Abstract-In this paper, we present a polymorphic processor paradigm incorporating both general purpose and custom computing processing. The proposal incorporates an arbitrary number of programmable units, exposes the hardware to the programmers/ designers, and allows them to modify and extend the processor functionality at will. To achieve the previously stated attributes, we present a new programming paradigm, a new instruction set architecture, a microcode-based microarchitecture, and a compiler methodology. The programming paradigm, in contrast with the conventional programming paradigms, allows general-purpose conventional code and hardware descriptions to coexist in a program. In our proposal, for a given instruction set architecture, a onetime instruction set extension of eight instructions is sufficient to implement the reconfigurable functionality of the processor. We propose a microarchitecture based on reconfigurable hardware emulation to allow high-speed reconfiguration and execution. To prove the viability of the proposal, we experimented with the MPEG-2 encoder and decoder and a Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA. We have implemented three operations, SAD, DCT, and IDCT. The overall attainable application speedup for the MPEG-2 encoder and decoder is between 2.64-3.18 and between 1.56-1.94, respectively, representing between 93 percent and 98 percent of the theoretically obtainable speedups.

We introduce a 64-bit ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985 floating point design of a hardware matrix multiplier optimized for FPGA implementations. A general block matrix multiplication algorithm, applicable for an arbitrary matrix size is proposed. The algorithm potentially enables optimum performance by exploiting the data locality and reusability incurred by the general matrix multiplication scheme and considering the limitations of the I/O bandwidth and the local storage volume. We implement a scalable linear array of processing elements (PE) supporting the proposed algorithm in the Xilinx Virtex II Pro technology. Synthesis results confirm a superior performance-area ratio compared to related recent works. Assuming the same FPGA chip, the same amount of local memory, and the same I/O bandwidth, our design outperforms related proposals by at least 1.7X and up to 18X consuming the least reconfigurable resources. A total of 39 PEs can be integrated into the xc2vp125-7 FPGA, reaching performance of, e.g., 15.6 GFLOPS with 1600 KB local memory and 400 MB/s external memory bandwidth.

No abstract

Disturbance of the cytokine equilibrium has been accused for many pathological disorders. Microbial infections, autoimmune diseases, graft rejection have been correlated to over- or under-production of specific cytokines which are produced as responder molecules to the various immune stimuli. The sole naturally occurring immune reaction in the organism is developed during the gestational period where, despite the presence of a semi-allogeneic graft, maternal immunoreactivity is driven to support fetal growth. The successful embryo development has been attributed to the important intervention of cytokines where some have been characterized as indispensable and others deleterious to fetal growth. However, the physiological levels of many factors during the gestational process have not been determined. Thus, in the present study we have measured and established the values of IL-1alpha, IL-2, IL-3, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, IL-12, GM-CSF, TNF-alpha and IFN-gamma during all phases of human pregnancy (first, second and third trimester of pregnancy, labour, abortions of the first trimester) as well as in the non-pregnant control state. This is an attempt to assess serum protein concentrations and present the physiological levels of these cytokines at certain time intervals providing thus a diagnostic advantage in pregnancy cases where the mother cannot immunologically support the fetus. Exploitation of this knowledge and further research may be useful for therapeutic interventions in the future.

No abstract