Abstract
This paper proposes a method to avoid using a CORDIC or external memory to process the steering vectors to calculate the pseudospectrum of correlation-based beamforming algorithms. We show that if we decompose the steering vector equation, the size of the matrix to be saved in memory becomes independent of the antenna array size. Besides, the amount of data needed is small enough to be saved in the internal block RAMs of the FPGA SoC. Besides, this method greatly reduces the number of memory accesses, by offloading some processing to hardware, while keeping the frequency at 300MHz with a precision of 0.25°. Finally, we show that this approach is scalable since the complexity grows logarithmically for bigger arrays, and the symmetry in the matrices obtained allows even more compact data. © 2024 IEEE.

Abstract
Decision trees are often preferred when implementing Machine Learning in embedded systems for their simplicity and scalability. Hoeffding Trees are a type of Decision Trees that take advantage of the Hoeffding Bound to allow them to learn patterns in data without having to continuously store the data samples for future reprocessing. This makes them especially suitable for deployment on embedded devices. In this work we highlight the features of a HLS implementation of the Hoeffding Tree. The implementation parameters include the feature size of the samples (D), the number of output classes (K), and the maximum number of nodes to which the tree is allowed to grow (Nd). We target a Xilinx MPSoC ZCU102, and evaluate: the design's resource requirements and clock frequency for different numbers of classes and feature size, the execution time on several synthetic datasets of varying sizes (N) and the execution time and accuracy for two datasets from UCI. For a problem size of D=3, K=5, and N=40000, a single decision tree operating at 103MHz is capable of 8.3x faster inference than the 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 core. Compared to a reference implementation of the Hoeffding tree, we achieve comparable classification accuracy for the UCI datasets.

Abstract
Heterogeneous platforms with FPGAs have started to be employed in the High-Performance Computing (HPC) field to improve performance and overall efficiency. These platforms allow the use of specialized hardware to accelerate software applications, but require the software to be adapted in what can be a prolonged and complex process. The main goal of this work is to describe and evaluate mechanisms that can transparently transfer the control flow between CPU and FPGA within the scope of HPC. Combining such a mechanism with transparent software profiling and accelerator configuration could lead to an automatic way of accelerating regular applications. In this work, a mechanism based on the ptrace system call is proposed, and its performance on the Intel Xeon+FPGA platform is evaluated. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by a working prototype that performs the transparent control flow transfer of any function call to a matching hardware accelerator. This approach is more general than shared library interposition at the cost of a small time overhead in each accelerator use (about 1.3 ms in the prototype implementation).

Abstract
As applications move to the edge, efficiency in computing power and power/energy consumption is required. Heterogeneous computing promises to meet these requirements through application-specific hardware accelerators. Runtime adaptivity might be of paramount importance to realize the potential of hardware specialization, but further study is required on workload retargeting and offloading to reconfigurable hardware. This article presents our framework for the exploration of both offloading and hardware generation techniques. The framework is currently able to process instruction sequences from MicroBlaze, ARMv8, and riscv32imaf binaries, and to represent them as Control and Dataflow Graphs for transformation to implementations of hardware modules. We illustrate the framework's capabilities for identifying binary sequences for hardware translation with a set of 13 benchmarks.

Abstract
The 2019/2020 school year will always be remembered for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in recent history, countries closed schools and forced instructors and students to quickly adjust to online classes. This sudden and forced shift to a method of teaching that was completely different from what we were used to presented several challenges and opportunities on a pedagogical level. In this paper we describe our experience as instructors in a course on microprocessor programming in the Master's Degree in Computer Science and Computing Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. Our approach included changes to the assessment plan, which became more distributed, and improvements in communication between students and instructors through the use of Slack. We found that the changes introduced were not only very well received by students, but also resulted in the best exam attendance and average final grade in the last 10 years of the course's history.