Ali Jahanshahi

Ali Jahanshahi, Sara Rashidi Golrouye, Osten Anderson et al.

The rapid growth of AI/ML data centers has led to higher energy consumption and carbon emissions. The shift to renewable energy and growing data center energy demands can destabilize the power grid. Power grids rely on frequency regulation reserves, typically fossil-fueled power plants, to stabilize and balance the supply and demand of electricity. This paper sheds light on the hidden carbon emissions of frequency regulation service. Our work explores how modern GPU data centers can coordinate with power grids to reduce the need for fossil-fueled frequency regulation reserves. We first introduce a novel metric, Exogenous Carbon, to quantify grid-side carbon emission reductions resulting from data center participation in regulation service. We additionally introduce EcoCenter, a framework to maximize the amount of frequency regulation provision that GPU data centers can provide, and thus, reduce the amount of frequency regulation reserves necessary. We demonstrate that data center participation in frequency regulation can result in Exogenous carbon savings that can outweigh operational carbon emissions

Ali Jahanshahi

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based methods have achieved great success in a large number of applications and have been among the most powerful and widely used techniques in computer vision. However, CNN-based methods are computational-intensive and resource-consuming, and thus are hard to be integrated into embedded systems such as smart phones, smart glasses, and robots. FPGA is one of the most promising platforms for accelerating CNN, but the limited on-chip memory size limit the performance of FPGA accelerator for CNN. In this paper, we propose a framework for designing CNN accelerator on embedded FPGA for image classification. The proposed framework provides a tool for FPGA resource-aware design space exploration of CNNs and automatically generates the hardware description of the CNN to be programmed on a target FPGA. The framework consists of three main backends; software, hardware generation, and simulation/precision adjustment. The software backend serves as an API to the designer to design the CNN and train it according to the hardware resources that are available. Using the CNN model, hardware backend generates the necessary hardware components and integrates them to generate the hardware description of the CNN. Finaly, Simulation/precision adjustment backend adjusts the inter-layer precision units to minimize the classification error. We used 16-bit fixed-point data in a CNN accelerator (FPGA) and compared it to the exactly similar software version running on an ARM processor (32-bit floating point data). We encounter about 3% accuracy loss in classification of the accelerated (FPGA) version. In return, we got up to 15.75x speedup by classifying with the accelerated version on the FPGA.

Ali Jahanshahi

Dynamic Information Flow Tracking (DIFT) is a technique to track potential security vulnerabilities in software and hardware systems at run time. The last fifteen years have seen a lot of research work on DIFT, including both hardware-based and software-based implementations for different types of processor architectures. This survey briefly reviews some hardware architectures that provide DIFT support. Starting from introducing different approaches for hardware based DIFT, this survey focuses on integrated/in-core architectures. Protection schemes, including tagging system, tag propagation, and tag checking for each architecture will be discussed. The survey is organized in such a way that it illustrates the evolution of integrated DIFT architectures, each architecture tries to improve the precious proposed architectures generality/versatility weaknesses. However, improving security while providing generality and versatility is kind of trade-offs. This survey compares the architectures from different aspects to show the trade-offs clearer.