Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
MULTICUBE design flow in an industrial practice, STM compared the traditional
optimization procedure used internally with respect to the automatic DSE procedure
proposed by MULTICUBE project. The benefits found from STM can be summarized
by the following statement:
The use of MULTICUBE optimization flow can save up to a 73% of the overall time while
achieving comparable results in terms of power/performance tradeoffs
...
. The overall con-
clusion of the utilization of MULTICUBE design flow over a real industrial use case like the
one just discussed is that the added value overcomes largely the cost of setting up the whole
process, converging much faster to the optimum solution for a given technical problem.
IMEC, the Europe's leading independent research center for the development of mi-
croelectronics and ICT, was interested in evaluating the MULTICUBE DSE flow
to show proof-of-concept of its innovative research ideas. IMEC was interested in
evaluating the benefits of DSE flow not only considering the design-time tunable
parameters, but also using the exploitation of the approach at run-time. For proof-
of-concept of both design-time and run-time automatic DSE, IMEC used the same
MPSoC virtual platform based on ADRES core executing the MPEG4 encoder ap-
plication described in Chap. 9. The benefits of automated DSE with respect to the
manual approach can be summarized by the following statements:
Looking at the two design space exploration case-studies, it can be seen that using automatic
DSE over manual full-space exploration has large benefits in terms of time-to-market and
accuracy of exploration results. By using automatic DSE in dynamic runtime management
evaluation case-study, design space exploration time was reduced from 6 months (full-space)
to 36 h. In another case-study of MPSoC platform optimization, by using a simulator at higher
abstraction level coupled with automatic DSE, we could reduce design space exploration
time from worst case of 153 years (full-space) to 36 h
...
. The extra efforts required to build
automatic DSE procedure were minimal.
Besides these tangible benefits of using automated design exploration techniques
obtained by implementing a number of industrial use-cases, MULTICUBE project
demonstrated several achievements at the scientific/technical level. Based on the
opinion of the European reviewers of the project,
these achievements can be
summarized by the following statements:
...
Practical ways to trade off accuracy for speed through the use of multi-abstraction level
simulation thus enabling exploration of larger design spaces.
...
The feasibility of automated parameter tuning at run-time using exploration data collected
at design-time. By implementing and applying a number of analytical and computational
multi-objective optimisation techniques the project has demonstrated the advantages (in
terms of design costs) of using automated architectural exploration at design-time and also
demonstrated the possibility of performance improvements for run-time.
...
The effectiveness of using a common XML scheme to enable integration and inter-
operability of both propriety and open-source software tools in a coherent design tool-chain.
To conclude, in the age of multi/many-core architectures, we believe that system
optimization and exploration technologies and tools represent not only a challenging
research task to be further investigated in the next coming years, but could also
represent one of the potential research breakthroughs.
The Editors