Future many-core systems need to handle high power density and chip temperature effectively. Some cores in many-core systems need to be turned off or ‘dark’ to manage chip power and thermal density. This phenomenon is also known as the dark silicon problem. This problem prevents many-core systems from utilizing and gaining improved performance from a large number of processing cores. This paper presents a dynamic thermal-aware performance optimization of dark silicon many-core systems (DTaPO) technique for optimizing dark silicon a many-core system performance under temperature constraint. The proposed technique utilizes both task migration and dynamic voltage frequency scaling (DVFS) for optimizing the performance of a many-core system while keeping system temperature in a safe operating limit. Task migration puts hot cores in low-power states and moves tasks to cooler dark cores to aggressively reduce chip temperature while maintaining high overall system performance. To reduce task migration overhead due to cold start, the source core (i.e., active core) keeps its L2 cache content during the initial migration phase. The destination core (i.e., dark core) can access it to reduce the impact of cold start misses. Moreover, the proposed technique limits tasks migration among cores that share the last level cache (LLC). In the case of major thermal violation and no cooler cores being available, DVFS is used to reduce the hot cores temperature gradually by reducing their frequency. Experimental results for different threshold temperatures show that DTaPO can keep the average system temperature below the thermal limit. Affirmatively, the execution time penalty is reduced by up to 18% compared with using only DVFS for all thermal thresholds. Moreover, the average peak temperature is reduced by up to 10.8°C. In addition, the experimental results show that DTaPO improves the system’s performance by up to 80% compared to optimal sprinting patterns (OSP) and reduces the temperature by up to 13.6°C.

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This paper considers the control of an active suspension system (ASS) for a quarter car model based on the fusion of robust control and computational intelligence techniques. The objective of designing a controller for the car suspension system is to improve the ride comfort while maintaining the constraints on to the suspension travel and tire deformation subjected to different road profile. However, due to the mismatched uncertainty in the mathematical model of the ASS, sliding mode control (SMC) cannot be applied directly to control the system. Thus, the purpose of this work is to adapt the SMC technique for the control of ASS, where particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is utilized to design the sliding surface such that the effect of the mismatched uncertainty can be minimized. The performance of the proposed sliding mode controller based on the PSO algorithm is compared with the linear quadratic optimal control (LQR) and the existing passive suspension system. In comparison with the other control methods, the simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed controller, where it significantly improved the ride comfort 67% and 25% more than the passive suspension system and the LQR controller, respectively.

This paper presents a robust backstepping control (BC) method based on nonlinear disturbance observer (NDOB) for trajectory tracking of the nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot (WMR) in the presence of external disturbances and parameters uncertainties. At first, a bounded Fuzzy logic based backstepping controller (BFLBC) is designed to control the WMR without considering the effects of the external disturbances and the parameters uncertainties. Typically, the conventional BC controller depends upon the state tracking errors analysis, where unbounded velocity signal is produced for the applications that have huge tracking errors. Therefore, a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) is introduced in this research in order to normalize the state tracking errors, so that the input errors to the BC are bounded to a finite interval. Finally, the designed BFLBC is integrated with the nonlinear disturbance observer in order to attenuate the external disturbances and model uncertainties. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller to generate a bounded velocity signal as well as to stabilize the tracking errors to zero. In addition, the results prove that the proposed controller provide an excellent disturbance attenuation as well as robustness against the parameters uncertainties.