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Concurrent evolutionary design of hardware and software
Minařík, Miloš ; Sekaj, Ivan (oponent) ; Squillero, Giovanni (oponent) ; Sekanina, Lukáš (vedoucí práce)
Genetic programming (GP) can, to some extent, automatically generate desired programs without asking the user to specify how to do it. It has been used to solve a wide range of practical problems and produce a number of human-competitive results in different fields. An interesting and practically untouched question is whether for a given problem, GP can generate a highly optimized programmable computational model (platform) together with a program running on the platform, solving the problem and satisfying all constrains such as on the area on a chip and speed. In a multi-objective scenario, the user would obtain a set of non-dominated solutions showing various tradeoffs between resources (the area, power consumption) and performance (the speed of execution). This problem can be seen as a concurrent development of hardware and software, simply, HW/SW codesign. This thesis explores the ways how to evolve hardware platforms together with programs in the case that the specification is given in terms of a set of input-output vectors. The initial model of the architecture was created and the evolutionary framework capable of maintaining and evolving the population of such architectures was implemented. Candidate microprogrammed architectures were evolved together with programs using extended linear genetic programming. Several simple experiments were carried out and the framework proved competitive with state-of-the-art methods. The framework was subsequently extended addressing the weak points identified during the initial experiments. The extended framework was validated by means of more complex experiments. One of them focused on an effective implementation of sigmoid function approximation. Various implementations of sigmoid approximation were evolved (sequentional as well as purely combinational). The proposed framework provided several well-known solutions and even optimized some of them for the particular input domain chosen for the experiment. The next set of experiments was supposed to evolve an image filter reducing salt-and-pepper impulse noise. The framework was able to evolve the concept of switching-based filter and even the variation of a switching-based median filter comparable to the filters commonly used. This thesis proved that small-size HW/SW systems can be designed and optimized by means of genetic programming. Moving to an automated evolutionary design of more complex HW/SW systems is an open research problem waiting for a future research.
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Concurrent evolutionary design of hardware and software
Minařík, Miloš ; Sekaj, Ivan (oponent) ; Squillero, Giovanni (oponent) ; Sekanina, Lukáš (vedoucí práce)
Genetic programming (GP) can, to some extent, automatically generate desired programs without asking the user to specify how to do it. It has been used to solve a wide range of practical problems and produce a number of human-competitive results in different fields. An interesting and practically untouched question is whether for a given problem, GP can generate a highly optimized programmable computational model (platform) together with a program running on the platform, solving the problem and satisfying all constrains such as on the area on a chip and speed. In a multi-objective scenario, the user would obtain a set of non-dominated solutions showing various tradeoffs between resources (the area, power consumption) and performance (the speed of execution). This problem can be seen as a concurrent development of hardware and software, simply, HW/SW codesign. This thesis explores the ways how to evolve hardware platforms together with programs in the case that the specification is given in terms of a set of input-output vectors. The initial model of the architecture was created and the evolutionary framework capable of maintaining and evolving the population of such architectures was implemented. Candidate microprogrammed architectures were evolved together with programs using extended linear genetic programming. Several simple experiments were carried out and the framework proved competitive with state-of-the-art methods. The framework was subsequently extended addressing the weak points identified during the initial experiments. The extended framework was validated by means of more complex experiments. One of them focused on an effective implementation of sigmoid function approximation. Various implementations of sigmoid approximation were evolved (sequentional as well as purely combinational). The proposed framework provided several well-known solutions and even optimized some of them for the particular input domain chosen for the experiment. The next set of experiments was supposed to evolve an image filter reducing salt-and-pepper impulse noise. The framework was able to evolve the concept of switching-based filter and even the variation of a switching-based median filter comparable to the filters commonly used. This thesis proved that small-size HW/SW systems can be designed and optimized by means of genetic programming. Moving to an automated evolutionary design of more complex HW/SW systems is an open research problem waiting for a future research.
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