The processing of digital video has long been a significant computational task for modern x86 processors. With every video frame composed of one to three planes, each consisting of a two-dimensional array of pixel data, and a video clip comprising of thousands of such frames, the sheer volume of data is significant. With the introduction of new high definition video formats such as 4K or stereoscopic 3D, the volume of uncompressed frame data is growing ever larger. Modern CPUs offer performance enhancements for processing digital video through SIMD instructions such as SSE2 or AVX. However, even with these instruction sets, CPUs are limited by their inherently sequential design, and can only operate on a handful of bytes in parallel. Even processors with a multitude of cores only execute on an elementary level of parallelism. GPUs provide an alternative, massively parallel architecture. GPUs differ from CPUs by providing thousands of throughput-oriented cores, instead of a maximum of tens of generalized “good enough at everything” x86 cores. The GPU’s throughput-oriented cores are far more adept at handling large arrays of pixel data, as many video filtering operations can be performed independently. This computational independence allows for pixel processing to scale across hun- dreds or even thousands of device cores. This thesis explores the utilization of GPUs for video processing, and evaluates the advantages and caveats of porting the modern video filtering framework, Vapoursynth, over to running entirely on the GPU. Compute heavy GPU-enabled video processing results in up to a 108% speedup over an SSE2-optimized, multithreaded CPU implementation.

GenSel is a genetic selection analysis tool used to determine which genetic markers are informational for a given trait. Performing genetic selection related analyses is a time consuming and computationally expensive task. Due to an expected increase in the number of genotyped individuals, analysis times will increase dramatically. Therefore, optimization efforts must be made to keep analysis times reasonable. This thesis focuses on optimizing one of GenSel’s underlying algorithms for heterogeneous computing. The resulting algorithm exposes task-level parallelism and data-level parallelism present but inaccessible in the original algorithm. The heterogeneous computing solution, ReGen, outperforms the optimized CPU implementation achieving a 1.84 times speedup.

Due to fundamental physical limitations, conventional digital circuits have not been able to scale at the pace expected from Moore’s law. In addition, computationally intensive applications such as neural networks and computer vision demand large amounts of energy from digital circuits. As a result, energy efficient alternatives are needed in order to provide continued performance scaling. Analog circuits have many well known benefits: the ability to store more information onto a single wire and efficiently perform mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction, and differential equation solving. However, analog computing also comes with drawbacks such as its sensitivity to process variation and noise, limited scalability, programming difficulty, and poor compatibility with digital circuits and design tools. We propose to leverage the strengths of analog circuits and avoid its weaknesses by using digital circuits and time-encoded computation. Time-encoded circuits also operate on continuous data but are implemented using digital circuits. We propose a novel scalable general purpose analog processor using time-encoded circuits that is well suited for emerging applications that require high numeric precision. The processor’s datapath, including time-domain register file and function units are described. We evaluate our proposed approach using an implementation that is simulated with a 0.18µm TSMC process and demonstrate that this approach improves the performance of a scientific benchmark by 4x compared against conventional analog implementations and improves energy consumption by 146x compared against digital implementations.

Automatic Heterogeneous Compilers allows blended hardware-software solutions to be explored without the cost of a full-fledged design team, but limited research exists on current partitioning algorithms responsible for separating hardware and software. The purpose of this thesis is to implement various partitioning algorithms onto the same automatic heterogeneous compiler platform to create an apples to apples comparison for AHC partitioning algorithms. Both estimated outcomes and actual outcomes for the solutions generated are studied and scored. The platform used to implement the algorithms is Cal Poly’s own Twill compiler, created by Doug Gallatin last year. Twill’s original partitioning algorithm is chosen along with two other partitioning algorithms: Tabu Search + Simulated Annealing (TSSA) and Genetic Search (GS). These algorithms are implemented inside Twill and test bench input code from the CHStone HLS Benchmark tests is used as stimulus. Along with the algorithms cost models, one key attribute of interest is queue counts generated, as the more cuts between hardware and software requires queues to pass the data between partition crossings. These high communication costs can end up damaging the heterogeneous solution’s performance. The Genetic, TSSA, and Twill’s original partitioning algorithm are all scored against each other’s cost models as well, combining the fitness and performance cost models with queue counts to evaluate each partitioning algorithm. The solutions generated by TSSA are rated as better by both the cost model for the TSSA algorithm and the cost model for the Genetic algorithm while producing low queue counts.

Amaethon is a web application that is designed for enterprise farm management. It takes a job typically performed with spreadsheets, paper, or custom software and puts it on the web. Farm administration personnel may use it to schedule farm operations and manage their resources and equipment. A survey was con- ducted to assess Amaethon’s user interface design. Participants in the survey were two groups of students and a small group of agriculture professionals. Among other results, the survey indicated that a calendar interface inside Amaethon was preferred, and statistically no less effective, than a map interface. This is despite the fact that a map interface was viewed by some users as a potentially important and effective component of Amaethon.

A proof of concept is created that demonstrates how low-cost sensors and a simple software solution can be used to proactively detect IED placement. The main goal is to detect suspicious behavior; Specifically we derive requirements that loitering, meandering, improper location and object placement shall be detected. Current methods being used to detect Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are costly in terms of equipment and risk to life, and many are retroactive; IED detection occurs long after explosives are placed. A prototype system is explored with the quality attributes of being low-cost, proactive and using simple software methods. A wireless sensor network of simple sensors may alert authorities to people in the act of placing IEDs. Previous work with Crossbow Motes showed that a network of infrared motion sensors can be used to detect loitering. In this prototype nine other sensors are reverse engineered to determine their true operating specifications. Then a prototype sensor network is developed to explore which low-cost sensors can be used to detect suspicious behavior. The results indicate that five low-cost sensors are effective in detecting suspicious behavior: infrared motion, infrared distance, light, force sensors and pressure sensors meet our requirements.

Modern-day computer security relies heavily on cryptography as a means to protect the data that we have become increasingly reliant on. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, methods of security must be better than ever. Validation tools can be leveraged to help increase our confidence and accountability for methods we employ to secure our systems. Security validation, however, can be difficult and time-consuming. As our computational ability increases, calculations that were once considered “hard” due to length of computation, can now be done in minutes. We are constantly increasing the size of our keys and attempting to make computations harder to protect our information. This increase in “cracking” difficulty often has the unfortunate side-effect of making validation equally as difficult. We can leverage massive-parallelism and the computational power that is granted by today’s commodity hardware such as GPUs to make checks that would otherwise be impossible to perform, attainable. Our work presents a practical tool for validating RSA keys for poor prime numbers: a fundamental problem that has led to significant security holes, despite the RSA algorithm’s mathematical soundness. Our tool, PARIS, leverages NVIDIA’s CUDA framework to perform a complete set of greatest common divisor calculations between all keys in a provided set. Our implementation offers a 27.5 times speedup using a GTX 480 and 33.9 times speedup using a Tesla K20Xm: both compared to a reference sequential implementation for sets of less than 200000 keys. This level of speedup brings this validation into the realm of practicality due to decreased runtime.

Contemporary small office phone systems are specialized computers that connect a variety of phones within the office and to the local phone company. These systems use digital signaling processors (DSPs) to convert signals from analog to digital and vice-versa. Many different types of applications run on the DSPs and different businesses have varying application needs. Given the systems have limited amounts of DSP resources and growing numbers of applications for a phone system, an administrator needs a way to configure the uses of resources based on their individual business needs. This thesis provides an overview of a system for configuring resources on various types of DSP hardware some of which are removable and have differing tradeoffs between application uses. The system has to be able to change resource allocations while the phone system is running with minimal interruptions to calls. The configuration system needs to be designed to be flexible enough that new applications or DSP hardware could be supported without major changes to code. This thesis presents a system that uses a database-driven model along with algorithms that optimize configuration of DSP hardware given the administrator’s individual application needs.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are commonly used to accelerate massively parallel workloads across a wide range of applications from machine learning to cryptocurrency mining. The original application for GPUs, however, was to accelerate graphics rendering which remains popular today through video gaming and video rendering. While GPUs began as fixed function hardware with minimal programmability, modern GPUs have adopted a design with many programmable cores and supporting fixed function hardware for rasterization, texture sampling, and render output tasks. This balance enables GPUs to be used for general purpose computing and still remain adept at graphics rendering. Previous work at the Georgia Institute of Technology has been done to implement a general purpose GPU (GPGPU) in the open source RISC-V ISA. The implementation features many programmable cores and texture sampling support. However, creating a truly modern GPU based on the RISC-V ISA requires the addition of fixed function hardware units for rasterization and render output tasks in order to meet the demands of current graphics APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan. This thesis discusses the work done by students at the Georgia Institute of Technology and California Polytechnic State University SLO to accelerate graphics rendering on RISC-V GPUs including the specific contributions made to implement and connect fixed function graphics hardware for the render output unit (ROP) to the programmable cores in a RISC-V GPU. This thesis also explores the performance and area cost of different hardware configurations within the implemented GPU.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are one of the most popular genres in video games that combine massively multiplayer online genres with role-playing gameplay. MMORPGs’ featured social interaction and forms of level pro- gression through quest completion are the core for gaining players’ attention. Varied and challenging quests play an essential part in retaining that attention. However, well-crafted content takes much longer to develop with human efforts than it does to consume, and the dominant procedural content generation models for quests suffer from the drawback of being incompatible with dynamic world changes and the feeling of repetition over time. The proposed solution is to dynamically generate contextu- ally relevant quests with real-time information collected from the players. This thesis is to show that it is possible to generate contextually dynamic quests that could fit into the background story with only the information gathered from the players in real-time. To validate the proposed solution, a text-based MMO scenario is generated from the Panoptyk Engine, an information-driven game engine designed to run massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) without the distinction between NPCs and human players. The engine is intended to serve as a platform for simulating human/robot interaction. In this case, a quest simulation is built where quests are given by the NPC faction leaders utilizing the information gathered through ongoing events; players or robots belonging to certain factions will be taking and completing the quests. ivThe results of the 14-person survey showed some successes and some limitations. There was strong agreement in players understanding of what the quest was asking for, quests were related to other agents the player had seen in the world, quests involved agents that the player had interactions with, quests were related to things happening in the game world, quests were interesting. There was regular agreement on players understanding of quests that were designed entirely before the player started playing, quests were generated using a basic template with details filled in based on the player’s actions, and quests were dynamically generated. It was inconclusive with players understanding of quest motivation and previous quests the player had completed having an impact on the next quests.