Chip-to-Cloud: an Autonomous and Energy Efficient Platform for Smart Vision Applications
A. Sciontia, S. Cicciab, O. Terzoc and G. Giordanengod
Istituto Superiore Mario Boella (ISMB) Torino, Italy
ascionti@ismb.it
bciccia@ismb.it
cterzo@ismb.it
dgiordanengo@ismb.it
ABSTRACT
Modern Cloud architectures encompass computing and communication elements that span from traditional data center computing nodes (offering almost infinite resources to satisfy any application demands) to edge-computing and IoT devices (to sense and act on the real world). This paper presents the Cloud architecture devised within the OPERA project [1], which provides new levels of energy efficiency as a full chipto- Cloud solution. Focusing on a smart vision application (i.e., road traffic monitoring), the paper presents novel architectural solutions optimised to achieve high energy efficiency at any level: i) the computing elements supporting the acceleration of Stateof- the-Art CNNs; and ii) an innovative wireless communication subsystem. Unlike conventional designs, our wireless communication subsystem exploits the advantages of software defined radio (SDN) firmware to control a reconfigurable antenna. To further extend the application range, an energy harvesting module is used to supply power. Besides the edge-IoT, high-density accelerated servers offer capabilities of running complex algorithms within a small power envelop. The effectiveness of the whole architecture has been tested in a real context (i.e., 2 installation sites). In-field measurements demonstrate our claim: high-performance coupled with high energy efficiency over the whole system.
Keywords: Cyber-physical systems, Hardware acceleration, Wireless communication
