Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

National Initiatives

Zero Power Computing Systems (ZEP): Inria Project Lab (2017–2020)

Participants : Erven Rohou, Bahram Yarahmadi.

This proposal addresses the issue of designing tiny wireless, batteryless, computing objects, harvesting energy in the environment. The energy level harvested being very low, very frequent energy shortages are expected. In order for the new system to maintain a consistent state, it will be based on a new architecture embedding non-volatile RAM (NVRAM). In order to benefit from the hardware innovations related to energy harvesting and NVRAM, software mechanisms will be designed. On the one hand, a compilation pass will compute a worst-case energy consumption. On the other hand, dedicated runtime mechanisms will allow:

1. to manage efficiently and correctly the NVRAM-based hardware architecture;

2. to use energy intelligently, by computing the worst-case energy consumption.

The ZEP project gathers four Inria teams that have a scientific background in architecture, compilation, operating systems together with the CEA Lialp and Lisan laboratories of CEA LETI & LIST [39]. The main application target is Internet of Things (IoT).

NOPE

Participants : Piéric Giraud, Erven Rohou, Bahram Yarahmadi.

NOPE is a one-year exploratory action funded by the Labex Cominlabs. This project aimed at being a first step, and served to elaborate more ambitious future works. Through this project, the consortium was able to grow its knowledge on a topical research theme and lay the foundations of an innovative hardware-software approach. The short term goals were:

• building and sharing across the consortium a strong expertise in state-of-the art results and tools on transient computing, and identifying challenges that should be focused on;

• initiating collaborations between the participants in order to identify opportunities at the hardware-software interface;

• building the foundations of a shared experimental platform for transient computing.

An intern, Piéric Giraud, was hired thanks to NOPE. He ported our WCET infrastructure Heptane to the MSP430 instruction set.

The NOPE project gathers teams PACAP, IETR Syscom and LS2N STR.

Hybrid SIMD architectures (2018–2019)

Participants : Caroline Collange, Alexandre Kouyoumdjian, Erven Rohou.

The project objective is to define new parallel computer architectures that offer high parallel performance on high-regularity workloads while keeping the flexibility to run more irregular parallel workloads. inspired by both GPU and SIMD or vector architectures.

This project is funded by the French Ministry of Armed Forces (Ministère des Armées).

DGA/PEC ARMOUR (2018–2021)

Participants : Kévin Le Bon, Erven Rohou.

ARMOUR (dynAmic binaRy optiMizatiOn cyber-secURity) aims at improving the security of computing systems at the software level. Our contribution will be twofold: (1) identify vulnerabilities in existing software, and (2) develop adaptive countermeasure mechanisms against attacks. We will rely on dynamic binary rewriting (DBR) which consists in observing a program and modifying its binary representation in memory while it runs. DBR does not require the source code of the programs it manipulates, making it convenient for commercial and legacy applications. We will study the feasibility of an adaptive security agent that monitors target applications and deploys (or removes) countermeasures based on dynamic conditions. Lightweight monitoring is appropriate when the threat condition is low, heavy countermeasures will be dynamically woven into the code when an attack is detected. Vulnerability analysis will be based on advanced fuzzing. DBR makes it possible to monitor and modify deeply embedded variables, inaccessible to traditional monitoring systems, and also to detect unexpected/suspicious values taken by variables and act before the application crashes.

ARMOUR is funded by DGA (Direction Générale de l'Armement) and PEC (Pôle d'Excellence Cyber).

ANR DYVE (31/03/2020 – 30/09/2023)

Participants : Arthur Blanleuil, Caroline Collange, Pierre-Yves Peneau.

Most of today's computer systems have CPU cores and GPU cores on the same chip. Though both are general-purpose, CPUs and GPUs still have fundamentally different software stacks and programming models, starting from the instruction set architecture. Indeed, GPUs rely on static vectorization of parallel applications, which demands vector instruction sets instead of CPU scalar instruction sets. In the DYVE project, we advocate a disruptive change in both CPU and GPU architecture by introducing Dynamic Vectorization at the hardware level.

Dynamic Vectorization will combine the efficiency of GPUs with the programmability and compatibility of CPUs by bringing them together into heterogeneous general-purpose multicores. It will enable processor architectures of the next decades to provide (1) high performance on sequential program sections thanks to latency-optimized cores, (2) energy-efficiency on parallel sections thanks to throughput-optimized cores, (3) programmability, binary compatibility and portability.

DYVE is funded by the ANR through the JCJC funding instrument.