Increasing data locality and introducing Level-3 BLAS in the Neville elimination

In this paper we present two new algorithmic variants to compute the Neville elimination, with and without pivoting, which improve data locality and cast most of the computations in terms of high-performance Level 3 BLAS. The experimental evaluation on a state-of-the-art multi-core processor demonstrates that the new blocked algorithms exhibit a much higher degree of concurrency and better cache usage, yielding higher performance while offering numerical accuracy akin to that of the traditional columnwise variant in most cases.     

Enrichment of Fetal Nucleated Red Blood Cells by Multi-core Magnetic Composite Particles for Non-invasive Prenatal Diagnosis

A novel kind of multi-core magnetic composite particles, the surfaces of which were respectively modified with goat-anti-mouse IgG and antitransferrin receptor(anti-CD71), was prepared. The fetal nucleated red blood cells(FNRBCs) in the peripheral blood of a gravida were rapidly and effectively enriched and separated by the modified multi-core magnetic composite particles in an external magnetic field. The obtained FNRBCs were used for the identification of the fetal sex by means of fluorescence in situ hybridization(FISH) technique. The results demonstrate that the multi-core magnetic composite particles meet the requirements for the enrichment and speration of FNRBCs with a low concentration and the accuracy of detetion for the diagnosis of fetal sex reached to 95%. Moreover, the obtained FNRBCs were applied to the non-invasive diagnosis of Down syndrome and chromosome 3p21 was detected. The above facts indicate that the novel multi-core magnetic composite particles-based method is simple, reliable and cost-effective and has opened up vast vistas for the potential application in clinic non-invasive prenatal diagnosis.     

Low-cost multi-core inertial microfluidic centrifuge for high-throughput cell concentration

We developed a low-cost multi-core inertial microfluidic centrifuge (IM-centrifuge) to achieve a continuous-flow cell/particle concentration at a throughput of up to 20 mL/min. To lower the cost of our IM-centrifuge, we clamped a disposable multilayer film-based inertial microfluidic (MFIM) chip with two reusable plastic housings. The key MFIM chip was fabricated in low-cost materials by stacking different polymer-film channel layers and double-sided tape. To increase processing throughput, multiplexing spiral inertial microfluidic channels were integrated within an all-in-one MFIM chip, and a novel sample distribution strategy was employed to equally distribute the sample into each channel layer. Then, we characterized the focusing performance in the MFIM chip over a wide flow-rate range. The experimental results showed that our IM-centrifuge was able to focus various-sized particles/cells to achieve volume reduction. The sample distribution strategy also effectively ensured identical focusing and concentration performances in different cores. Finally, our IM-centrifuge was successfully applied to concentrate microalgae cells with irregular shapes and highly polydisperse sizes. Thus, our IM-centrifuge holds the potential to be employed as a low-cost, high-throughput centrifuge for disposable use in low-resource settings.     

Benchmarking JPEG 2000 implementations on modern CPU and GPU architectures

The use of graphics hardware for non-graphics applications has become popular among many scientific programmers and researchers as we have observed a higher rate of theoretical performance increase than the CPUs in recent years. However, performance gains may be easily lost in the context of a specific parallel application due to various both hardware and software factors. JPEG 2000 is a complex standard for data compression and coding, that provides many advanced capabilities demanded by more specialized applications. There are several JPEG 2000 implementations that utilize emerging parallel architectures with the built-in support for parallelism at different levels. Unfortunately, many available implementations are only optimized for a certain parallel architecture or they do not take advantage of recent capabilities provided by modern hardware and low level APIs. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive real performance analysis of JPEG 2000. It consists of a chain of data and compute intensive tasks that can be treated as good examples of software benchmarks for modern parallel hardware architectures. In this paper we compare achieved performance results of various JPEG 2000 implementations executed on selected architectures for different data sets to identify possible bottlenecks. We discuss also best practices and advices for parallel software development to help users to evaluate in advance and then select appropriate solutions to accelerate the execution of their applications.     

1 × 4 coupler based on all solid five-core photonic crystal fibers

An improved 1 × 4 coupler based on all solid multi-core photonic crystal fiber is proposed and analyzed. The expressions to calculate the coupling length and the coupling efficiency are deduced based on the coupled-mode equations firstly. Then a full-vector finite element method (FEM) is used to calculate the coupling length and the coupling efficiency. Next, the propagation characteristics and the performances of the coupler are analyzed through using a full vector beam propagation method (BPM). Research shows that the results derived by FEM agree with that by BPM. The coupling length of the coupler is 4.1 mm at λ = 1.55 μm. A maximum coupling efficiency of 24.96% can be obtained. The coupling ratio is more than 22.5% over a wavelength range of 100 nm. The polarization-dependent loss at λ = 1.55 μm is equal to 0.73 dB. Finally, the influences of the micro-variation of structure parameters and the material refractive index on the working performances of the coupler are investigated.     

Ultrasound phase rotation beamforming on multi-core DSP

Phase rotation beamforming (PRBF) is a commonly-used digital receive beamforming technique. However, due to its high computational requirement, it has traditionally been supported by hardwired architectures, e.g., application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or more recently field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In this study, we investigated the feasibility of supporting software-based PRBF on a multi-core DSP. To alleviate the high computing requirement, the analog front-end (AFE) chips integrating quadrature demodulation in addition to analog-to-digital conversion were defined and used. With these new AFE chips, only delay alignment and phase rotation need to be performed by DSP, substantially reducing the computational load. We implemented the delay alignment and phase rotation modules on a Texas Instruments C6678 DSP with 8 cores. We found it takes 200 μs to beamform 2048 samples from 64 channels using 2 cores. With 4 cores, 20 million samples can be beamformed in one second. Therefore, ADC frequencies up to 40 MHz with 2:1 decimation in AFE chips or up to 20 MHz with no decimation can be supported as long as the ADC-to-DSP I/O requirement can be met. The remaining 4 cores can work on back-end processing tasks and applications, e.g., color Doppler or ultrasound elastography. One DSP being able to handle both beamforming and back-end processing could lead to low-power and low-cost ultrasound machines, benefiting ultrasound imaging in general, particularly portable ultrasound machines.     

基于多核点共享树的多源光组播路由方法

通过网络编码方法优化多核点选择和组播信息传输,本文提出一种基于多核点共享树和网络编码的光组播路由构造和波长分配方法、减少波长资源消耗和提高网络的负载平衡性能.首先,删除产生源点迂回回路的网络编码备选核点集合,采用启发式矩阵运算方法确定多源共享树的网络编码核点,实现多源共享树以最少的核点覆盖最多的源节点;然后,为减少波长信道消耗数目,在确定的核点到目的节点间加入网络编码方法传输信息;最后,讨论了多核点共享树的波长分配方法和目的节点成功解码的边分离路径方法.仿真结果表明:与单核共享树、基于网络编码的单核共享树相比,基于网络编码的多核点共享树组播路由方法需求最少的波长数目和获得最好的网络负载平衡性能.     

基于多核的车牌识别的架构实现

多核技术是现在提高芯片性能的主要方法。区别于传统以PC和DSP为核心的车牌识别系统,以FPGA为核心,利用SOPC技术构建了车牌识别多核处理器。给出了一种基于多核的车牌识别架构,在该多核处理器中,以3个Nios II 软核为主要处理器核处理车牌定位、字符特征识别提取及识别等处理,同时构建硬件加速器作为协处理器处理图像增强、边缘检测和膨胀、腐蚀等数学形态学处理。在CQ片上路由器基础上,构建了NOC用以实现片上多核通信。另外,为了保证路由器与多处理器核之间的快速、并行通信,加入了数据驱动模块。整个系统在Altera Cyclone IV FPGA上实现了车牌的识别。这种片上系统设计方法具有硬件设计灵活,可扩展性强等优点,能有效地降低系统软硬件设计的难度,缩短开发周期,并提高设计的可靠性。     

基于多芯光纤级联布喇格光纤光栅的横向压力与温度同时测量

提出并制作了一种基于多芯光纤与单模光纤错位构成的马赫-曾德尔干涉仪,将其与光纤布喇格光栅级联,形成的全光纤传感系统可实现横向压力和温度双参量同时测量.马赫-曾德尔干涉仪是利用多芯光纤和单模光纤的模场不匹配而发生模间干涉,当外界横向压力直接作用在多芯光纤内部光场,干涉仪具有较高的灵敏度.实验结果表明:马赫-曾德尔干涉仪压力灵敏度为28.57nm/(N·mm~(-1)),线性度为0.997,而光纤布喇格光栅在一定范围内对压力变化不敏感;马赫-曾德干涉仪和光纤布喇格光栅对温度变化都具有较高的线性度,温度灵敏度分别为56.1pm/℃和11.3pm/℃.对于分辨率为0.02nm的光谱仪,传感器可实现的压力和温度测量分辨率分别为7.0×10~(-4)N/mm和0.03℃.马赫-曾德尔干涉仪的透射谱和光纤布拉光栅的谐振峰对横向压力和温度的变化有不同的光谱响应,利用光谱仪对传感器的透射谱实时监测,方便地实现了压力与温度双参量的测量.该传感器结构简单,灵敏度高,可用于不同领域的压力传感.