Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 5
Design Space Exploration Supporting
Run-Time Resource Management
Prabhat Avasare, Chantal Ykman-Couvreur, Geert Vanmeerbeeck,
Giovanni Mariani, Gianluca Palermo, Cristina Silvano, and Vittorio Zaccaria
Abstract Running multiple applications optimally in terms of Quality of Service
(e.g. performance and power consumption) on embedded multi-core platforms is
a huge challenge. Moreover, current applications exhibit unpredictable changes of
the environment and workload conditions which makes the task of running them
optimally even more difficult. This dynamic trend in application runs will grow even
more in future applications.
This Chapter presents an automated tool flow which tackles this challenge by a
two-step approach: first at design-time, a Design Space Exploration (DSE) tool is
coupled with a platform simulator(s) to get optimum operating points for the set of
target applications. Secondly, at run-time, a lightweight Run-time Resource Manager
(RRM) leverages the design-time DSE results for deciding an operating configuration
to be loaded at run-time for each application. This decision is performed dynamically,
by taking into consideration available platform resources and the QoS requirements
of the specific use-case. To keep RRM execution and resource overhead at minimum,
a very fast optimisation heuristic is integrated.
Application of this tool-flow on a real-life multimedia use case (described in Chap.
9) will demonstrate a significant speedup in optimisation process while maintaining
desired Quality of Service.
5.1
Introduction
The future of embedded computing is shifting to multi-core designs due to handling
of simultaneous multiple applications and at the same time to boost performance
given the unacceptable power consumption and operating temperature increase of
fast single-core processors. This introduces new big challenges for application and
platform designers. The first challenge is the support for a variety of applications:
P. Avasare ( )
IMEC, Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: avasare@imec.be
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