Emerging web applications like cloud computing, Big Data and social networks have created the need for powerful centres hosting hundreds of thousands of servers. Currently, the data centres are based on general purpose processors that provide high flexibility buts lack the energy efficiency of customized accelerators. VINEYARD aims to develop an integrated platform for energy-efficient data centres based on new servers with novel, coarse-grain and fine-grain, programmable hardware accelerators. It will, also, build a high-level programming framework for allowing end-users to seamlessly utilize these accelerators in heterogeneous computing systems by employing typical data-centre programming frameworks (e.g. MapReduce, Storm, Spark, etc.). This programming framework will, further, allow the hardware accelerators to be swapped in and out of the heterogeneous infrastructure so as to offer high flexibility and energy efficiency. VINEYARD will foster the expansion of the soft-IP core industry, currently limited in the embedded systems, to the data-centre market. VINEYARD plans to demonstrate the advantages of its approach in three real use-cases (a) a bio-informatics application for high-accuracy brain modeling, (b) two critical financial applications, and (c) a big-data analysis application.@en

Emerging applications like cloud computing and big data analytics have created the need for powerful centers hosting hundreds of thousands of servers. Currently, the data centers are based on general purpose processors that provide high flexibility but lacks the energy efficiency of customized accelerators. VINEYARD1 aims to develop novel servers based on programmable hardware accelerators. Furthermore, VINEYARD will develop an integrated framework for allowing end-users to seamlessly utilize these accelerators in heterogeneous computing systems by using typical data-center programming frameworks (i.e. Spark). VINEYARD will foster the expansion of the soft-IP cores industry, currently limited in the embedded systems, to the data center market. VINEYARD plans to demonstrate the advantages of its approach in three real use-cases a) a bio-informatics application for high-accuracy brain modeling, b) two critical financial applications and c) a big-data analysis application.@en

EUROSERVER is a collaborative project that aims to dramatically improve data centre energy-efficiency, cost, and software efficiency. It is addressing these important challenges through the coordinated application of several key recent innovations: 64-bit ARM cores, 3D heterogeneous silicon-on-silicon integration, and fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD SOI) process technology, together with new software techniques for efficient resource management, including resource sharing and workload isolation. We are pioneering a system architecture approach that allows specialized silicon devices to be built even for low-volume markets where NRE costs are currently prohibitive. The EUROSERVER device will embed multiple silicon 'chiplets' on an active silicon interposer. Its system architecture is being driven by requirements from three use cases: data centres and cloud computing, telecom infrastructures, and high-end embedded systems. We will build two fully integrated full-system prototypes, based on a common micro-server board, and targeting embedded servers and enterprise servers.@en

State of the art kernel diagnostic tools like DTrace and Systemtap provide a procedural interface for expressing analysis tasks. We argue that a relational interface to kernel data structures can offer complementary benefits for kernel diagnostics. This work contributes a method and an implementation for mapping a kernel's data structures to a relational interface. The Pico COllections Query Library (PiCO QL) Linux kernel module uses a domain specific language to define a relational representation of accessible Linux kernel data structures, a parser to analyze the definitions, and a compiler to implement an SQL interface to the data structures. It then evaluates queries written in SQL against the kernel's data structures. PiCO QL queries are interactive and type safe. Unlike SystemTap and DTrace, PiCO QL is less intrusive because it does not require kernel instrumentation; instead it hooks to existing kernel data structures through the module's source code. PiCO QL imposes no overhead when idle and needs only access to the kernel data structures that contain relevant information for answering the input queries. We demonstrate PiCO QL's usefulness by presenting Linux kernel queries that provide meaningful custom views of system resources and pinpoint issues, such as security vulnerabilities and performance problems.@en