Testbeds

Users of applications such as search engines, speech recognition, and multimedia rendering are tolerant of output quality variations, offering the system opportunities to trade output quality against system performance, resource cost, and energy usage. The Variability Expedition’s three experimental testbeds are critical to testing new solutions in domains with potential for broad societal, economic and education impacts. The testbeds draw on different classes of systems (embedded, mobile, server) and different designs (off-the-shelf integrated circuits, FPGA-based, custom-designed IC).  The testbeds are designed to be network-accessible shared instruments for all Expedition partners, and for the broader research community. The testbeds will serve as highly visible demonstration vehicles, and as a way to evaluate the success of the Variability Expedition’s research and knowledge-transfer goals.