Dear all, CAIRN research team (http://www.irisa.fr/cairn/home_html?set_language=en&cl=en) which is part of the INRIA research center (Rennes Bretagne Atlantique) and the IRISA Lab (UMR 6074) is offering a 3-year PhD position starting 15th october 2011 (or soon after). The project is financed by the EC FP7 project "Self adaptive heterogeneous manycore based on Flexible Tiles (Flextiles)".
PhD subject "3D-stacked hardware accelerators with virtualized dynamic reconfiguration in a heterogeneoous multicore" Modern FPGAs, such as proposed currently by Xilinx and ALTERA in a near future, support partial and dynamic reconfiguration. Part of the chip targeted for a hardware-accelerated software implementation can be dynamically configured, on demand, and remotely. However, there is no reconfigurable technology providing the same level of flexibility as software, i.e. thread pre-emption and task relocation according to application requests. Self-adaptive capabilities also require monitoring and control functions to be able to dynamically adapt the system depending on environment changes. We can consider the evolution of application needs, but also power consumption of the architecture, workload balancing or fault tolerance techniques. For example, dynamic power management can be achieved by migrating tasks and controlling power supply. A change in real-time or workload constraints can necessitate modifying at run time the amount of tasks parallelism and therefore to reconfigure and migrate a set of tasks. Monitoring and control are also crucial for debugging. The objective of this thesis is to propose and design a new embedded FPGA architecture exhibiting such efficient dynamic reconfiguration features. More information http://www.irisa.fr/cairn/jobs/PhD/thesisflextiles PROFILE ======= - The candidate should be fluent in English or French - Good programming skills - The candidate should be experienced in one or more of the following research areas : - HW VLSI design - Dynamic and partial reconfiguration - Virtualization Project Description A major challenge in computing is to leverage multi-core technologies to enable the development of energy- efficient high performance systems. This is especially critical for embedded systems that have very limited energy budget as well as for supercomputers in respect to sustainability. But, efficient programming of multi- core architectures, moving towards manycores with more than a thousand cores predicted by 2020, remains an unresolved issue. The FlexTiles project will define and develop an energy-efficient and programmable heterogeneous manycore platform (THALES, CSEM, CEA) with selfadaptive capabilities, based on the following innovations: - Energy-efficiency, performance and flexibility provided by a reconfigurable layer linked to the manycore and enabling the dynamic instantiation of dedicated accelerators (CAIRN). - Power consumption, load balancing, dynamic mapping and resilience to faulty modules managed through self-adaptation features (KIT). - Virtualised executable codes enabling dynamic relocation of configuration (TUE) and bitstreams respectively on standard processor and network on chip and on reconfigurable layer (CAIRN). - A virtualisation layer monitoring the system and optimising the application mapping for load balancing, power consumption and faults tolerance (KIT, TUE). - Parallelisation and compilation tools improvement to take into account the mixture of static and dynamic behaviours (COMPAAN). - The solution proposed by FlexTiles consortium is a 3D-stacked chip where the reconfigurable area migration and relocation is on a dedicated layer. The physical design of this 3Dstacking solution is out of the scope of the FlexTiles project, however, a feasibility study will be done to bring first responses on potential solutions. FlexTiles final platform will be validated on two main applications (smart camera, cognitive radio) of the targeted embedded technology market (THALES, SUNDANCE). FlexTiles achieved new type of manycore will also benefit from other markets and applications, domains opportunities (e.g. automotive, autonomous systems, medical imaging systems, supercomputers), where there is a combined need for energy-efficiency, performance and interactivity, while guaranteeing short time to market. Cheers, Sébastien Pillement -------------------------------------------------------------------------- PILLEMENT Sébastien Maître de Conférences tel : +33 (0)2-96-46-91-66 ou +33 (0)2-96-46-94-85 fax : +33 (0)2.96.46.90.75 IUT de Lannion - Université de RENNES 1 INRIA/IRISA - Equipe de Recherche CAIRN BP 80518 - 6 Rue de Kérampont 22305 LANNION - FRANCE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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