Energy efficient hardware acceleration of multimedia processing tools

The world of mobile devices is experiencing an ongoing trend of feature enhancement and generalpurpose multimedia platform convergence. This trend poses many grand challenges, the most pressing being their limited battery life as a consequence of delivering computationally demanding features. The envisaged mobile application features can be considered to be accelerated by a set of underpinning hardware blocks Based on the survey that this thesis presents on modem video compression standards and their associated enabling technologies, it is concluded that tight energy and throughput constraints can still be effectively tackled at algorithmic level in order to design re-usable optimised hardware acceleration cores. To prove these conclusions, the work m this thesis is focused on two of the basic enabling technologies that support mobile video applications, namely the Shape Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform (SA-DCT) and its inverse, the SA-IDCT. The hardware architectures presented in this work have been designed with energy efficiency in mind. This goal is achieved by employing high level techniques such as redundant computation elimination, parallelism and low switching computation structures. Both architectures compare favourably against the relevant pnor art in the literature. The SA-DCT/IDCT technologies are instances of a more general computation - namely, both are Constant Matrix Multiplication (CMM) operations. Thus, this thesis also proposes an algorithm for the efficient hardware design of any general CMM-based enabling technology. The proposed algorithm leverages the effective solution search capability of genetic programming. A bonus feature of the proposed modelling approach is that it is further amenable to hardware acceleration. Another bonus feature is an early exit mechanism that achieves large search space reductions .Results show an improvement on state of the art algorithms with future potential for even greater savings

Dynamic Power Management of High Performance Network on Chip

With increased density of modern System on Chip(SoC) communication between nodes has become a major problem. Network on Chip is a novel on chip communication paradigm to solve this by using highly scalable and efficient packet switched network. The addition of intelligent networking on the chip adds to the chip’s power consumption thus making management of communication power an interesting and challenging research problem. While VLSI techniques have evolved over time to enable power reduction in the circuit level, the highly dynamic nature of modern large SoC demand more than that. This dissertation explores some innovative dynamic solutions to manage the ever increasing communication power in the post sub-micron era. Today’s highly integrated SoCs require great level of cross layer optimizations to provide maximum efficiency. This dissertation aims at the dynamic power management problem from top. Starting with a system level distribution and management down to microarchitecture enhancements were found necessary to deliver maximum power efficiency. A distributed power budget sharing technique is proposed. To efficiently satisfy the established power budget, a novel flow control and throttling technique is proposed. Finally power efficiency of underlying microarchitecture is explored and novel buffer and link management techniques are developed. All of the proposed techniques yield improvement in power-performance efficiency of the NoC infrastructure

The impact of design techniques in the reduction of power consumption of SoCs Multimedia

Orientador: Guido Costa Souza de AraújoDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: A indústria de semicondutores sempre enfrentou fortes demandas em resolver problema de dissipação de calor e reduzir o consumo de energia em dispositivos. Esta tendência tem sido intensificada nos últimos anos com o movimento de sustentabilidade ambiental. A concepção correta de um sistema eletrônico de baixo consumo de energia é um problema de vários níveis de complexidade e exige estratégias sistemáticas na sua construção. Fora disso, a adoção de qualquer técnica de redução de energia sempre está vinculada com objetivos especiais e provoca alguns impactos no projeto. Apesar dos projetistas conheçam bem os impactos de forma qualitativa, as detalhes quantitativas ainda são incógnitas ou apenas mantidas dentro do 'know-how' das empresas. Neste trabalho, de acordo com resultados experimentais baseado num plataforma de SoC1 industrial, tentamos quantificar os impactos derivados do uso de técnicas de redução de consumo de energia. Nos concentramos em relacionar o fator de redução de energia de cada técnica aos impactos em termo de área, desempenho, esforço de implementação e verificação. Na ausência desse tipo de dados, que relacionam o esforço de engenharia com as metas de consumo de energia, incertezas e atrasos serão frequentes no cronograma de projeto. Esperamos que este tipo de orientações possam ajudar/guiar os arquitetos de projeto em selecionar as técnicas adequadas para reduzir o consumo de energia dentro do alcance de orçamento e cronograma de projetoAbstract: The semiconductor industry has always faced strong demands to solve the problem of heat dissipation and reduce the power consumption in electronic devices. This trend has been increased in recent years with the action of environmental sustainability. The correct conception of an electronic system for low power consumption is an issue with multiple levels of complexities and requires systematic approaches in its construction. However, the adoption of any technique for reducing the power consumption is always linked with some specific goals and causes some impacts on the project. Although the designers know well that these impacts can affect the design in a quality aspect, the quantitative details are still unkown or just be kept inside the company's know-how. In this work, according to the experimental results based on an industrial SoC2 platform, we try to quantify the impacts of the use of low power techniques. We will relate the power reduction factor of each technique to the impact in terms of area, performance, implementation and verification effort. In the absence of such data, which relates the engineering effort to the goals of power consumption, uncertainties and delays are frequent. We hope that such guidelines can help/guide the project architects in selecting the appropriate techniques to reduce the power consumption within the limit of budget and project scheduleMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

Run-time management for future MPSoC platforms

In recent years, we are witnessing the dawning of the Multi-Processor Systemon- Chip (MPSoC) era. In essence, this era is triggered by the need to handle more complex applications, while reducing overall cost of embedded (handheld) devices. This cost will mainly be determined by the cost of the hardware platform and the cost of designing applications for that platform. The cost of a hardware platform will partly depend on its production volume. In turn, this means that ??exible, (easily) programmable multi-purpose platforms will exhibit a lower cost. A multi-purpose platform not only requires ??exibility, but should also combine a high performance with a low power consumption. To this end, MPSoC devices integrate computer architectural properties of various computing domains. Just like large-scale parallel and distributed systems, they contain multiple heterogeneous processing elements interconnected by a scalable, network-like structure. This helps in achieving scalable high performance. As in most mobile or portable embedded systems, there is a need for low-power operation and real-time behavior. The cost of designing applications is equally important. Indeed, the actual value of future MPSoC devices is not contained within the embedded multiprocessor IC, but in their capability to provide the user of the device with an amount of services or experiences. So from an application viewpoint, MPSoCs are designed to ef??ciently process multimedia content in applications like video players, video conferencing, 3D gaming, augmented reality, etc. Such applications typically require a lot of processing power and a signi??cant amount of memory. To keep up with ever evolving user needs and with new application standards appearing at a fast pace, MPSoC platforms need to be be easily programmable. Application scalability, i.e. the ability to use just enough platform resources according to the user requirements and with respect to the device capabilities is also an important factor. Hence scalability, ??exibility, real-time behavior, a high performance, a low power consumption and, ??nally, programmability are key components in realizing the success of MPSoC platforms. The run-time manager is logically located between the application layer en the platform layer. It has a crucial role in realizing these MPSoC requirements. As it abstracts the platform hardware, it improves platform programmability. By deciding on resource assignment at run-time and based on the performance requirements of the user, the needs of the application and the capabilities of the platform, it contributes to ??exibility, scalability and to low power operation. As it has an arbiter function between different applications, it enables real-time behavior. This thesis details the key components of such an MPSoC run-time manager and provides a proof-of-concept implementation. These key components include application quality management algorithms linked to MPSoC resource management mechanisms and policies, adapted to the provided MPSoC platform services. First, we describe the role, the responsibilities and the boundary conditions of an MPSoC run-time manager in a generic way. This includes a de??nition of the multiprocessor run-time management design space, a description of the run-time manager design trade-offs and a brief discussion on how these trade-offs affect the key MPSoC requirements. This design space de??nition and the trade-offs are illustrated based on ongoing research and on existing commercial and academic multiprocessor run-time management solutions. Consequently, we introduce a fast and ef??cient resource allocation heuristic that considers FPGA fabric properties such as fragmentation. In addition, this thesis introduces a novel task assignment algorithm for handling soft IP cores denoted as hierarchical con??guration. Hierarchical con??guration managed by the run-time manager enables easier application design and increases the run-time spatial mapping freedom. In turn, this improves the performance of the resource assignment algorithm. Furthermore, we introduce run-time task migration components. We detail a new run-time task migration policy closely coupled to the run-time resource assignment algorithm. In addition to detailing a design-environment supported mechanism that enables moving tasks between an ISP and ??ne-grained recon??gurable hardware, we also propose two novel task migration mechanisms tailored to the Network-on-Chip environment. Finally, we propose a novel mechanism for task migration initiation, based on reusing debug registers in modern embedded microprocessors. We propose a reactive on-chip communication management mechanism. We show that by exploiting an injection rate control mechanism it is possible to provide a communication management system capable of providing a soft (reactive) QoS in a NoC. We introduce a novel, platform independent run-time algorithm to perform quality management, i.e. to select an application quality operating point at run-time based on the user requirements and the available platform resources, as reported by the resource manager. This contribution also proposes a novel way to manage the interaction between the quality manager and the resource manager. In order to have a the realistic, reproducible and ??exible run-time manager testbench with respect to applications with multiple quality levels and implementation tradev offs, we have created an input data generation tool denoted Pareto Surfaces For Free (PSFF). The the PSFF tool is, to the best of our knowledge, the ??rst tool that generates multiple realistic application operating points either based on pro??ling information of a real-life application or based on a designer-controlled random generator. Finally, we provide a proof-of-concept demonstrator that combines these concepts and shows how these mechanisms and policies can operate for real-life situations. In addition, we show that the proposed solutions can be integrated into existing platform operating systems

Concurrent error detection in 2-D separable linear transform

As process technology continues to scale to smaller geometries and reduces the supply voltage, reliability of the resulting semiconductor becomes a greater concern. The effect of deep submicron noise, soft errors, variation, and aging degradation pose challenges on the functional correctness of VLSI systems and places roadblocks on reductions in scale. On the other side, as computing moves toward mobile, the energy efficiency of digital systems becomes one of the most important design metrics. However, reliability and energy efficiency are contradicting design requirements. Adding a voltage guard band is the most common method to mitigate the reliability impacts in such instances. Low power design technique like voltage over-scaling (VOS) even reduces the power by scaling the supply voltage just before data-dependant timing errors start to appear. Concurrent error detection is the solution to tackle reliability and energy-efficiency in a unified manner. Fault tolerance can be deployed at different design hierarchies. Given its low overhead, algorithm level error detection is an attractive approach. In this work, a generic weighted checksum code based error detection algorithm targeted generic 2-D separable linear transform is proposed. This technique encodes the input array at the 2-D linear trans- formation level, and algorithms are designed to operate on encoded data and produce encoded output data. The proposed error detection technique is a system-level method and therefore can be used in existing hardware or software 2-D linear transformation architectures with low overhead. The mathematic proof of the algorithm is provided within the scope of this dissertation. The checksum weighting vector for several common transforms are derived as examples, error detection cost and algorithm effectiveness are analyzed. In traditional fault tolerance study, the error is often evaluated at the boolean level. Many DSP applications, like 2-D linear transformation used in the multimedia compression system, do not require exactly correct results, but rather that the quality of the output is within the acceptable range. A generic quality aware error detection in the 2-D separable linear transform is proposed by extending the above property and defining the errors at the functional level. As an example, the quality-aware error detection technique is deployed on a low-power wavelet lifting transform architecture in JPEG2000. A low-cost Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) aware detection logic based on proposed scheme is integrated into the discrete wavelet lifting transform architecture. This detection logic checks whether the image quality degradation caused by voltage over-scaling induced timing errors is acceptable and determines the optimal voltage set point in operating conditions at run time. This novel quality-based error detection approach is significantly different from traditional error detection schemes which look for exact data equivalence. A simulation result for one design shows that the supply voltage can be scaled down to 75% of the nominal voltage in typical process corner without significant image quality degradation, which translates to 9.15mW power consumption (44% power saving).Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Satellite Communications

This study is motivated by the need to give the reader a broad view of the developments, key concepts, and technologies related to information society evolution, with a focus on the wireless communications and geoinformation technologies and their role in the environment. Giving perspective, it aims at assisting people active in the industry, the public sector, and Earth science fields as well, by providing a base for their continued work and thinking

DESIGN METHODOLOGIES FOR RELIABLE AND ENERGY-EFFICIENT MULTIPROCESSOR SYSTEM

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Self-adaptivity of applications on network on chip multiprocessors: the case of fault-tolerant Kahn process networks

Technology scaling accompanied with higher operating frequencies and the ability to integrate more functionality in the same chip has been the driving force behind delivering higher performance computing systems at lower costs. Embedded computing systems, which have been riding the same wave of success, have evolved into complex architectures encompassing a high number of cores interconnected by an on-chip network (usually identified as Multiprocessor System-on-Chip). However these trends are hindered by issues that arise as technology scaling continues towards deep submicron scales. Firstly, growing complexity of these systems and the variability introduced by process technologies make it ever harder to perform a thorough optimization of the system at design time. Secondly, designers are faced with a reliability wall that emerges as age-related degradation reduces the lifetime of transistors, and as the probability of defects escaping post-manufacturing testing is increased. In this thesis, we take on these challenges within the context of streaming applications running in network-on-chip based parallel (not necessarily homogeneous) systems-on-chip that adopt the no-remote memory access model. In particular, this thesis tackles two main problems: (1) fault-aware online task remapping, (2) application-level self-adaptation for quality management. For the former, by viewing fault tolerance as a self-adaptation aspect, we adopt a cross-layer approach that aims at graceful performance degradation by addressing permanent faults in processing elements mostly at system-level, in particular by exploiting redundancy available in multi-core platforms. We propose an optimal solution based on an integer linear programming formulation (suitable for design time adoption) as well as heuristic-based solutions to be used at run-time. We assess the impact of our approach on the lifetime reliability. We propose two recovery schemes based on a checkpoint-and-rollback and a rollforward technique. For the latter, we propose two variants of a monitor-controller- adapter loop that adapts application-level parameters to meet performance goals. We demonstrate not only that fault tolerance and self-adaptivity can be achieved in embedded platforms, but also that it can be done without incurring large overheads. In addressing these problems, we present techniques which have been realized (depending on their characteristics) in the form of a design tool, a run-time library or a hardware core to be added to the basic architecture

Towards Computational Efficiency of Next Generation Multimedia Systems

To address throughput demands of complex applications (like Multimedia), a next-generation system designer needs to co-design and co-optimize the hardware and software layers. Hardware/software knobs must be tuned in synergy to increase the throughput efficiency. This thesis provides such algorithmic and architectural solutions, while considering the new technology challenges (power-cap and memory aging). The goal is to maximize the throughput efficiency, under timing- and hardware-constraints