We are entering the Cyber-Physical age, in which both objects and people will become nodes of the same digital network for exchanging information. Therefore, the general expectation is that “things” or systems will become somewhat smart as people, allowing a rapid and close interaction not only system-system, but also human-system, system-human. Moreover, through smart systems, the human behavior
is improved and simplified. More scientifically, we expect that such Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) will at least react in real-time, provide enough computational power for the assigned tasks, consume the least possible energy for such task (energy efficiency), scale up through modularity, allow for an easy programmability across performance scaling, and exploit at best existing standards at minimal costs. The whole set of these expectations impose scientific and technological challenges that need to be properly addressed. The AXIOM project (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module) aims at researching new software/hardware architectures for CPSs to meet the above expectations. The current solutions for providing enough computational power are mainly based on multi- or many-core architectures. For example, some current research projects (such as ADEPT or P-SOCRATES) are already investigating how to join efforts from the High-Performance Computing (HPC) and the Embedded Computing domains, which are both focused on high power efficiency, while GPUs and new Dataflow platforms such as Maxeler, or in general FPGAs, are claimed as the most energy-efficient. For this reason, our research will not be limited to only one kind of technology, but it will start from power efficient multi-cores such as ARM cores and FPGA accelerators on the same die as in the Xilinx Zynq.
