Title | Design-space Exploration and Runtime Resource Management for Multicores |
Publication Type | Journal Article |
Year of Publication | 2013 |
Authors | Mariani, G., G. Palermo, V. Zaccaria, and C. Silvano |
Journal | ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) - Special issue on application-specific processors |
Volume | 13 |
Issue | 2 |
Pagination | 20:1–20:27 |
Date Published | 09/2013 |
ISSN | 1539-9087 |
Keywords | application-specific platforms, design-space exploration, genetic algorithms, Multicore architectures, operating systems, resource reservation, runtime resource management, throughput maximization |
Abstract | Application-specific multicore architectures are usually designed by using a configurable platform in which a set of parameters can be tuned to find the best trade-off in terms of the selected figures of merit (such as energy, delay, and area). This multi-objective optimization phase is called Design-Space Exploration (DSE). Among the design-time (hardware) configurable parameters we can find the memory subsystem configuration (such as cache size and associativity) and other architectural parameters such as the instruction-level parallelism of the system processors. Among the runtime (software) configurable parameters we can find the degree of task-level parallelism associated with each application running on the platform. The contribution of this article is twofold; first, we introduce an evolutionary (NSGA-II-based) methodology for identifying a hardware configuration which is robust with respect to applications and corresponding datasets. Second, we introduce a novel runtime heuristic that exploits design-time identified operating points to provide guaranteed throughput to each application. Experimental results show that the design-time/runtime combined approach improves the runtime performance of the system with respect to existing reference techniques, while meeting the overall power budget. |
DOI | 10.1145/2514641.2514647 |
