Wednesday 16 November 2016

EMBS Design Contest 2016

As it happens every year, I run a design contest as part of my undergraduate module on Embedded Systems. This year, we had a larger number of students choosing the module (maybe because we were ranked top teaching in the department last year!), so for the first time we had four teams competing for the coveted prizes: a box of chocolates and a picture on this blog. Their task: to design and implement a multi-hop wireless network using the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol, so that a message can be routed from the labs to my office on the other side of our C-shaped building.

This year's winners took an unorthodox approach to the network topology. Instead of placing network nodes all the way through the C-shaped corridor as previous winners have done, they decided to take a shortcut through the inner courtyard of the building. Iain Bate was seen giving them some advice about avoiding WiFi interference, which may have tipped the balance towards going outdoors. Luckily for them, the weather was mild and they had no problem to place network nodes over their shortcut (side picture shows the view from my office window). In previous years, rain and snow have prevented other groups from succeeding on that.

Bottom line is: they managed to finish the task before everybody else, in a little over two hours, so they deserve to be immortalised with their picture in the gallery of winners, which also include the top teams from 20152014, 2012, 2011 and 2010 (in 2013, no group managed to finish the challenge).


 

Monday 31 October 2016

New book: Dynamic Resource Allocation in Embedded, High-Performance and Cloud Computing

River Publishers has released this month our textbook on dynamic resource allocation heuristics for embedded, high-performance and cloud computing. The book is authored by myself and two of my former postdoc researchers Piotr Dziurzanski (now a lecturer at Staffordshire University) and Amit Kumar Singh (now a senior postdoc at Southampton University). It presents some of the work we did in the EU-funded DreamCloud project.

Hardcopies will be available for purchase on Amazon, and an ebook version is freely available in the publisher's website. This arrangement was made possible thanks to the EU FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot Scheme. The textbook includes the following chapters:

Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Load and Resource Models; 3. Feedback-based Admission Control Heuristics; 4. Feedback-based Allocation and Optimisation Heuristics; 5. Search-based Heuristics for Modal Applications; 6. Swarm Intelligence Algorithms for Dynamic Task Reallocation; 7. Value-Based Allocation; Bibliography


Monday 4 January 2016

2nd DREAMCloud Workshop

Together with the DreamCloud project team, I'm organising the 2nd International Workshop on Dynamic Resource Allocation and Management in Embedded, High Performance and Cloud Computing. More details, and an embarrassing video, below:

https://www.hipeac.net/2016/prague/
https://www.hipeac.net/events/activities/7316/dreamcloud/
http://www.dreamcloud-project.org/forum/workshop2016