Computer hardware

Summary

Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the case, central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), monitor, mouse, keyboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, speakers and motherboard. By contrast, software is the set of instructions that can be stored and run by hardware. Hardware is so-termed because it is "hard" or rigid with respect to changes, whereas software is "soft" because it is easy to change. Hardware is typically directed by the software to execute any command or instruction. A combination of hardware and software forms a usable computing system, although other systems exist with only hardware. Von Neumann architecture Von Neumann architecture and Stored-program computer The template for all modern computers is the Von Neumann architecture, detailed in a 1945 paper by Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann. This describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with subdivisions of a

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_hardware

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (100)

Related publications

Related people (41)

Related people

Related units (30)

Related units

Related concepts (159)

Related concepts

Related courses (74)

Related courses

Related lectures (114)

Related lectures

Increasing Haptic Fidelity and Ergonomics in Teleoperated Surgery

Laura Santos Carreras

Over the past few decades, surgical procedures have made enormous progress, shifting from traditional open procedures to less and less invasive approaches, with the promise of smaller incisions, less complications, better cosmetic results and shorter recovery times. With these developments came a reduced dexterity and more complex control through the fulcrum effect and modified eye-hand coordination. These complications were greatly mitigated by the recent introduction of surgical robots, allowing the surgeon to sit in a comfortable posture, and restoring natural visuomotor coordination. To date, the issue of the lack of haptic feedback, which initially allowed the surgeon to intervene without vision, identify pathological tissue, feel arteries, etc., has not been resolved, despite the fact that it is crucial in certain interventions. Besides, the added value of haptic feedback is subject to controversy. Surgeons experienced in robotic surgery have adapted to the lack of haptic feedback and learned how to rely only on vision and proprioceptive cues as compensation. Nevertheless, previous studies have shown that substituting haptic information through various sensory channels can increase surgeons' performance. As a complete restoration of the sense of touch is extremely challenging in minimally invasive surgery, the advantages of haptic feedback have to be demonstrated and quantified to justify the additional cost and complexity. This is the aim of the present work. We hypothesized that tactile feedback as well as force is crucial in surgery and we investigated the haptic information involved in several representative surgical tasks. Dedicated hardware and a virtual reality environment to simulate suturing and palpation tasks were developed to address these questions. Ergonomic design guidelines were established based on an in-depth literature review and surgeons' comments gathered in a survey. These guidelines were then used to design and benchmark an ergonomic haptic handle featuring active grasping feedback and additional safety features. The results of the first two studies suggest that the benefits of haptic information highly depend on the surgical task in question. During a suturing task, force feedback significantly increased users' accuracy whereas torque feedback did not result in any significant improvement. In a palpation task, a higher recognition rate was achieved with tactile feedback than with visual sensory substitution. The performance of the haptic device integrating the ergonomic handle was assessed and compared with the standard omega.7 haptic device. Results showed that the index of performance of the original device was not degraded with the additional hardware. The index of performance was slightly increased for a manipulation task involving orientations. The ergonomic assessment of the handle showed a slight decrease of the tension in the adductor pollicis and flexor digitorium muscles, and therefore a potential decrease of fatigue. Although just a subset of surgical tasks could be investigated, the results indicate that haptic feedback and sensory substitution would greatly benefit teleoperated robotic surgery. Providing the surgeon with tactile information can potentially restore the feeling of "contact with the patient" and other surgeries that are highly reliant on the sense of touch could become possible again. This thesis presents a novel multidisciplinary approach to systematically analyzing surgical tasks in order to improve safety in two dimensions. Firstly, in the area of patient safety by providing the surgeon with haptic information to increase performance and reduce the risk of errors and secondly, in the area of surgeon safety by providing a more ergonomic master console. We expect this work to be a first step in establishing a general design method for more ergonomic surgeon consoles and trust that it will inspire research to investigate the sensory mechanisms underlying highly dexterous tasks such as those performed in surgery.

EPFL2012

Storage in IX: a High Performance Storage Layer for a Dataplane Operating System

Lisa Zhou

As storage hardware evolves, the systems and components which interact with them must adapt as well. Outdated assumptions at the operating system level necessitate a dramatic rethinking of the storage path as emerging storage technology offer performance speeds several orders of magnitude faster than traditional hard disks. This thesis investigates the design space of contemporary storage systems, in particular for non-volatile memory (NVM) technology, and presents a survey of the techniques currently being employed to build systems for NVM. We identify and examine relevant systems to determine features applicable to building a storage extension for IX, a data- plane operating system. We present the design and implementation of such a system and detail the assumptions and principles we strove to incorporate.

2017

Cloud computing has been experiencing sharp development over the last years, leading to an increased demand for application migration to the cloud. Cloud providers, in an effort to attract more customers and earn their confidence, offer to tenants the illusion of an isolated network, exposing familiar abstractions. At the same time, creating this illusion poses challenging problems for the providers, as one tenant's traffic may interfere with another's in complicated, unpredictable ways. First, new challenges have arisen in administering access-control rules (ACLs). On the one hand, installing ACLs at the server is incompatible with bare-metal support and introduces unnecessary performance overhead. On the other hand, offloading the most popular ACLs on the limited hardware memory in Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches should not be conducted naïvely, as the existence of wildcard rules presents inter-rule dependencies that must be respected. Second, tenants' demands have evolved beyond requesting hardware resources; for instance, tenants may require bandwidth provisions between their resources or optimized access to a specific cloud service, e.g., a Mail server or a Database. Cloud providers have not adequately adapted to these expanding demands, therefore elevating hardware resources to "first class citizens," as non-hardware constraints are not considered during resource allocation, instead they are applied afterwards. In this thesis we propose two architectures that facilitate cloud providers in managing their shared network resources in a flexible way. First, we demonstrate virtual flow tables, a ToR architecture that handles ACLs using a two-level memory hierarchy. The most popular ACLs are stored in the limited hardware memory, respecting any dependencies between wildcard rules, while the ToR's supervisor engine maintains access to the entire ACL rule-set. Second, we present a two-tiered architecture for scheduling cloud resources, consisting of a resource-agnostic scheduling layer and a resource-specific enforcement layer. Network resources and constraints are taken into consideration during resource scheduling, instead of afterwards, while resource provisioning, as well as general network-management policies, are delegated to the resource-specific tier.

EPFL2018

Increasing Haptic Fidelity and Ergonomics in Teleoperated Surgery

Laura Santos Carreras

EPFL2012

EPFL2018