Category Archives: Embedded Systems

Minimal Metrics is hiring two interns to work on some exciting projects this summer. You will use your coding talent on cutting edge technologies alongside really sharp (and fun) people, and uniquely apply them to rapidly growing markets. Minimal Metrics has projects in retail analytics, media compression and web-data mining, in addition to our staple work in high performance computing (HPC) for a variety of top-tier customers. These positions are “generalists” – you will be responsible for developing a prototype; from specification modification to demonstration. As such, we’d rather you be good at a lot of things rather than great at only one or two. One of those things should be an eye for detail – you like elegance, simplicity and reusability in your designs. You’ll contribute to all aspects of the product development process while experiencing true startup culture. Please send a brief resume and a reference (academic advisor…

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Texas Instruments has renewed their contract with Minimal Metrics to deliver optimized numerical libraries for their next generation of high-performance microprocessors. The Keystone 2, is a revolutionary new product that integrates four cores of an ARM A15 with 8 cores of the  C6678 DSP on the same die. Offload to the DSPs can be accomplished either through the use of OpenCL or a subset of the OpenMP 4 specification, OpenMPACC. For this contract, Minimal Metrics will be providing optimized, hybrid, ARM+DSP-accelerated versions of the following libraries. These libraries are critical elements in the middleware of high-performance numerical simulations. FFTW – Fast Fourier transform BLAS/ATLAS – Vector/vector, matrix/vector and matrix/matrix arithmetic LAPACK – Dense library algebra LIBFLAME – Dense linear algebra Applications are accelerated using new versions of the libraries transparently, without requiring any changes to the source or object code. In this way, HPC applications ported to the ARM gain vast increases in performance by…

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Minimal Metrics has successful completed their work with Texas Instruments to deliver an optimized and complete BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) library. The BLAS are the building blocks of many high performance numerical algorithms – and are known as the keystone to high performance in scientific simulations. The Minimal Metrics team worked closely with the ATLAS group in order to provide a complete and optimized implementation much faster than could be coded by hand. The target platform for the work was the C6678 DSP, aka Keystone, an 8-core DSP with industry leading floating point performance per watt. This library will also be used for the Keystone 2, a revolutionary new product that integrates the ARM A15 CPU with 8 cores of the C6678. The DSP architecture is substantially different than coding for “traditional” RISC/CISC processors. The Keystone series provides a number of architectural features to enhance performance – including hardware-assisted software…

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What’s more expensive than designing a new handset, tablet or mobile device? Verification! With the design tools available today, even a small team can design a device like a smart-phone from a commodity off-the-shelf components. These aren’t physical components mind you, this is silicon IP or intellectual property, and it’s how tremendously successful companies like ARM, Marvell and others sell their technology to Apple, Samsung and LG without ever physically building anything. With today’s tools, you can design the system the same way you might design a flow-chart in Power-point, drag and drop, plug and play… A little LCD screen here, a wireless radio there, memory-controller, flash card, keypad and of course a CPU. But how does one know this system is going to work? The entire system needs to be verified – and the only way to do that is to run it. This isn’t a logical (or functional…

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Minimal Metrics has teamed up with the authors of ATLAS to bring their ultra high performance implementation of the BLAS or Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines to Texas Instruments‘ next-generation, multi-core, digital signal processing (DSP) platform. BLAS is used throughout the industry to achieve performance on a number of low-level matrix and vector operations. It is best known as the building block of LAPACK; a programming library invented by Dr. Jack Dongarra in the 70’s to solve problems consisting of simultaneous systems of linear equations. Solving such systems are at the core of many uses of high performance computers today, whether it be in the simulation sciences like weather forecasting, aircraft design or car crash simulation or web technologies such as data mining, web analytics and natural language processing. Ti’s new generation of processors, beginning with the 8-core C6678, a.k.a “Shannon” raise the bar on the performance per-watt for both integer…

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