The MULTICUBE Design Flow - Multi-objective Design Space Exploration of Multiprocessor SoC Architectures - page 6

Exploration
Architect

Design Space
Defination

Use Case
and Simulator
Provider

Exploration
Strategies

Open Source
- M3Explorer

Use Case

Design Space
Instance

Proprietary
- modeFRONTIER Open Source

- SCOPE

System Metrics

Design Space
Exploration Framework

Proprietary
- ConvergenceSC
- IMEC HLSim
- STM Simulator
- ICT Simulator

Pareto Curve Pareto Curve

Run-Time
Design
Exploration

Architecture
Design and
Optimization

Power/Performance
Estimation Framework

Application
Working Point

Multi-Core
Architectural Instance

Fig. 1.1 Overview of the MULTICUBE design flow

￿ A new open source tool (Multicube Explorer available at http://www.

multicube.eu) suitable for automatic design space exploration of MPSoC archi-
tectures. The tool enables a fast optimisation of parameterized system architecture
towards a set of objective functions (e.g., energy, delay and area), by interacting
with a system-level simulator through an open XML-based interface. Multicube
Explorer provides a set of innovative sampling and optimisation techniques to
support the designer in finding the best objective functions trade-offs. It also
provides a set of Response Modeling Methods for speeding up the optimisation
phase.

￿ An existing commercial tool (modeFRONTIER from ESTECO), widely adopted

in other optimisation fields, has been re-targeted to support automatic DSE in the
embedded systems field. The tool includes the most recent optimisation techniques
available in literature, ranging from Design of Experiments to direct optimisers.
modeFRONTIER (see also http://www.esteco.com) also provides meta-modeling
support for the creation of interpolating surfaces from well statistically distributed
designs to be used to perform the optimisation without computing any further
analysis. The tool also supports multivariate statistical analysis and data mining
tools directly integrated in the exploration process to enable the user to easily
analyse complex data. The graphical user interface of modeFRONTIER provides
access to all features of design experiment definition, exploration and analysis in
a simple and intuitive way.

Both tools leverage a set of multi-objective optimisation algorithms that have been
validated on several industrial use cases. In multi-objective optimisation problems