ANNUAL REPORT 2012

First year of the “CERES+” Phase
Following up on its six-year support of CERES in the form of
“profile funding”, The Knowledge Foundation in 2011 offered
CERES to qualify for two-year “profile+ funding” during 2012
and 2013. The goal of the new two-year period must be to
further develop the centre’s international research edge and its
international research network, while at the same time maintaining
its focus on industrially relevant research and industrial
collaborations.
Andreas Olofsson, Adapteva, giving a seminar about Epiphany
Manycore Architecture
CERES Research Focus in a Broader Context
Within the School of IDE, CERES is part of a larger, coordinated
research arena within information technology, covering
the entire spectrum from basic, enabling technologies to
end usage and business models, see Figure 1. The right-going
arrows can be understood as “enables” and the left-going as
“demands”. The core expertise of CERES is mainly used in
the two circles meeting in “systems solutions”. In projects performed
in cooperation with industry it is a great asset to CE-
RES to have access to this wide-ranging expertise.
Enabling
technologies
Systems
solutions
Applications
End usage and
business models
Figure 1. Embedded and intelligent systems research, ranging from
enabling technologies, via systems solutions and applications, to
business models.
Over the years, CERES has achieved strong national recognition
and is also attractive as an international partner, for example
in European research projects. In that light, CERES ambition
during the current two-year period is to further establish
itself as an internationally renowned research centre for cooperating
intelligent embedded systems, with a special tip of smart
cooperation and communication, and smart programming
and execution.
For smart cooperation and communication, research in realtime
communication is focusing on the efficiency of interaction
and communication in distributed systems in that it is
characterized by a cross-layer approach. Thus it does not address
the various “layers” of communication solutions in isolation,
but together (“cross-layer design,” or so-called multi-layer
synthesis), including also the application level. This results in
smarter, more tailored cooperating embedded systems that take
into consideration the conditions, application requirements
and limited resources.
For smart programming and execution, research on integrated
parallel computers (“manycores”) focuses on the effectiveness
of the programming and execution of the embedded systems.
Programming techniques appropriate for the application area
are developed, meaning that they should both be effective for
the application programmer and allow for adaptivity and smart
energy saving during execution. The latter requires cooperation
between language and architecture researchers on the one hand
and real-time researchers on the other.
CERES position as a leading actor in embedded systems has
attracted national cooperation in the ELLIIT consortium, consisting
of the universities in Linköping, Lund, Halmstad and
Blekinge. This consortium was selected by the Swedish Government
(in 2009) to achieve long-term extra funding of research
that is considered to be of particular strategic importance to
Sweden. Since 2010 CERES has been performing joint, strategic
research projects together with the other ELLIIT partners.
CERES is also active in international collaborations, the largest
and most important one being the EU Artemis project SMECY
(Smart Multicore Embedded Systems) which has 29 partners
from nine European countries. CERES is national coordinator
for the Swedish part of the consortium. Another positioning
on the international arena is in relation to the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Researchers
of CERES have become well-known for their expertise in
understanding the characteristics of different communication
standards when applied to inter-vehicle communication for
increased road traffic safety. These researchers have been contracted
by ETSI to be involved in the work towards future European
standards for vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
Ambric Software evaluation board, used by CERES researchers for
programming on multicore processors.
CERES Annual Report 2012
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