Recent improvements in energy efficiency and renewable energy integration have increased the relative importance of embodied carbon in data centers, motivating improved provisioning strategies. Conventional approaches primarily minimize operational energy, but this perspective is increasingly insufficient for sustainability. In this paper, we propose carbon depreciation models to encourage longer hardware lifetimes. Carbon depreciation assigns a larger portion of embodied carbon to newly provisioned servers, discouraging unnecessary deployment of new hardware. As a result, new servers are provisioned mainly for jobs with strict quality-of-service (QoS) constraints, while older servers, whose embodied carbon has largely been recovered, are used for other workloads. We further argue that both embodied carbon and operational carbon from server idle time should be recovered during active jobs, encouraging provisioning strategies that maintain high utilization. We show that prior carbon accounting strategies can be counterproductive: under a greedy scheduler minimizing carbon under QoS constraints, jobs are priced as 25% cheaper on new hardware than on older hardware. In contrast, our approach uses a greedy scheduler that prioritizes older hardware through non-linear carbon depreciation, promoting sustainable provisioning. Experimental results show carbon reductions of 28–57%, depending on server lifetime assumptions.

Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) increasingly rely on diverse deep neural networks to support perception, prediction, planning, and control under strict real-time constraints. FPGA-based heterogeneous computing provides an attractive platform for DNN workloads, but it raises a fundamental deployment question: should the system rely on a flexible overlay architecture, or repeatedly load customized bitstreams optimized for dedicated models, which should be treated as a first-class systems problem rather than a purely architectural one? Overlay-based execution offers fast model switching and better adaptability relying on lightweight instruction or parameter updates, while customized architectures can provide higher model-wise efficiency at the cost of reconfiguration latency and reduced flexibility. However, the boundary between these two design choices remains unclear in realistic ADS scenarios. In this work, we present a systematic study of this trade-off from a deployment-centric perspective, focusing on an autonomous driving scenario. Instead of treating overlay and customized acceleration as isolated design points, we analyze when each approach is preferable under practical conditions, including workload variation, architectural design, reconfiguration latency, and switching frequency. Our analysis shows that overlay-based architecture is more suitable for highly frequent model switching under the state-of-the-art architecture. However, as bitstream reload overhead continues to reduce, customized architectures may become increasingly attractive, especially for workloads with efficiency requirements. Conversely, if overlay architectures become more capable and flexible, they may further expand their advantage over customized architectures. These observations provide design insights for future architectural design, and the optimal deployment strategy will be flipped according to the technique development.

Spatially partitioned heterogeneous accelerators (HAs) are increasingly adopted in embedded systems for their performance and flexibility. Yet most existing HA design frameworks optimize primarily for throughput or quality-of-service (QoS) metrics. They often overlook safety-critical real-time requirements, including hardware support for predictable execution, real-time-aware design space exploration (DSE), and rigorous schedulability analysis. These requirements are essential in safety-critical applications such as smart transportation, where schedulability guarantees directly affect system safety. To address this gap, we present PHAROS, a real-time-centric HA design framework. PHAROS introduces preemption mechanisms and scheduler designs for spatially partitioned HAs under first-in-first-out (FIFO) and earliest-deadline-first (EDF) policies. Leveraging modern real-time theory, we further develop a soft real-time (SRT) schedulability-oriented DSE with objectives and constraints tailored to SRT schedulability. Through comprehensive modeling, analysis, and evaluation across diverse applications, we show that PHAROS’s schedulability-oriented DSE discovers more feasible configurations for a broader range of task sets than throughput-oriented DSE baselines, while delivering improved real-time performance. We also provide response-time analyses for the supported scheduling algorithms.

With the development of deep neural network (DNN) enabled applications, achieving high hardware resource efficiency on diverse workloads is non-trivial in heterogeneous computing platforms. Prior works discuss dedicated architectures to achieve maximal resource efficiency. However, a mismatch between hardware and workloads always exists in various diverse workloads. Other works discuss overlay architecture that can dynamically switch dataflow for different workloads. However, these works are still limited by flexibility granularity and induce much resource inefficiency.

To solve this problem, we propose a flexible composing architecture, FILCO, that can efficiently match diverse workloads to achieve the optimal storage and computation resource efficiency. FILCO can be reconfigured in real-time and flexibly composed into a unified or multiple independent accelerators. We also propose the FILCO framework, including an analytical model with a two-stage DSE that can achieve the optimal design point. We also evaluate the FILCO framework on the 7nm AMD Versal VCK190 board. Compared with prior works, our design can achieve 1.3x∼5x throughput and hardware efficiency on various diverse workloads.

This article examines key challenges in computing systems research under the emerging paradigm of Physical Intelligence on the Edge (PIE), in which raw sensor streams are transformed into real-time, safety-critical intelligence that can act in the physical world. It traces the evolution of computing architectures from centralized systems to distributed systems and edge computing, and argues that PIE constitutes a qualitative shift: the edge becomes the primary platform for tightly integrating sensing, reasoning, and actuation under stringent real-time constraints. The article identifies five emerging research thrusts—embodied spatial reasoning, embodied temporal reasoning, edge-native customization, symbiosis, and sustainability. Using a hypothetical PIE scenario, it exposes a fundamental gap between the capabilities of current systems and the requirements of future PIE-enabled autonomy: while today’s edge platforms can execute individual components of perception and inference, they remain unable to autonomously close the sense-think-act loop with certifiable guarantees on timing and safety. This vision is further substantiated by recent industrial progress, including several compelling demonstrations showcased at CES 2026 by leading companies such as NVIDIA and AMD. The article concludes by calling for a paradigm shift in systems thinking—from efficiently transporting and processing data (bits) to predictably and safely influencing the physical world (atoms)—thereby positioning edge-native system design as a foundational enabler of next-generation autonomous and robotic systems.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become essential for com- putationally intensive applications. However, emerging workloads such as recommender systems, graph analytics, and data analytics often involve processing data exceeding GPU device memory capacity. To mitigate this issue, existing solutions enable GPUs to use CPU DRAM or SSDs as external memory. Among them, the GPU-centric approach lets GPU threads directly initiate NVMe requests, eliminating CPU intervention overhead over traditional methods. However, the SOTA GPU-centric approach adopts a synchronous IO model, and threads must tolerate the long latency in communication before starting any tasks.

In this work, we propose AGILE, a lightweight and efficient asynchronous library allowing GPU threads to access SSDs asynchronously while eliminating deadlock risks. AGILE also integrates a flexible software cache using GPU High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). We demonstrate that the asynchronous GPU-centric IO achieves up to 1.88× improvement in workloads with different computation-to-communication (CTC) ratios. We also compare AGILE with the SOTA work BaM on Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM) with various settings, and the results show that AGILE achieves 1.75× performance improvement due to its efficient design and the overlapping strategy enabled by an asynchronous IO model. We further evaluate AGILE’s API overhead on graph applications, and the results demonstrate AGILE reduces software cache overhead by up to 3.12× and overhead in NVMe IO requests by up to 2.85×. Compared with BaM, AGILE consumes fewer registers and exhibits up to 1.32× reduction in the usage of registers.

Real-time systems are widely applied in different areas like autonomous vehicles, where safety is the key metric. However, on the FPGA platform, most of the prior accelerator frameworks omit discussing the schedulability in such real-time safety-critical systems, leaving deadlines unmet, which can lead to catastrophic system failures. To address this, we propose the ART framework, a hardware-software co-design approach that transforms baseline accelerators into real-time guaranteed accelerators. On the software side, ART performs schedulability analysis and preemption point placement, optimizing task scheduling to meet deadlines and enhance throughput. On the hardware side, ART integrates the Global Earliest Deadline First (GEDF) scheduling algorithm, implements preemption, and conducts source code transformation to transform baseline HLS-based accelerators into designs targeted for real-time systems capable of saving and resuming tasks. ART also includes integration, debugging, and testing tools for full-system implementation. We demonstrate the methodology of ART on two kinds of popular accelerator models and evaluate on AMD Versal VCK190 platform, where ART meets schedulability requirements that baseline accelerators fail. ART is lightweight, utilizing <0.5% resources. With about 100 lines of user input, ART generates about 2.5k lines of accelerator code, making it a push-button solution.

Dense matrix multiply (MM) serves as one of the most heavily used kernels in deep learning applications. To cope with the high computation demands of these applications, heterogeneous architectures featuring both FPGA and dedicated ASIC accelerators have emerged as promising platforms. For example, the AMD/Xilinx Versal ACAP architecture combines general-purpose CPU cores and programmable logic (PL) with AI Engine processors (AIE) optimized for AI/ML. An array of 400 AI Engine processors executing at 1 GHz can theoretically provide up to 6.4 TFLOPs performance for 32-bit floating-point (fp32) data. However, machine learning models often contain both large and small MM operations. While large MM operations can be parallelized efficiently across many cores, small MM operations typically cannot. In our investigation, we observe that executing some small MM layers from the BERT natural language processing model on a large, monolithic MM accelerator in Versal ACAP achieved less than 5% of the theoretical peak performance. Therefore, one key question arises, how can we design accelerators to fully use the abundant computation resources under limited communication bandwidth for end-to-end applications with multiple MM layers of diverse sizes? We identify the biggest system throughput bottleneck resulting from the mismatch of massive computation resources of one monolithic accelerator and the various MM layers of small sizes in the application. To resolve this problem, we propose the CHARM framework to compose multiple diverse MM accelerator architectures working concurrently towards different layers within one application. CHARM includes analytical models which guide design space exploration to determine accelerator partitions and layer scheduling. To facilitate the system designs, CHARM automatically generates code, enabling thorough onboard design verification. We deploy the CHARM framework for four different deep learning applications, including BERT, ViT, NCF, MLP, on the AMD/Xilinx Versal ACAP VCK190 evaluation board. Our experiments show that we achieve 1.46 TFLOPs, 1.61 TFLOPs, 1.74 TFLOPs, and 2.94 TFLOPs inference throughput for BERT, ViT, NCF, MLP, respectively, which obtain 5.40x, 32.51x, 1.00x and 1.00x throughput gains compared to one monolithic accelerator.

The complex nature of real-world problems calls for heterogeneity in both machine learning (ML) models and hardware systems. For the algorithm, the heterogeneity in ML models comes from the multi-sensor perceiving and multi-task learning, i.e., multi-modality multi-task (MMMT) models, resulting in diverse deep neural net- work (DNN) layers and computation patterns. For the system, it becomes prevailing to integrate dedicated acceleration components into one system. It thus introduces a new problem, heterogeneous model to heterogeneous system mapping (H2H), in which both computation and communication efficiency need to be considered. While previous mapping algorithms only focus on computation patterns, in this work, we propose a novel mapping algorithm with both computation and communication awareness. By slightly sacrificing computation efficiency, the communication latency is largely reduced. Therefore, the system overall performance is improved and energy is also reduced. The superior performance of our work is evaluated on MAESTRO, achieving 15%-74% latency improvement and 23%-64% energy reduction when compared with the existing computation-prioritized mapping algorithm.

FPGAs have been widely deployed in public clouds, e.g., Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Huawei Cloud. However, simply offloading accelerated kernels from CPU hosts to PCIe-based FPGAs does not guarantee out-of-pocket cost savings in a pay-as-you-go public cloud. Taking Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) applications as case studies, although the adoption of FPGAs reduces the overall execution time, it introduces 2.56× extra cost, due to insufficient application-level speedup by Amdahl’s law. To optimize the out-of-pocket cost while keeping high speedup and throughput, we propose Mocha framework as a distributed runtime system to fully utilize the accelerator resource by accelerator sharing and CPU-FPGA partial task offloading. Evaluation results on HaplotypeCaller (HTC) and Mutect2 in GATK show that on AWS, Mocha saves on the application cost by 2.82x for HTC, 1.06x for Mutect2 and on Huawei Cloud by 1.22x, 1.52x respectively than straightforward CPU-FPGA integration solution with less than 5.1% performance overhead.