this paper, the criteria are applied to conduct a detailed comparison study of the support-based sequential pattern model with an approximate pattern model based on sequence alignment. The study suggests that the alignment model will give a good summary of the sequential data in the form of a set of common patterns in the data. In contrast, the support model generates massive amounts of frequent patterns with much redundancy. This suggests that the results of the support model require more post processing before it can be of actual use in real applications.
34576803
Multi-modal gray-level histogram modeling and decomposition
Abstract In this paper, we present a novel multi-modal histogram thresholding method in which no a priori knowledge about the number of clusters to be extracted is needed. The proposed method combines regularization and statistical approaches. By converting the approaching histogram thresholding problem to the mixture Gaussian density modeling problem, threshold values can be estimated precisely according to the parameters belonging to each contiguous cluster. Computational complexity has been greatly reduced since our method does not employ conventional iterative parameter refinement. Instead, an optimal parameter estimation interval was defined before the estimation procedure. This predefined optimal estimation interval reduces time consumption while other histogram decomposition based methods search all feature space to locate an estimation interval for each candidate cluster. Experimental results with both simulated data and real images demonstrate the robustness of our method.