Norihiro Fujii

A New Remote Laboratory for Hardware Experiment with Shared Resources and Service Management

A new remote laboratory system for hardware experiment has been developed. It employs shared resources and enhanced service management scheme based on the Web services. Wide spread use of the Internet and broadband remote network access capability to the home, motivated us to develop a seamless remote and actual hardware laboratory for hardware design laboratory course. The combinatorial use of FPGA/PC connected test hardware and PC-based measurement equipments such as logic analyzer or pattern generator has make it possible to develop a remote multi-user time-sharing hardware experiment system, where students can perform actual experiments using actual hardware equipments and tools concurrently. The Web-services-based course material distribution, course guidance and report collection system are also developed to realize the remote-laboratory self e-learning system

A time-sharing remote laboratory for hardware design and experiment with shared resources and service management

A new remote laboratory system for learning hardware designs and experiment of digital circuits has been developed. Wide use of the Internet motivated us to develop seamless remote and actual hardware laboratories for hardware design laboratory course. Unlike existing virtual laboratories, the proposed remote laboratory utilizes actual hardware and actual measurement tools in a time sharing fashion. Hardware experimental environment is usually treated as an exclusive resource, for single user usage. However, the actual test run time is rather short and most of the time is wasted leaving those precious resources idle. To make those resources operate more efficiently, it employs shared resources and enhanced service management scheme based on the Web services. It finds an available service site and schedules the executable processing. The combinatorial use of FPGA/PC connected test hardware and PC based measurement equipments such as logic analyzer or pattern generator has make it possible to develop a remote multi-user time sharing hardware experiment system, where students at remote sites can perform actual experiments using actual hardware equipments and tools concurrently. As all students are equipped with high performance laptop PCs, CPU intensive tasks such as development of the digital circuits for FPGA can be off-loaded from the server host and can be performed by each students client PC. A floating license scheme allows students through the Internet to utilize commercial FPGA development tools. Thus, we created virtual private network to access the floating license server over firewalls. Such a rich client configuration allows the server to concentrate on the service management tasks, such as hardware resource managements. The prototype system is scheduled to be used for the third grade CS students from year 2005.

A new elearning system integrating a top-down elearning and new virtual remote laboratory environments for logic circuit design

A new distance learning system, integrating a top-down design support system and a multi-user/multi-test-bed remote laboratory system for digital circuit hardware design and implementation course, is realized. The proposed system employs the hardware description language (VerilogHDL) for the design database and FPGAs for design implementation test-beds. Students using this remote laboratory system at remote sites can perform actual hardware experiments in parallel. It realized a remote multi-user time-sharing hardware experiment system. It has achieved seamless remotes and actual hardware laboratories, which resolve conflicts among users, when many users request the same services at the same time. The top-down design support system guides students to complete projects. The course material database is organized in the form of a design-module-cell hierarchy tree, where each design-module-cell contains a sample circuit design, described in VerilogHDL. The use of XML wrapped VerilogHDL descriptions and specially extended XML vocabularies contributed to share designed modules among students and teachers as well across the Internet via the Web. The prototype of the distance learning system, integrating both the digital circuit design support system using top-down approach and the multi-user remote laboratory system for running experiment of digital circuit, has been developed. It has achieved an effective and efficient distance learning system.

Work in progress - a new time-sharing remote laboratory e-learning system for hardware design and experiment of digital circuits

A new remote laboratory system for learning hardware design and experiment of digital circuit has been developed. It employs shared resources and an e-learning system based on the top-down method specializing in the logic circuit design and featuring a quick acquisition of the hardware-description-language-based design skill. The wide use of the Internet motivated us to develop seamless remote and actual hardware laboratories for hardware design laboratory course, and for students to learn the digital circuit design by themselves. The proposed remote laboratory utilizes actual hardware and actual measurement tools in a time-sharing fashion. The combinatorial use of FPGA/PC connected test hardware and PC-based measurement equipments has made it possible to develop a remote multi-user and time-sharing hardware experiment system. As all students are equipped with high-performance Laptop PCs, CPU intensive development tasks can be performed by each students client PC in a rich-client environment. The prototype the remote-laboratory and self e-learning system are under-construction, and will be used for the third grade CS students from year 2005

An E-Learning System Based on the Top Down Method and the Cellular Models

As the broadband connectivity to the Internet becomes common, Web based e-learning and distance learning have come to play the central roles for self-learning, where learners are given much flexibility in choosing place and time to study. However, the learners still have to spend a lot of time before reaching the learning goal. This discourages the learners from continuing their studies and diminishes their motivation. To overcome this problem and to let the learners keep focusing on their primary interests, we propose a top-down e-learning system called TDeLS. The TDeLS can offer learners the learning materials based on the top-down (i.e., goal-oriented) method, according to the learners’ demands and purposes. Moreover, the TDeLS can distribute them to the learners through the Internet, and manage the database for learning materials. In order to share learning materials among learners through the Web, these learning materials are wrapped in XML with a specially designed vocabulary for TDeLS. We employed the cellular models that ensure the consistency among design modules and support a top-down design methodology. In this paper, we present the TDeLS for hardware logic design courses based on the cellular models. The primary goal is to design complex logic circuits in VerilogHDL, which is an industrial-standard hardware description language. This paper also presents the basic XML vocabulary designed to describe hardware modules efficiently, and a brief introduction to the structure and functions of the proposed system that implements the TDeLS.

Work in progress -a dual mode remote laboratory system supporting both real-time and batch controls by making use of virtual machines

This paper describes a dual mode remote laboratory system for an educational hardware experiment. There are two different approaches, namely real-time and batch modes, which control a laboratory system remotely. In the real-time mode, the spatially distributed hardware and test apparatuses are occupied by users during entire experiment periods exclusively. It gives the users interactive and real-laboratory like test environments, but the physical number of platforms will give the system usage limit. As for the batch mode approach, this mode resolves such shortcomings and achieves efficient equipment sharing among concurrent users, but the response-time is rather sacrificed. As neither of them does solve the problems, new remote laboratory environment which resolves the time restriction and the spatial restriction is proposed. The virtual machine (VM) technology has been employed to resolve these problems. As the VM controller allocates both real-time mode VMs and batch mode VMs dynamically, an efficient sharing of apparatuses and an improved interactivity can be achieved.

Multi-user/Multi-test-bed Remote Hardware Laboratory with Job Management System

A new remote hardware laboratory, supporting multi-user/multi-test-bed, has been developed. Learners can perform experiments remotely utilizing actual hardware and actual measurement tools. It employs FPGAs for design implementation test-beds. It can handle many experiment sessions concurrently, by making use of actual hardware test-beds in time and space division fashions. Learners at remote sites can perform actual hardware experiments in parallel. It realized seamless remote and actual hardware laboratories. The combinatorial use of FPGA/PC connected test hardware and PC-based measurement equipment has made it possible to develop a multi-user/multi-test-bed remote hardware experiment system. In order to allocate available experimental environments for users at the same time, a job management system is employed. The prototype system of self-learning experiment environment for digital circuit designs and experiments is in use for 3r class CS students at Hosei University.

Work in progress - development of a new multi-CPU parallel and distributed processing experiment platform for remote hardware laboratory

A new multi-CPU parallel and distributed processing experiment platform using plural FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) platforms is under development. Students can remotely perform hardware and software experiments combining a number of FPGA-based experiment platforms. The authors have already developed a remote laboratory, namely Cyber Laboratory, which realized an efficient sharing of hardware platforms among on-site and remote-site students, both in space-division and time-division fashions. Multi-CPU parallel and distributed processing experiment environment is implemented on a combined use of multiple set of FPGA experiment platforms based on the Cyber Laboratory. Each FPGA platform consists of a FPGA board with a LAN port, host PC as an experiment server, a signal generator, a logic analyzer and a synchronizing mechanism. LAN is used to connect FPGA platforms to organize a parallel system. Therefore, the proposed system can provide each student not only with a CPU hardware design/experiment platform but also with an environment where he/she can conduct parallel and distributed processing as well. The project is at a detailed design phase, and the prototype will be operational in 2010.

New Virtual Remote Laboratory Environments for Logic Circuit Design Realizing an efficient sharing of Test Equipments and Concurrent User Support

The distance learning is widely spreading its use in many areas thanks to the Internet advancement. One of the emerging areas is the remote laboratory. The proposed remote laboratory system is to realize an internet based remote digital logic circuit experiment, which enables efficient sharing of test equipments both in space and time division fashions as well as supporting many users to perform experiments concurrently. Most existing remote laboratories are based on exclusive use of experimental equipments applying the client-server models via the Internet. Once users start remote experiments, these test-benches including target FPGA boards, logic analyzers or pattern generators are exclusively occupied for a long period of time._As available test-bench numbers are strictly restricted to the available physical numbers, it becomes difficult to provide enough experimental environments supportable for many users at the same time. In order to overcome such shortcomings, the authors realized virtual experiment environments, which share actual experiment equipments in space and time division fashions on demand basis. Each user is allocated a virtual experiment environment. It is possible to reside many virtual experiment environments in the system more than the available_test-benches. In the course of the test-and-experiments, available physical equipments necessary to the experiment are dynamically allocated to the virtual environments. In order to resolve the conflicts among equipment usages, the job submission and allocation system, Condor has been employed as the job manager. Although Condor was originally developed for parallel machines to allocate jobs, it is also suitable for the virtual experiment environment handlings. It submits many virtual experiment environments at the same time and allocates equipments according to experiment-runs. As each experiment-run contains number of different experiment stages, where usages of the equipments differ from each other, an efficient sharing of equipments becomes possible.