“Signal Processing in the AI era” was the tagline of this year’s IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, taking place in Rhodes, Greece.
In this context, Brent de Weerdt, Xiangyu Yang, Boris Joukovsky, Alex Stergiou and Nikos Deligiannis presented ETRO’s research during poster sessions and oral presentations, with novel ways to process and understand graph, video, and audio data. Nikos Deligiannis chaired a session on Graph Deep Learning, attended the IEEE T-IP Editorial Board Meeting, and had the opportunity to meet with collaborators from the VUB-Duke-Ugent-UCL joint lab.
Featured articles:
- De Weerdt, B. et al., “Designing Transformer Networks for Sparse Recovery of Sequential Data Using Deep Unfolding” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10094712)
- Yang X. et al., “Relevance Propagation through Deep Conditional Random Fields” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10095075)
- Stergiou A. et al., “Play it back: Iterative attention for audio recognition” (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10096532, developed at the University of Bristol)
On Monday September 19, Prof. Nikos Deligiannis, Prof. Bruno Da Silva and Prof. Bart Jansen gave a warm welcome to the new generation of MACS students. We expect 50+ new students in the first master year.
– The language of the programme is English, and the requirements are described here: http://www.vub.ac.be/en/study/applied-sciences-and-engineering-applied-computer-science#admission-criteria;
– If cannot provide a proof of sufficient knowledge of English, then, after the positive evaluation of your academic background and all other criteria to follow the program are met, through an interview the professors will also assess your level of English and a final decision will be taken.
Remote editing with VS Code
Visual Studio Code is a widely-used, cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports numerous programming languages and offers a vast array of extensions to enhance its functionality.
One notable extension enables development on remote machines via SSH, providing integrated access to a file explorer, terminal, and text editor on the configured remote system. This makes it a strong alternative to JupyterLab as a remote editor for e.g., the ETROFARM Slurm cluster.
Configuring Visual Studio Code extensions for working on ETROFARM Slurm cluster
Open the Extensions tab using the corresponding icon in the left toolbar.
Search for “SSH” and subsequently select the topmost “Remote – SSH” extension. Install this extension.
Depending on your programming language of choice, you might also be interested in extensions such as “Python”, “Python Debugger”, “Ruff” (a Python code linter) etc.
With the “Remote – SSH” extension installed, a new tab “Remote explorer” has been added to the left toolbar.
Add a new remote by pressing the + icon.
When asked for the SSH Connection Command:
ssh <username>@etroflock.etrovub.be
Secondly, it will ask where to store this information. This can be the default option.
The etroflock.etrovub.be remote has been created. Time to connect by triggering one of the 2 corresponding buttons.
During a brief instant the option will be displayed to edit the configuration. If you have missed it you can find this file via the gear button next to remote explorer – remote tunnels – ssh
Your config file should look like
Host etroflock.etrovub.be HostName etroflock.etrovub.be User jdoe IdentityFile C:\users\jdoe\.ssh\id_rsaIf you have no experience with encryption you can e.g. use a rsa 2048 type of key. Please make sure you are using a private key in openssh format.
Upon our first connection attempt, it requests the platform of the remote host, being the Slurm cluster’s login node we are connecting to. This is a Linux machine.
It will also ask to confirm the SSH public key credential of the server.
We are now connected to the remote server. This can be seen in the Remote explorer tab as well as in the left corner of the bottom toolbar.
Configuring the file explorer and text editor on the remote system
Time to open our file explorer via the “Explorer” tab in the left toolbar (Ctrl + Shift + E). Press the “Open Folder” button. It should by default suggest to open your home folder on the Slurm cluster (currently on /FARM/<username>).
If prompted, confirm that the remote server is (again) a Linux platform. Lastly, confirm that you trust the authors of the files in this folder as this is your own home folder.
Congratulations! Your remote file explorer and text editor on the Slurm cluster is now operational.
Remote terminal and running code on the remote system
A remote terminal can be opened using Terminal -> New Terminal in the top toolbar, or via the Ctrl + Shift + ` shortcut.
An interactive terminal session is opened on the remote host as if it was a PuTTY (or other) SSH session.
Running code remotely with VScode (ideally on Slurm compute nodes)
With the remote file explorer, remote text editor and remote terminal sessions available, it is a logical next step to focus on running our code remotely on the machine. Luckily, this is typically as straightforward as pressing the “Run file” button on the active (Python) file.
We can observe that the code has indeed been executed on the remote machine. However, the configured remote machine is ETROflock, ETRO’s Slurm cluster’s login server that is scarce in compute resources and lacks and GPU’s.
Running our code on a Slurm compute node is more complicated as it involves requesting a Slurm job. This is currently a manual process but we are investigating if this can be automated in VScode by using a custom launch script.
For now, there are two possibilities to run code on the Slurm cluster from within VScode:
A Slurm job can be requested that immediately runs the code until completion (or an error or timeout). This is the recommended default approach for running Slurm jobs.
E.g. the same test.py code is run as a Slurm job by using the srun command.
We observe that the first command is run on ETROFLOCK (the Slurm login node) because that is immediately launched on the remote system. The second command is scheduled as a Slurm job and is run on ETROFARM (a Slurm compute node).
The second possibility involves starting a Slurm job with an interactive shell. Once this interactive shell is running on a compute node, we can manually launch the desired code within that shell. This solution might be preferred when developing and testing the functionality of the code as a Slurm job (and potential queue) must only be requested once per session.
Launching a Slurm job with interactive shell is possible using the following srun command parameters:
srun –pty bash -i
E.g. the same test.py code is run after an interactive shell has been requested using the srun command and has started.
Observe that after requesting the slurm job with interactive terminal we change from “steffen@ETROFLOCK” to “steffen@ETROFARM”. This indicates our interactive shell is indeed running on a compute node instead of the login node.
Executing the test.py script from within this shell again confirms that the code is indeed run on the compute node with hostname ETROFARM.
When finished, one should use the “exit” command. This closes the interactive shell and terminates the Slurm job, thereby releasing the allocated resources for new jobs.
On May 9 2022 at 14.00 Zhiwei Zong will defend his PhD entitled “DESIGN OF VCOs AND PAs IN 22 NM FD-SOI FOR 5G MM-WAVE COMMUNICATIONS”.
Everybody is invited to attend the presentation online via this TEAMS link.
The use of spectrum in the millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) frequency range is considered as a key enabler to continue the insatiable demand for increased wireless data capacity. This spectrum will be adopted in the 5G wireless communication standard. To obtain a high integration degree for the implementation of 5G mm-Wave transceivers, advanced CMOS is the preferred technology. The higher operating frequency, compared to 4G, poses more design challenges on the key building blocks of a transceiver. This PhD thesis focuses on the design of the two key building blocks in a 5G mm-Wave transceiver, namely a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) and a power amplifier (PA). All building blocks designed in this PhD work are operating in the 20-30 GHz frequency region. All building blocks have been designed in a 22nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) CMOS technology.
First, a modified transformer-feedback VCO (TF-VCO) with a sourcebridging capacitor (Cs) is introduced. Thanks to the use of Cs, the phase noise (PN) in the 1/f2 and 1/f3 regions are both improved compared to earlier published TF-VCOs. The origin of the PN improvement by the use Cs is explained in this thesis. It is seen that with Cs we can improve the symmetry of the waveform of the voltage over the tank of the VCO. Also, with Cs the effective quality factor of the transformer can be increased, which also reduces phase noise. These theoretical investigations are proven with measurement results. With a second design, an LC-VCO design, another key design challenge is tackled, namely the suppression of flicker noise upconversion. A 22-29GHz voltage-biased LC-VCO is designed and implemented to suppress this flicker noise upconversion by using a flicker noise filtering technique. A self-coupled inductor and a common-centroid capacitor bank layout are proposed in this design to guarantee a good flicker noise suppression over the frequency tuning range.
Next, two 28GHz PAs are designed and implemented for 5G mm-Wave communications. The first PA focuses on generation of a high output power (Pout) with a high linearity. This is achieved in a first design that uses a two-way current combiner and an output stage that uses stacking of transistors. The stack of three transistors used in this design enables the generation of a high output power without overstressing the core devices. The second PA focuses on the power back-off (PBO) efficiency enhancement. This is important for communication with a high spectral efficiency: high-order modulation requires to operate at a relatively large back-off from the saturation level. The design is based on the Doherty architecture. By merging lumped passive components into a transformer, a transformer-based Doherty PA with a compact power combiner is obtained, achieving Doherty load modulation with a compact footprint. This design has the highest power density and ITRS PA figure-of-merit (FOM) among the published mm-wave Doherty PAs.
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Happy kids visited the ETRO Build your climate-proof LEGO city boot at CurieuCity and it was also broadcasted on Bruzz tv this weekend.
https://curieucity.brussels/nl/build-your-climate-resistant-city-of-the-future/
