Alma Mater Studiorum — Università di Bologna

Role

Leading WP1, architecture modeling, simulation, allocation techniques.

Specific skills

The Microelectronics Research Group (MICREL) at the University of Bologna focuses on the design and design automation of large-scale integrated systems. MICREL members have produced several significant contributions in the area of low power design, power management and energy-aware system design. The group has also pioneered the concept of network-on-chip, a new paradigm for building scalable and efficient on-chip communication fabrics for next-generation multi-core platforms.

Recent work has focused on building a complete modeling infrastructure for complex multi-processor systems on chips. This effort has lead to the development of the MPARM virtual platform, which is used by a number of research groups around the world.

The Constraint Optimisation Group is one of the most active in Europe in the area of integration of constraint programming and operation research. Since 1997, the group has developed a large set of optimisation techniques which are now integrated in commercial constraint solvers such as ILOG and Eclipse. By working in this area, the group has gained deep insights into the exact solution of scheduling and allocation problems, providing state-of-the-art results for many instances and closing open problems at hand.

Recently, these techniques have been successfully applied to applications related to system design, providing the best known results for pipelined task graphs. The group has applied its expertise to the system design area, exploiting problem structures and sophisticated solving techniques.

Both groups have participated in EU projects in the fifth (SOCS, ARTIST) and sixth (ARTIST2) framework programme, and have numerous research cooperations with industry partners such as STMicroelectronics, Freescale Semicondutors, and ILOG. University of Bologna has on-going cooperations with University of Dortmund and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on modeling and designing highly predictable platforms.

Key personnel

PREDATOR-related publications

A Constraint Programming Approach for Allocation and Scheduling on the CELL Broadband Engine (PDF, 270kB)
By Luca Benini, Michele Lombardi, Michela Milano, and Martino Ruggiero, University of Bologna.
In: CP 2008.
Multi-Stage Benders Decomposition for Optimizing Multicore Architectures
By Luca Benini, Michele Lombardi, Michela Milano, Martino Ruggiero, and Marco Mantovani, University of Bologna.
In: CPAIOR 2008.
Resource-Management Policy Handling Multiple Use Cases in MPSoC Platforms Using Constraint Programming
By Luca Benini, Davide Bertozzi, and Michela Milano, University of Bologna.
In: ICLP 2008.
Cellflow: a Parallel Application Development Environment with Run-Time Support for the Cell BE Processor (PDF, 380kB)
By Martino Ruggiero, Michele Lombardi, Michela Milano, and Luca Benini, University of Bologna.
In: 11th EUROMICRO Conference on Digital System Design Architectures, Methods and Tools (DSD) 2008.