Sharif Digital Repository

It has always been a human challenge to inspire natural configurations and phenomena and benefit from their merits in improving the performances of man-made proposed aero/hydro vehicles. For example, the manta rays are known for their great swimming performances. To design and fabricate an underwater robot based on the manta ray geometry and its kinematic characteristics, it is important to initially study its hydrodynamic behavior and possibly arrive at some key design parameters, which can remarkably help to figure out an optimum geometry with high swimming performances. The main objective of this study is to focus on the merits of gliding motion inspired by the manta ray fish considering... 

Low power consumption, real-time computing, and high reliability are three key requirements/design objectives of real-time embedded systems. The standby-sparing technique can improve system reliability while it might increase the temperature of the system beyond safe limits. In this paper, we propose a thermal-aware standby-sparing (TASS) technique that aims at maximizing the Quality of Service (QoS) of soft real-time tasks, which is defined as a function of the finishing time of running tasks. The proposed technique tolerates permanent and transient faults for multicore real-time embedded systems while meeting the Thermal Safe Power (TSP) as the core-level power constraint, which avoids... 

The ever-expanding growth of internet traffic enforces deployment of massive Data Center Networks (DCNs) supporting high performance communications. Optical switching is being studied as a promising approach to fulfill the surging requirements of large scale data centers. The tree-based optical topology limits the scalability of the interconnected network due to the limitations in the port count of optical switches and the lack of optical buffers. Alternatively, buffer-less Fast Optical Switch (FOS) was proposed to realize the nanosecond switching of optical DCNs. Although FOSs provide nanosecond optical switching, they still suffer from port count limitations to scale the DCN. To address... 

Given the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and their omnipresence, reducing their power consumption is among the major design priorities. To reduce the power consumption of such systems, we propose the use of a signal-dependent sampling method in a bottom-up fashion, which can lead to up to a 94% reduction in the overall system power with negligible or no loss in performance. Moreover, the proposed technique provides further flexibility for self-aware CPSs to dynamically adjust the number of data samples that are needed for processing (and consequently reduce the power consumption) based on the application at hand and the desired trade-off between... 

Mixed-criticality (MC) systems have recently been devised to address the requirements of real-time systems in industrial applications, where the system runs tasks with different criticality levels on a single platform. In some workloads, a high-critically task might overrun and overload the system, or a fault can occur during the execution. However, these systems must be fault tolerant and guarantee the correct execution of all high-criticality (HC) tasks by their deadlines to avoid catastrophic consequences, in any situation. Furthermore, in these MC systems, the peak-power consumption of the system may increase, especially in an overload situation and exceed the processor thermal design... 

This paper presents a multi-model robust control (MMRC) design for an offshore variable speed wind turbine with tension leg platform. The proposed control scheme covers the model uncertainty in the above rated wind speed, and it provides a reliable control for power regulation while minimizing the mechanical loads on the wind turbine structure. For this purpose, the above rated wind speed region is divided into several wind speed groups, and a set of linearized models are obtained from the Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures, and Turbulence (FAST) simulator for various mean wind speeds of each group. Using Weibull wind speed distribution, a nominal model with additive uncertainty is generated... 

As technology size scales down, magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) as a promising technology are becoming more and more sensitive to process variation, especially in oxide barrier thickness. Process variation particularly affects the cell resistance and the critical switching current for the smaller dimensions. This article proposes an MTJ cell with one free and two pinned layers, which highly improves the process variation robustness. By employing the spin transfer torque (STT)-spin-Hall effect (SHE) switching method, our proposed MTJ cell improves the switching speed and lowers the switching power consumption. Per simulations, an MRAM cell built with the proposed MTJ cell offers up to 36%... 

Electricity demand forecast is necessary for power systems' operation scheduling and management. However, power consumption is uncertain and depends on several factors. Moreover, since the onset of covid-19, the electricity consumption pattern went through significant changes across the globe, which made the forecasting demand more challenging. This is mainly due to the fact that pandemic-driven restrictions changed people's lifestyles and work activities. This calls for new forecasting algorithms to more effectively handle these conditions. In this paper, ensemble-based machine learning models are utilized for this task. The lockdown temporal policies are added to the feature set in order... 

Increasing power densities in future technology nodes is a crucial issue in multicore platforms. As the number of cores increases in them, power budget constraints may prevent powering all cores simultaneously at full performance level. Therefore, chip manufacturers introduce a power budget constraint as Thermal Design Power (TDP) for chips. Meanwhile, multicore platforms are suitable for the implementation of fault-tolerance techniques to achieve high reliability. Task Replication is a well-known technique to tolerate transient faults. However, careless task replication may lead to significant peak power consumption. In this article, we consider the problem of achieving a given reliability... 

Increasing the number of cores integrated on a single chip offers a great potential for the implementation of fault-tolerant techniques to achieve high reliability in real-time embedded systems. Checkpointing with rollback-recovery is a well-established technique to tolerate transient faults in multicore platforms. To consider the worst-case fault occurrence scenario, checkpointing technique requires to re-execute some parts of the tasks, and that might lead to simultaneous execution of task parts with high power consumptions, which eventually might result in a peak power increase beyond the thermal design power (TDP). Exceeding TDP can elevate on-chip temperatures beyond safe limits, and... 

Accurate monthly electricity consumption forecasting (ECF) can help retailers enhance the profitability in deregulated electricity markets. Most current methods use monthly load data to perform monthly ECF, which usually produces large errors due to insufficient training samples. A few methods try to use fine-grained smart-meter data (e.g., hourly data) to increase training samples. However, such methods still exhibit low accuracy due to the increase in forecasting steps. © 1975-2012 IEEE  

In modern multicore mixed-criticality (MC) systems, a rise in peak power consumption due to parallel execution of tasks with maximum frequency, specially in the overload situation, may lead to thermal issues, which may affect the reliability and timeliness of MC systems. Therefore, managing peak power consumption has become imperative in multicore MC systems. In this regard, we propose an online peak power and thermal management heuristic for multicore MC systems. This heuristic reduces the peak power consumption of the system as much as possible during runtime by exploiting dynamic slack and per-cluster dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). Specifically, our approach examines... 

Mixed-Criticality (MC) systems have recently been devised to address the requirements of real-time systems in industrial applications, where the system runs tasks with different criticality levels on a single platform. In some workloads, a highcritically task might overrun and overload the system, or a fault can occur during the execution. However, these systems must be fault-tolerant and guarantee the correct execution of all highcriticality tasks by their deadlines to avoid catastrophic consequences, in any situation. Furthermore, in these MC systems, the peak power consumption of the system may increase, especially in an overload situation and exceed the processor Thermal Design Power... 

Power consumption of wellbore drilling in oil and gas exploitations count for 40% of total costs, hence power saving of WBM (water-based mud) by adding different concentrations of Al2O3, TiO2 and SiO2 nanoparticles is investigated here. A high-speed Taylor–Couette system (TCS) was devised to operate at speeds 0–1600 RPM to simulate power consumption of wellbore drilling using nanofluids in laminar to turbulent flow conditions. The TCS control unit uses several sensors to record current, voltage and rotational speed and Arduino microprocessors to process outputs including rheological properties and power consumption. Total power consumption of the TCS was correlated with a second-order... 

In this study, a vapor-compression cooling system utilizing different phase change materials (PCMs) has been studied whereby the electricity consumption peak load is shifted. More specifically, the dynamic performance of cooling systems with and without using PCM is evaluated for the hottest day of the year. The proposed system uses the cooling energy to freeze, or “discharge” the PCM during nighttime when the cooling load is minimally needed and uses the stored thermal energy during the peak load hours by melting, or “charging” the PCM. This leads to better performance during peak load hours when higher cooling loads are needed. Different PCMs including oleic acid, SP224A, CL, CaCl2·6H2O... 

A vapor-compression cooling system utilizing PCM is studied whereby the electricity consumption peak load is shifted. More specifically, the dynamic performance of the cooling system with and without PCM is evaluated and is presented with details on the hottest day of the year in Tehran, Iran. The proposed system uses the cooling energy to freeze or “discharge” the PCM during nighttime when the cooling load is minimally needed and uses the stored cooling energy during the peak load hours by melting or “charging” the PCM. This leads to better performance during the peak load hours when higher cooling loads are required. Oleic acid was chosen as PCM. The simulation was performed in EES... 

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) employ large register files to accommodate all active threads and accelerate context switching. Unfortunately, register files are a scalability bottleneck for future GPUs due to long access latency, high power consumption, and large silicon area provisioning. Prior work proposes hierarchical register file to reduce the register file power consumption by caching registers in a smaller register file cache. Unfortunately, this approach does not improve register access latency due to the low hit rate in the register file cache. In this article, we propose the Latency-Tolerant Register File (LTRF) architecture to achieve low latency in a two-level hierarchical... 

Despite FPGAs rapidly evolving to support the requirements of the most demanding emerging applications, their high static power consumption, concentrated within the routing resources, still presents a major hurdle for low-power applications. Augmenting the FPGAs with power-gating ability is a promising way to effectively address the power-consumption obstacle. However, the main challenge when implementing power gating is in choosing the clusters of resources in a way that would allow the most power-saving opportunities. In this paper, we take advantage of machine learning approaches, such as K-means clustering, to propose efficient algorithms for creating power-gating clusters of FPGA... 

A phase frequency detector (PFD) with a very low dead zone is proposed which is based on a configuration adaptable to both CMOS or carbon nano-tube transistors (CNTFETs). In the first step the proposed configuration is designed using CMOS transistors, and then CNTFETs are substituted to improve the speed and reduce the propagation delay. The proposed PFD in addition to very low dead zone, has low power consumption and high frequency range of operation, which are achieved as a result of the elimination of the reset path. The simulation results based on 32 nm technology for CNTFET and 180 nm technology for CMOS, illustrate that CNTFET-based proposed circuit dissipates 2 µW and has frequency of... 

Low power consumption, real-time computing, and high reliability are three key requirements/design objectives of real-time embedded systems. The standby-sparing technique can improve system reliability while it might increase the temperature of the system beyond safe limits. In this paper, we propose a thermal-aware standby-sparing (TASS) technique that aims at maximizing the Quality of Service (QoS) of soft real-time tasks, which is defined as a function of the finishing time of running tasks. The proposed technique tolerates permanent and transient faults for multicore real-time embedded systems while meeting the Thermal Safe Power (TSP) as the core-level power constraint, which avoids...