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With their potential to significantly reduce traffic accidents, enhance road safety, optimize traffic flow, and decrease congestion, autonomous driving systems are a major focus of research and development in recent years. Beyond these immediate benefits, they offer long-term advantages in promoting sustainable transportation by reducing emissions and fuel consumption. Achieving a high level of autonomy across diverse conditions requires a comprehensive understanding of the environment. This is accomplished by processing data from sensors such as cameras, radars, and LiDARs through a software stack that relies heavily on machine learning algorithms. These ML models demand significant computational resources and involve large-scale data movement, presenting challenges for hardware to execute them efficiently and at high speed. In this survey, we first outline and highlight the key components of self-driving systems, covering input sensors, commonly used datasets, simulation platforms, and the software architecture. We then explore the underlying hardware platforms that support the execution of these software systems. By presenting a comprehensive view of autonomous driving systems and their increasing demands, particularly for higher levels of autonomy, we analyze the performance and efficiency of scaled-up off-the-shelf GPU/CPU-based systems, emphasizing the challenges within the computational components. Through examples showcasing the diverse computational and memory requirements in the software stack, we demonstrate how more specialized hardware and processing closer to memory can enable more efficient execution with lower latency. Finally, based on current trends and future demands, we conclude by speculating what a future hardware platform for autonomous driving might look like.

Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize multiple fields by solving complex problems that can not be solved in reasonable time with current classical computers. Nevertheless, the development of quantum computers is still in its early stages and the available systems have still very limited resources. As such, currently, the most practical way to develop and test quantum algorithms is to use classical simulators of quantum computers. In addition, the development of new quantum computers and their components also depends on simulations. Given the characteristics of a quantum computer, their simulation is a very demanding application in terms of both computation and memory. As such, simulations do not scale well in current classical systems. Thus different optimization and approximation techniques need to be applied at different levels. This review provides an overview of the components of a quantum computer, the levels at which these components and the whole quantum computer can be simulated, and an in-depth analysis of different state-of-the-art acceleration approaches. Besides the optimizations that can be performed at the algorithmic level, this review presents the most promising hardware-aware optimizations and future directions that can be explored for improving the performance and scalability of the simulations.

Depthwise and pointwise convolutions have fewer parameters and perform fewer operations than standard convolutions. As a result, they have become increasingly used in various compact DNNs, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs). However, they have a lower compute-to-memory-access ratio than standard convolutions, making their memory accesses often the performance bottleneck. This paper explores fusing depthwise and pointwise convolutions to overcome the memory access bottleneck. The focus is on fusing these operators on GPUs. The prior art on GPU-based fusion suffers from one or more of the following: (1) fusing either a convolution with an element-wise or multiple non-convolutional operators, (2) not explicitly optimizing for memory accesses, (3) not supporting depthwise convolutions. This paper proposes Fused Convolutional Modules (FCMs), a set of novel fused depthwise and pointwise GPU kernels. FCMs significantly reduce pointwise and depthwise convolutions memory accesses, improving execution time and energy efficiency. To evaluate the trade-offs associated with fusion and determine which convolutions are beneficial to fuse and the optimal FCM parameters, we propose FusePlanner. FusePlanner consists of cost models to estimate the memory accesses of depthwise, pointwise, and FCM kernels given GPU characteristics. Our experiments on three GPUs using representative CNNs and ViTs demonstrate that FCMs save up to 83\% of the memory accesses and achieve speedups of up to 3.7x compared to cuDNN. Complete model implementations of various CNNs using our modules outperform TVMs' achieving speedups of up to 1.8x and saving up to two-thirds of the energy. FCM and FusePlanner implementations are open source: https://github.com/fqararyah/Fusing_DW_and_PW_on_GPUs.

The VEDLIoT project aims to develop energy-efficient Deep Learning methodologies for distributed Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) applications. During our project, we propose a holistic approach that focuses on optimizing algorithms while addressing safety and security challenges inherent to AIoT systems. The foundation of this approach lies in a modular and scalable cognitive IoT hardware platform, which leverages microserver technology to enable users to configure the hardware to meet the requirements of a diverse array of applications. Heterogeneous computing is used to boost performance and energy efficiency. In addition, the full spectrum of hardware accelerators is integrated, providing specialized ASICs as well as FPGAs for reconfigurable computing. The project's contributions span across trusted computing, remote attestation, and secure execution environments, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the design and deployment of robust and efficient AIoT systems. The overall architecture is validated on use-cases ranging from Smart Home to Automotive and Industrial IoT appliances. Ten additional use cases are integrated via an open call, broadening the range of application areas., Comment: This publication incorporates results from the VEDLIoT project, which received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 957197. CF'23: 20th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, May 2023, Bologna, Italy

Image captioning by the encoder-decoder framework has shown tremendous advancement in the last decade where CNN is mainly used as encoder and LSTM is used as a decoder. Despite such an impressive achievement in terms of accuracy in simple images, it lacks in terms of time complexity and space complexity efficiency. In addition to this, in case of complex images with a lot of information and objects, the performance of this CNN-LSTM pair downgraded exponentially due to the lack of semantic understanding of the scenes presented in the images. Thus, to take these issues into consideration, we present CNN-GRU encoder decode framework for caption-to-image reconstructor to handle the semantic context into consideration as well as the time complexity. By taking the hidden states of the decoder into consideration, the input image and its similar semantic representations is reconstructed and reconstruction scores from a semantic reconstructor are used in conjunction with likelihood during model training to assess the quality of the generated caption. As a result, the decoder receives improved semantic information, enhancing the caption production process. During model testing, combining the reconstruction score and the log-likelihood is also feasible to choose the most appropriate caption. The suggested model outperforms the state-of-the-art LSTM-A5 model for picture captioning in terms of time complexity and accuracy.