• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.678-684
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• 2015

Near-threshold computing (NTC) is now regarded as a promising candidate for innovative power reduction, which cannot be achieved with conventional super-threshold computing (STC). However, performance degradation and vulnerability to process variation in the NTC regime are the primary concerns. In this paper, we propose a voltage- and frequency-tuning methodology for mitigating the process-variation-induced problems in NTC-based manycore architectures. To implement the proposed methodology, we build up multiple-voltage multiple-frequency (MVMF) islands and apply a voltage-frequency tuning algorithm based on the critical-path monitoring technique to reduce the effects of process variation and maximize energy efficiency in the post-silicon stage. Experimental results show that the proposed methodology reduces overall power consumption by 8.2-20.0%, compared to existing methods in variation-sensitive NTC environments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2015.10a
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• pp.866-869
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• 2015

With the advance in semiconductor technology, the number of elements that can be integrated in system-on-chip(SoC) increases exponentially, and thus voltage scaling is indispensable to enhance energy efficiency. Near-threshold voltage computing(NTC) improves the energy efficiency by an order of degree, hence it is able to overcome the limitation of conventional super-threshold voltage computing(STC). Although NTC-based low performance manycore system can be used to maximize energy efficiency, it demands more number of cores to sustain the performance, which results in considerable increase of area. In this paper, we analyze NTC manycore architecture considering the trade-offs between performance, power, and area. Therefore, we propose an algorithmic methodology that can optimize power consumption and area while satisfying the required performance by determining the constrained number of cores and size of caches and clusters in NTC environment. Experimental results show that proposed NTC architecture can reduce power consumption by approximately 16.5 % while maintaining the performance of STC core under area constraint.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.77-83
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• 2015

Frequent pattern mining, which is one of the major areas actively studied in data mining, is a method for extracting useful pattern information hidden from large data sets or databases. Moreover, frequent pattern mining approaches have been actively employed in a variety of application fields because the results obtained from them can allow us to analyze various, important characteristics within databases more easily and automatically. However, traditional frequent pattern mining methods, which simply extract all of the possible frequent patterns such that each of their support values is not smaller than a user-given minimum support threshold, have the following problems. First, traditional approaches have to generate a numerous number of patterns according to the features of a given database and the degree of threshold settings, and the number can also increase in geometrical progression. In addition, such works also cause waste of runtime and memory resources. Furthermore, the pattern results excessively generated from the methods also lead to troubles of pattern analysis for the mining results. In order to solve such issues of previous traditional frequent pattern mining approaches, the concept of representative pattern mining and its various related works have been proposed. In contrast to the traditional ones that find all the possible frequent patterns from databases, representative pattern mining approaches selectively extract a smaller number of patterns that represent general frequent patterns. In this paper, we describe details and characteristics of pattern condensing techniques that consider the maximality or closure property of generated frequent patterns, and conduct comparison and analysis for the techniques. Given a frequent pattern, satisfying the maximality for the pattern signifies that all of the possible super sets of the pattern must have smaller support values than a user-specific minimum support threshold; meanwhile, satisfying the closure property for the pattern means that there is no superset of which the support is equal to that of the pattern with respect to all the possible super sets. By mining maximal frequent patterns or closed frequent ones, we can achieve effective pattern compression and also perform mining operations with much smaller time and space resources. In addition, compressed patterns can be converted into the original frequent pattern forms again if necessary; especially, the closed frequent pattern notation has the ability to convert representative patterns into the original ones again without any information loss. That is, we can obtain a complete set of original frequent patterns from closed frequent ones. Although the maximal frequent pattern notation does not guarantee a complete recovery rate in the process of pattern conversion, it has an advantage that can extract a smaller number of representative patterns more quickly compared to the closed frequent pattern notation. In this paper, we show the performance results and characteristics of the aforementioned techniques in terms of pattern generation, runtime, and memory usage by conducting performance evaluation with respect to various real data sets collected from the real world. For more exact comparison, we also employ the algorithms implementing these techniques on the same platform and Implementation level.