I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at the University of Central Florida. During my Ph.D., I was involved in the field of fault tolerant evolvable hardware systems. Currently, I enjoy collaborating with the research group, where we developed the Competitive Runtime Reconfiguration (CRR) approach to effect refurbishment of FPGAs at runtime in Xilinx FPGAs.
Our approach provides a method to identify the presence of faults in FPGAs using the idea of competition among configurations. Over a period of time, using output comparisons with the normal data-flow inputs, we can identify the faulty resources, as well as affected configurations. The health-states of configurations are monitored, and using an embedded evolutionary algorithm, we seek to repair the affected configurations. The health of the configurations is restored, and these refurbished configurations are then viable for normal use. The various characteristics such as throughput, fault-repair latency and correctness are variable according to application-specific needs. We hope to demonstrate a system that can autonomously detect faults and maintain availability while effecting refurbishment of the device, without taking the device offline. The project was sponsored by NASA.
Besides fault tolerant computing, I sustain an interest in cryptography, evolvable hardware, and computer system design in general.
The following are technical journal/conference articles I have been a co-author of:
Publications:
A. Sarvi, C. A. Sharma and R. F. DeMara, “BIST-Based Group Testing for Diagnosis of Embedded FPGA Cores,” accepted to The 2008 International Conference on Embedded Systems and Applications, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (July 14-17, 2008). [pdf] [doc]
C. A. Sharma, R. F. DeMara and A. Sarvi, “Self-Healing Reconfigurable Logic using Autonomous Group Testing,” submitted to ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS) of Special Issue on Organic Computing May 2007. [abstract] [pdf] [doc]
R. F. DeMara, K. Zhang, C. A. Sharma, “Consensus-based Evolvable Hardware for Sustainable Fault Handling,” submitted to The IEEE Transactions in Evolutionary Computation Aug 2007. [pdf]
R. N. Al-Haddad, C. A. Sharma, R. F. DeMara, “Performance Evaluation of Two Allocation Schemes for Combinatorial Group Testing Fault Isolation,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms ERSA ’07,, Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A, June 25 – 28, 2007. [pdf] [doc]
R. S. Oreifej, C. A. Sharma, R. F. DeMara, “Expediting GA-Based Evolution Using Group Testing Techniques for Reconfigurable Hardware,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Reconfigurable Computing and FPGAs (Reconfig’06), San Luis Potosi, Mexico, September 20-22, 2006, pp 106-113. [abstract] [pdf]
C. A. Sharma, R. F. DeMara, “A Combinatorial Group Testing Method for FPGA Fault Location“, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Science and Technology (ACST 2006), Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, January 23 – 35, 2006. [abstract] [pdf] [doc]
C. J. Milliord, C. A. Sharma, R. F. DeMara, “Dynamic Voting Schemes to Enhance Evolutionary Repair in Reconfigurable Logic Devices,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Reconfigurable Computing and FPGAs (ReConFig’05), pp. 8.1.1 – 8.1.6, Puebla City, Mexico, September 28 – 30, 2005. [abstract][pdf] [doc]
K. Zhang, R. F. DeMara, C. A. Sharma, “Consensus-based Evaluation for Fault Isolation and On-line Evolutionary Regeneration,†in Proceedings of the International Conference in Evolvable Systems (ICES’05), pp. 12 -24, Barcelona, Spain, September 12 – 14, 2005. [abstract] [pdf] [doc]
R. F. DeMara and C. A. Sharma, “Self-Checking Fault Detection using Discrepancy Mirrors,†in Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA’05), pp. 311-317, Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A, June 27 – 30, 2005. [abstract] [pdf]
Engineering Education
Michael Georgiopoulos , Ronald F. DeMara, Avelino J. Gonzalez, Annie S. Wu, Mansooreh Mollaghasemi, Erol Gelenbe, Marcella Kysilka, Jimmy Secretan, Carthik A. Sharma and Ayman J. Alnsour, “A Sustainable Model for Integrating Current Topics in Machine Learning Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum,” submitted to the IEEE Transactions in Education, March 2008. [pdf] [doc]