Aging population and the thereby ever-rising cost of health services call for novel and innovative solutions for providing medical care and services. So far, medical care is primarily provided in the form of time-consuming in-person appointments with trained personnel and expensive, stationary instrumentation equipment. As for many current and past challenges, the advances in microelectronics are a crucial enabler and offer a plethora of opportunities. With key building blocks such as sensing, processing, and communication systems and circuits getting smaller, cheaper, and more energy-efficient, personal and wearable or even implantable point-of-care devices with medicalgrade instrumentation capabilities become feasible. Device size and battery lifetime are paramount for the realization of such devices. Besides integrating the required functionality into as few individual microelectronic components as possible, the energy efficiency of such is crucial to reduce battery size, usually being the dominant contributor to overall device size. In this thesis, we present two major contributions to achieve the discussed goals in the context of miniaturized medical instrumentation: First, we present a synchronization solution for embedded, parallel near-threshold computing (NTC), a promising concept for enabling the required processing capabilities with an energy efficiency that is suitable for highly mobile devices with very limited battery capacity. Our proposed solution aims at increasing energy efficiency and performance for parallel NTC clusters by maximizing the effective utilization of the available cores under parallel workloads. We describe a hardware unit that enables fine-grain parallelization by greatly optimizing and accelerating core-to-core synchronization and communication and analyze the impact of those mechanisms on the overall performance and energy efficiency of an eight-core cluster. With a range of digital signal processing (DSP) applications typical for the targeted systems, the proposed hardware unit improves performance by up to 92% and 23% on average and energy efficiency by up to 98% and 39% on average. In the second part, we present a MCU processing and control subsystem (MPCS) for the integration into VivoSoC, a highly versatile single-chip solution for mobile medical instrumentation. In addition to the MPCS, it includes a multitude of analog front-ends (AFEs) and a multi-channel power management IC (PMIC) for voltage conversion. ...

In his seminal Turing Award Lecture, Backus discussed the issues stemming from the word-at-a-time style of programming inherited from the von Neumann computer. More than forty years later, computer architects must be creative to amortize the von Neumann Bottleneck (VNB) associated with fetching and decoding instructions which only keep the datapath busy for a very short period of time. In particular, vector processors promise to be one of the most efficient architectures to tackle the VNB, by amortizing the energy overhead of instruction fetching and decoding over several chunks of data. This work explores vector processing as an option to build small and efficient processing elements for large-scale clusters of cores sharing access to tightly-coupled L1 memory

The energy consumption issue in distributed computing systems raises various monetary, environmental and system performance concerns. Electricity consumption in the US doubled from 2000 to 2005. From a financial and environmental standpoint, reducing the consumption of electricity is important, yet these reforms must not lead to performance degradation of the computing systems. These contradicting constraints create a suite of complex problems that need to be resolved in order to lead to 'greener' distributed computing systems. This book brings together a group of outstanding researchers that investigate the different facets of green and energy efficient distributed computing. Key features: One of the first books of its kind Features latest research findings on emerging topics by well-known scientists Valuable research for grad students, postdocs, and researchers Research will greatly feed into other technologies and application domains

Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach, Second Edition, teaches students how to program massively parallel processors. It offers a detailed discussion of various techniques for constructing parallel programs. Case studies are used to demonstrate the development process, which begins with computational thinking and ends with effective and efficient parallel programs. This guide shows both student and professional alike the basic concepts of parallel programming and GPU architecture. Topics of performance, floating-point format, parallel patterns, and dynamic parallelism are covered in depth. This revised edition contains more parallel programming examples, commonly-used libraries such as Thrust, and explanations of the latest tools. It also provides new coverage of CUDA 5.0, improved performance, enhanced development tools, increased hardware support, and more; increased coverage of related technology, OpenCL and new material on algorithm patterns, GPU clusters, host programming, and data parallelism; and two new case studies (on MRI reconstruction and molecular visualization) that explore the latest applications of CUDA and GPUs for scientific research and high-performance computing. This book should be a valuable resource for advanced students, software engineers, programmers, and hardware engineers. - New coverage of CUDA 5.0, improved performance, enhanced development tools, increased hardware support, and more - Increased coverage of related technology, OpenCL and new material on algorithm patterns, GPU clusters, host programming, and data parallelism - Two new case studies (on MRI reconstruction and molecular visualization) explore the latest applications of CUDA and GPUs for scientific research and high-performance computing

Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification. In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the "breaking" of meter and rise of free verse.

This handbook serves as a guide to deploying battery energy storage technologies, specifically for distributed energy resources and flexibility resources. Battery energy storage technology is the most promising, rapidly developed technology as it provides higher efficiency and ease of control. With energy transition through decarbonization and decentralization, energy storage plays a significant role to enhance grid efficiency by alleviating volatility from demand and supply. Energy storage also contributes to the grid integration of renewable energy and promotion of microgrid.