A Machine-Learning Compositional Study of Exoplanetary Material Accreted Onto Five Helium-Atmosphere White Dwarfs with $\texttt{cecilia}$

We present the first application of the Machine Learning (ML) pipeline $\texttt{cecilia}$ to determine the physical parameters and photospheric composition of five metal-polluted He-atmosphere white dwarfs without well-characterised elemental abundances. To achieve this, we perform a joint and iterative Bayesian fit to their $\textit{SDSS}$ (R=2,000) and $\textit{Keck/ESI}$ (R=4,500) optical spectra, covering the wavelength range from about 3,800\r{A} to 9,000\r{A}. Our analysis measures the abundances of at least two $-$and up to six$-$ chemical elements in their atmospheres with a predictive accuracy similar to that of conventional WD analysis techniques ($\approx$0.20 dex). The white dwarfs with the largest number of detected heavy elements are SDSS J0859$+$5732 and SDSS J2311$-$0041, which simultaneously exhibit O, Mg, Si, Ca, and Fe in their $\textit{Keck/ESI}$ spectra. For all systems, we find that the bulk composition of their pollutants is largely consistent with those of primitive CI chondrites to within 1-2$\sigma$. We also find evidence of statistically significant ($>2\sigma$) oxygen excesses for SDSS J0859$+$5732 and SDSS J2311$-$0041, which could point to the accretion of oxygen-rich exoplanetary material. In the future, as wide-field astronomical surveys deliver millions of public WD spectra to the scientific community, $\texttt{cecilia}$ aspires to unlock population-wide studies of polluted WDs, therefore helping to improve our statistical knowledge of extrasolar compositions.

A Hierarchical Dataflow-Driven Heterogeneous Architecture for Wireless Baseband Processing

Wireless baseband processing (WBP) is a key element of wireless communications, with a series of signal processing modules to improve data throughput and counter channel fading. Conventional hardware solutions, such as digital signal processors (DSPs) and more recently, graphic processing units (GPUs), provide various degrees of parallelism, yet they both fail to take into account the cyclical and consecutive character of WBP. Furthermore, the large amount of data in WBPs cannot be processed quickly in symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs) due to the unpredictability of memory latency. To address this issue, we propose a hierarchical dataflow-driven architecture to accelerate WBP. A pack-and-ship approach is presented under a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture to allow the subordinate tiles to operate in a bundled access and execute manner. We also propose a multi-level dataflow model and the related scheduling scheme to manage and allocate the heterogeneous hardware resources. Experiment results demonstrate that our prototype achieves $2\times$ and $2.3\times$ speedup in terms of normalized throughput and single-tile clock cycles compared with GPU and DSP counterparts in several critical WBP benchmarks. Additionally, a link-level throughput of $288$ Mbps can be achieved with a $45$-core configuration.