The continous development of computer technology supported by the VLSI revolution stimulated the research in the field .of multiprocessors systems. The main motivation for the migration of design efforts from conventional architectures towards multiprocessor ones is the possibi I ity to obtain a significant processing power together with the improvement of price/performance, reliability and flexibility figures. Currently, such systems are moving from research laboratories to real field appl ications. Future technological advances and new generations of components are I ikely to further enhance this trend. This book is intended to provide basic concepts and design methodologies for engineers and researchers involved in the development of mul tiprocessor systems and/or of appl ications based on multiprocessor architectures. In addition the book can be a source of material for computer architecture courses at graduate level. A preliminary knowledge of computer architecture and logical design has been assumed in wri ting this book. Not all the problems related with the development of multiprocessor systems are addressed in th i s book. The covered range spans from the electrical and logical design problems, to architectural issues, to design methodologis for system software. Subj ects such as software development in a multiprocessor environment or loosely coupled multiprocessor systems are out of the scope of the book. Since the basic elements, processors and memories, are now available as standard integrated circuits, the key design problem is how to put them together in an efficient and reliable way."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures, Tools and Applications, ARC 2012, held in Hongkong, China, in March 2012. The 35 revised papers presented, consisting of 25 full papers and 10 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The topics covered are applied RC design methods and tools, applied RC architectures, applied RC applications and critical issues in applied RC.

Robust Nano-Computing focuses on various issues of robust nano-computing, defect-tolerance design for nano-technology at different design abstraction levels. It addresses both redundancy- and configuration-based methods as well as fault detecting techniques through the development of accurate computation models and tools. The contents present an insightful view of the ongoing researches on nano-electronic devices, circuits, architectures, and design methods, as well as provide promising directions for future research.

Pipelined ADCs have seen phenomenal improvements in performance over the last few years. As such, when designing a pipelined ADC a clear understanding of the design tradeoffs, and state of the art techniques is required to implement today's high performance low power ADCs.

Nonlinear Optical Materials and Devices for Applications in Information Technology takes the reader from fundamental interactions of laser light in materials to the latest developments of digital optical information processing. The book emphasises nonlinear optical interactions in bulk and low-dimensional semiconductors, liquid crystals and optical fibres. After establishing the basic laser--material interactions in these materials, it goes on to assess applications in soliton propagation, integrated optics, smart pixel arrays and digital optical computing.

Multimedia Information Systems brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Multimedia Information Systems serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Optical media are now widely used in the telecommunication networks, and the evolution of optical and optoelectronic technologies tends to show that their wide range of techniques could be successfully introduced in shorter-distance interconnection systems. This book bridges the existing gap between research in optical interconnects and research in high-performance computing and communication systems, of which parallel processing is just an example. It also provides a more comprehensive understanding of the advantages and limitations of optics as applied to high-speed communications. Audience: The book will be a vital resource for researchers and graduate students of optical interconnects, computer architectures and high-performance computing and communication systems who wish to understand the trends in the newest technologies, models and communication issues in the field.

Nonlinear Assignment Problems (NAPs) are natural extensions of the classic Linear Assignment Problem, and despite the efforts of many researchers over the past three decades, they still remain some of the hardest combinatorial optimization problems to solve exactly. The purpose of this book is to provide in a single volume, major algorithmic aspects and applications of NAPs as contributed by leading international experts. The chapters included in this book are concerned with major applications and the latest algorithmic solution approaches for NAPs. Approximation algorithms, polyhedral methods, semidefinite programming approaches and heuristic procedures for NAPs are included, while applications of this problem class in the areas of multiple-target tracking in the context of military surveillance systems, of experimental high energy physics, and of parallel processing are presented. Audience: Researchers and graduate students in the areas of combinatorial optimization, mathematical programming, operations research, physics, and computer science.

After a brief introduction to low-power VLSI design, the design space of ASIP instruction set architectures (ISAs) is introduced with a special focus on important features for digital signal processing. Based on the degrees of freedom offered by this design space, a consistent ASIP design flow is proposed: this design flow starts with a given application and uses incremental optimization of the ASIP hardware, of ASIP coprocessors and of the ASIP software by using a top-down approach and by applying application-specific modifications on all levels of design hierarchy. A broad range of real-world signal processing applications serves as vehicle to illustrate each design decision and provides a hands-on approach to ASIP design. Finally, two complete case studies demonstrate the feasibility and the efficiency of the proposed methodology and quantitatively evaluate the benefits of ASIPs in an industrial context.

Efficient parallel solutions have been found to many problems. Some of them can be obtained automatically from sequential programs, using compilers. However, there is a large class of problems - irregular problems - that lack efficient solutions. IRREGULAR 94 - a workshop and summer school organized in Geneva - addressed the problems associated with the derivation of efficient solutions to irregular problems. This book, which is based on the workshop, draws on the contributions of outstanding scientists to present the state of the art in irregular problems, covering aspects ranging from scientific computing, discrete optimization, and automatic extraction of parallelism. Audience: This first book on parallel algorithms for irregular problems is of interest to advanced graduate students and researchers in parallel computer science.

Proceedings of the International Symposium on High Performance Computational Science and Engineering 2004 (IFIP World Computer Congress) is an essential reference for both academic and professional researchers in the field of computational science and engineering.

Computational Science and Engineering is increasingly becoming an emerging and promising discipline in shaping future research and development activities in academia and industry ranging from engineering, science, finance, economics, arts and humanitarian fields. New challenges are in modeling of complex systems, sophisticated algorithms, advanced scientific and engineering computing, and associated (multi-disciplinary) problem solving environments. The papers presented in this volume are specially selected to address the most up-to-date ideas, results, work-in-progress and research experience in the area of high performance computational techniques for science and engineering applications.

This state-of-the-are volume presents the proceedings of the International Symposium on High Performance Computational Science and Engineering, held in conjunction with the IFIP World Computer Congress, August 2004, in Toulouse, France.

The collection will be important not only for computational science and engineering experts and researchers but for all teachers and administrators interested in high performance computational techniques.

Quality of Protection: Security Measurements and Metrics is an edited volume based on the Quality of Protection Workshop in Milano, Italy (September 2005). This volume discusses how security research can progress towards quality of protection in security comparable to quality of service in networking and software measurements, and metrics in empirical software engineering. Information security in the business setting has matured in the last few decades. Standards such as IS017799, the Common Criteria (ISO15408), and a number of industry certifications and risk analysis methodologies have raised the bar for good security solutions from a business perspective.

Designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry, Quality of Protection: Security Measurements and Metrics is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

It is universally accepted today that parallel processing is here to stay but that software for parallel machines is still difficult to develop. However, there is little recognition of the fact that changes in processor architecture can significantly ease the development of software. In the seventies the availability of processors that could address a large name space directly, eliminated the problem of name management at one level and paved the way for the routine development of large programs. Similarly, today, processor architectures that can facilitate cheap synchronization and provide a global address space can simplify compiler development for parallel machines. If the cost of synchronization remains high, the pro gramming of parallel machines will remain significantly less abstract than programming sequential machines. In this monograph Bob Iannucci presents the design and analysis of an architecture that can be a better building block for parallel machines than any von Neumann processor. There is another very interesting motivation behind this work. It is rooted in the long and venerable history of dataflow graphs as a formalism for ex pressing parallel computation. The field has bloomed since 1974, when Dennis and Misunas proposed a truly novel architecture using dataflow graphs as the parallel machine language. The novelty and elegance of dataflow architectures has, however, also kept us from asking the real question: "What can dataflow architectures buy us that von Neumann ar chitectures can't?" In the following I explain in a round about way how Bob and I arrived at this question."

We are about to enter a period of radical change in computer architecture. It is made necessary by adL)anCeS in processing tech- nology that will make it possible to build devices exceeding in performance and complexity anything conceived in the past. These advances the logical extension of large - to very-large-scale in- J tegration (VLSI) are all but inevitable. With the large number of shlitching elements available in a sinqle chip as promised by VLSI technology, the question that arises naturally is: What can hle do hlith this technology and hOhl can hle best utilize it? The final anShler, hlhatever it may be, hlill be based on architectu- ral concepts that probably hlill depart, in several cases, from past and present practices. Furthermore, as hle continue to build increasingly pOhlerful microprocessors permitted by VLSI process advances, the method of efficiently interconnecting them hlill become more and more important. In fact one serious drahlback of VLSI technology is the limited number of pins on each chip. While VLSI chips provide an exponentially grOhling number of gates, the number of pins they provide remains almost constant. As a result communication becomes a very difficult design problem in the interconnection of VLSI chips. Due to the insufficient commu- nication pOhler and the high design cost of VLSI chips, computer systems employing VLSI technology hlill thus need to employ many architectural concepts that depart sharply from past and present practices.

Application Specific Processors is written for use by engineers who are developing specialized systems (application specific systems). Traditionally, most high performance signal processors have been realized with application specific processors. The explanation is that application specific processors can be tailored to exactly match the (usually very demanding) application requirements. The result is that no processing power' is wasted for unnecessary capabilities and maximum performance is achieved. A disadvantage is that such processors have been expensive to design since each is a unique design that is customized to the specific application. In the last decade, computer-aided design systems have been developed to facilitate the development of application specific integrated circuits. The success of such ASIC CAD systems suggests that it should be possible to streamline the process of application specific processor design. Application Specific Processors consists of eight chapters which provide a mixture of techniques and examples that relate to application specific processing. The inclusion of techniques is expected to suggest additional research and to assist those who are faced with the requirement to implement efficient application specific processors. The examples illustrate the application of the concepts and demonstrate the efficiency that can be achieved via application specific processors. The chapters were written by members and former members of the application specific processing group at the University of Texas at Austin. The first five chapters relate to specific arithmetic which often is the key to achieving high performance in application specific processors. The next two chapters focus on signal processing systems, and the final chapter examines the interconnection of possibly disparate elements to create systems.

Fault-tolerance in integrated circuits is not an exclusive concern regarding space designers or highly-reliable application engineers. Rather, designers of next generation products must cope with reduced margin noises due to technological advances. The continuous evolution of the fabrication technology process of semiconductor components, in terms of transistor geometry shrinking, power supply, speed, and logic density, has significantly reduced the reliability of very deep submicron integrated circuits, in face of the various internal and external sources of noise. The very popular Field Programmable Gate Arrays, customizable by SRAM cells, are a consequence of the integrated circuit evolution with millions of memory cells to implement the logic, embedded memories, routing, and more recently with embedded microprocessors cores. These re-programmable systems-on-chip platforms must be fault-tolerant to cope with present days requirements. This book discusses fault-tolerance techniques for SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). It starts by showing the model of the problem and the upset effects in the programmable architecture. In the sequence, it shows the main fault tolerance techniques used nowadays to protect integrated circuits against errors. A large set of methods for designing fault tolerance systems in SRAM-based FPGAs is described. Some presented techniques are based on developing a new fault-tolerant architecture with new robustness FPGA elements. Other techniques are based on protecting the high-level hardware description before the synthesis in the FPGA. The reader has the flexibility of choosing the most suitable fault-tolerance technique for its project and to compare a set of fault tolerant techniques for programmable logic applications.

The SCAN conference, the International Symposium on Scientific Com puting, Computer Arithmetic and Validated Numerics, takes place bian nually under the joint auspices of GAMM (Gesellschaft fiir Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik) and IMACS (International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation). SCAN-98 attracted more than 100 participants from 21 countries all over the world. During the four days from September 22 to 25, nine highlighted, plenary lectures and over 70 contributed talks were given. These figures indicate a large participation, which was partly caused by the attraction of the organizing country, Hungary, but also the effec tive support system have contributed to the success. The conference was substantially supported by the Hungarian Research Fund OTKA, GAMM, the National Technology Development Board OMFB and by the J6zsef Attila University. Due to this funding, it was possible to subsidize the participation of over 20 scientists, mainly from Eastern European countries. It is important that the possibly first participation of 6 young researchers was made possible due to the obtained support. The number of East-European participants was relatively high. These results are especially valuable, since in contrast to the usual 2 years period, the present meeting was organized just one year after the last SCAN-xx conference."

Floating Gate Devices: Operation and Compact Modeling focuses on standard operations and compact modeling of memory devices based on Floating Gate architecture. Floating Gate devices are the building blocks of Flash, EPROM, EEPROM memories. Flash memories, which are the most versatile nonvolatile memories, are widely used to store code (BIOS, Communication protocol, Identification code, ) and data (solid-state Hard Disks, Flash cards for digital cameras, ).
The reader, who deals with Floating Gate memory devices at different levels - from test-structures to complex circuit design - will find an essential explanation on device physics and technology, and also circuit issues which must be fully understood while developing a new device. Device engineers will use this book to find simplified models to design new process steps or new architectures. Circuit designers will find the basic theory to understand the use of compact models to validate circuits against process variations and to evaluate the impact of parameter variations on circuit performances.
Floating Gate Devices: Operation and Compact Modeling is meant to be a basic tool for designing the next generation of memory devices based on FG technologies.

What makes some computers slow? What makes some digital systems operate reliably for years while others fail mysteriously every few hours? Why do some systems dissipate kilowatts while others operate off batteries? These questions of speed, reliability, and power are all determined by the system-level electrical design of a digital system. Digital Systems Engineering presents a comprehensive treatment of these topics. It combines a rigorous development of the fundamental principles in each area with down-to-earth examples of circuits and methods that work in practice. The book not only can serve as an undergraduate textbook, filling the gap between circuit design and logic design, but also can help practicing digital designers keep up with the speed and power of modern integrated circuits. The techniques described in this book, which were once used only in supercomputers, are now essential to the correct and efficient operation of any type of digital system.

Event-Triggered and Time-Triggered Control Paradigms presents a valuable survey about existing architectures for safety-critical applications and discusses the issues that must be considered when moving from a federated to an integrated architecture. The book focuses on one key topic - the amalgamation of the event-triggered and the time-triggered control paradigm into a coherent integrated architecture. The architecture provides for the integration of independent distributed application subsystems by introducing multi-criticality nodes and virtual networks of known temporal properties. The feasibility and the tangible advantages of this new architecture are demonstrated with practical examples taken from the automotive industry.

Event-Triggered and Time-Triggered Control Paradigms offers significant insights into the architecture and design of integrated embedded systems, both at the conceptual and at the practical level.

What is exactly "Safety"? A safety system should be defined as a system that will not endanger human life or the environment. A safety-critical system requires utmost care in their specification and design in order to avoid possible errors in their implementation that should result in unexpected system's behavior during his operating "life." An inappropriate method could lead to loss of life, and will almost certainly result in financial penalties in the long run, whether because of loss of business or because the imposition of fines. Risks of this kind are usually managed with the methods and tools of the "safety engineering." A life-critical system is designed to 9 lose less than one life per billion (10 ). Nowadays, computers are used at least an order of magnitude more in safety-critical applications compared to two decades ago. Increasingly electronic devices are being used in applications where their correct operation is vital to ensure the safety of the human life and the environment. These application ranging from the anti-lock braking systems (ABS) in automobiles, to the fly-by-wire aircrafts, to biomedical supports to the human care. Therefore, it is vital that electronic designers be aware of the safety implications of the systems they develop. State of the art electronic systems are increasingly adopting progr- mable devices for electronic applications on earthling system. In particular, the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices are becoming very interesting due to their characteristics in terms of performance, dimensions and cost.

Database Concurrency Control: Methods, Performance and Analysis is a review of developments in concurrency control methods for centralized database systems, with a quick digression into distributed databases and multicomputers, the emphasis being on performance. The main goals of Database Concurrency Control: Methods, Performance and Analysis are to succinctly specify various concurrency control methods; to describe models for evaluating the relative performance of concurrency control methods; to point out problem areas in earlier performance analyses; to introduce queuing network models to evaluate the baseline performance of transaction processing systems; to provide insights into the relative performance of transaction processing systems; to illustrate the application of basic analytic methods to the performance analysis of various concurrency control methods; to review transaction models which are intended to relieve the effect of lock contention; to provide guidelines for improving the performance of transaction processing systems due to concurrency control; and to point out areas for further investigation. This monograph should be of direct interest to computer scientists doing research on concurrency control methods for high performance transaction processing systems, designers of such systems, and professionals concerned with improving (tuning) the performance of transaction processing systems.

Various approaches for finding optimal values for the parameters of analog cells have made their entrance in commercial applications. However, a larger impact on the performance is expected if tools are developed which operate on a higher abstraction level and consider multiple architectural choices to realize a particular functionality. This book examines the opportunities, conditions, problems, solutions and systematic methodologies for this new generation of analog CAD tools.

Multithreaded Processor Design takes the unique approach of designing a multithreaded processor from the ground up. Every aspect is carefully considered to form a balanced design rather than making incremental changes to an existing design and then ignoring problem areas. The general purpose parallel computer is an elusive goal. Multithreaded processors have emerged as a promising solution to this conundrum by forming some amalgam of the commonplace control-flow (von Neumann) processor model with the more exotic data-flow approach. This new processor model offers many exciting possibilities and there is much research to be performed to make this technology widespread. Multithreaded processors utilize the simple and efficient sequential execution technique of control-flow, and also data-flow like concurrency primitives. This supports the conceptually simple but powerful idea of rescheduling rather than blocking when waiting for data, e.g. from large and distributed memories, thereby tolerating long data transmission latencies. This makes multiprocessing far more efficient because the cost of moving data between distributed memories and processors can be hidden by other activity. The same hardware mechanisms may also be used to synchronize interprocess communications to awaiting threads, thereby alleviating operating system overheads. Supporting synchronization and scheduling mechanisms in hardware naturally adds complexity. Consequently, existing multithreaded processor designs have tended to make incremental changes to existing control-flow processor designs to resolve some problems but not others. Multithreaded Processor Design serves as an excellent reference source and is suitable as a text for advanced courses in computer architecture dealing with the subject.