No abstract

No abstract

Technology trends enable the integration of many processor cores in a System-on-Chip (SoC). In these complex architectures, several architectural parameters can be tuned to find the best trade-off in terms of multiple metrics such as energy and delay. The main goal of the MULTICUBE project consists of the definition of an automatic Design Space Exploration framework to support the design of next generation many-core architectures 1 .

No abstract

The extremely high technology process reached by silicon manufacturing (smaller than 32nm) has led to production of computational platforms and SoC, featuring a considerable amount of resources. Whereas from one side such multi-and many-core platforms show growing performance capabilities, from the other side they are more and more affected by power, thermal, and reliability issues. Moreover, the increased computational capabilities allows congested usage scenarios with workloads subject to mixed and time-varying requirements. Effective usage of the resources should take into account both the application requirements and resources availability, with an arbiter, namely a resource manager in charge to solve the resource contention among demanding applications.Current operating systems (OS) have only a limited knowledge about application-specific behaviors and their time-varying requirements. Dedicated system interfaces to collect such inputs and forward them to the OS (e.g., its scheduler) are thus an interesting research area that aims at integrating the OS with an ad hoc resource manager. Such a component can exploit efficient low-level OS interfaces and mechanisms to extend its capabilities of controlling tasks and system resources. Because of the specific tasks and timings of a resource manager, this component can be easily and effectively developed as a user-space extension lying in between the OS and the controlled application.This article, which focuses on multicore Linux systems, shows a portable solution to enforce runtime resource management decisions based on the standard control groups framework. A burst and a mixed workload analysis, performed on a multicore-based NUMA platform, have reported some promising results both in terms of performance and power saving.

This paper presents a parametric area estimation methodology at SystemC level for FPGA-based designs. The approach is conceived to reduce the effort to adapt the area estimators to the evolutions of the EDA design environments. It consists in identifying the subset of measures that can be derived form the system level description and that are also relevant at VHDL-RT level. Estimators' parameters are then automatically derived from a set of benchmarks.

No abstract

A B S T R A C T This paper considers the problem of designing heterogeneous multiprocessor embedded systems. The focus is on a step of the design flow: the definition of innovative metrics for the analysis of the system specification to statically identify the most suitable processing elements class for each system functionality. Experimental results are also included, to show the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.