Multi-criteria scheduling of pipeline workflows

Mapping workflow applications onto parallel platforms is a challenging problem, even for simple application patterns such as pipeline graphs. Several antagonist criteria should be optimized, such as throughput and latency (or a combination). In this paper, we study the complexity of the bi-criteria mapping problem for pipeline graphs on communication homogeneous platforms. In particular, we assess the complexity of the well-known chains-to-chains problem for different-speed processors, which turns out to be NP-hard. We provide several efficient polynomial bi-criteria heuristics, and their relative performance is evaluated through extensive simulations

A Micro Power Hardware Fabric for Embedded Computing

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) mitigate many of the problemsencountered with the development of ASICs by offering flexibility, faster time-to-market, and amortized NRE costs, among other benefits. While FPGAs are increasingly being used for complex computational applications such as signal and image processing, networking, and cryptology, they are far from ideal for these tasks due to relatively high power consumption and silicon usage overheads compared to direct ASIC implementation. A reconfigurable device that exhibits ASIC-like power characteristics and FPGA-like costs and tool support is desirable to fill this void. In this research, a parameterized, reconfigurable fabric model named as domain specific fabric (DSF) is developed that exhibits ASIC-like power characteristics for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) style applications. Using this model, the impact of varying different design parameters on power and performance has been studied. Different optimization techniques like local search and simulated annealing are used to determine the appropriate interconnect for a specific set of applications. A design space exploration tool has been developed to automate and generate a tailored architectural instance of the fabric.The fabric has been synthesized on 160 nm cell-based ASIC fabrication process from OKI and 130 nm from IBM. A detailed power-performance analysis has been completed using signal and image processing benchmarks from the MediaBench benchmark suite and elsewhere with comparisons to other hardware and software implementations. The optimized fabric implemented using the 130 nm process yields energy within 3X of a direct ASIC implementation, 330X better than a Virtex-II Pro FPGA and 2016X better than an Intel XScale processor

Execution models for mapping programs onto distributed memory parallel computers

The problem of exploiting the parallelism available in a program to efficiently employ the resources of the target machine is addressed. The problem is discussed in the context of building a mapping compiler for a distributed memory parallel machine. The paper describes using execution models to drive the process of mapping a program in the most efficient way onto a particular machine. Through analysis of the execution models for several mapping techniques for one class of programs, we show that the selection of the best technique for a particular program instance can make a significant difference in performance. On the other hand, the results of benchmarks from an implementation of a mapping compiler show that our execution models are accurate enough to select the best mapping technique for a given program

Design of testbed and emulation tools

The research summarized was concerned with the design of testbed and emulation tools suitable to assist in projecting, with reasonable accuracy, the expected performance of highly concurrent computing systems on large, complete applications. Such testbed and emulation tools are intended for the eventual use of those exploring new concurrent system architectures and organizations, either as users or as designers of such systems. While a range of alternatives was considered, a software based set of hierarchical tools was chosen to provide maximum flexibility, to ease in moving to new computers as technology improves and to take advantage of the inherent reliability and availability of commercially available computing systems

Generic Connectivity-Based CGRA Mapping via Integer Linear Programming

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) are programmable logic devices with large coarse-grained ALU-like logic blocks, and multi-bit datapath-style routing. CGRAs often have relatively restricted data routing networks, so they attract CAD mapping tools that use exact methods, such as Integer Linear Programming (ILP). However, tools that target general architectures must use large constraint systems to fully describe an architecture's flexibility, resulting in lengthy run-times. In this paper, we propose to derive connectivity information from an otherwise generic device model, and use this to create simpler ILPs, which we combine in an iterative schedule and retain most of the exactness of a fully-generic ILP approach. This new approach has a speed-up geometric mean of 5.88x when considering benchmarks that do not hit a time-limit of 7.5 hours on the fully-generic ILP, and 37.6x otherwise. This was measured using the set of benchmarks used to originally evaluate the fully-generic approach and several more benchmarks representing computation tasks, over three different CGRA architectures. All run-times of the new approach are less than 20 minutes, with 90th percentile time of 410 seconds. The proposed mapping techniques are integrated into, and evaluated using the open-source CGRA-ME architecture modelling and exploration framework.Comment: 8 pages of content; 8 figures; 3 tables; to appear in FCCM 2019; Uses the CGRA-ME framework at http://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca

Coarse-grained reconfigurable array architectures

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array (CGRA) architectures accelerate the same inner loops that benefit from the high ILP support in VLIW architectures. By executing non-loop code on other cores, however, CGRAs can focus on such loops to execute them more efficiently. This chapter discusses the basic principles of CGRAs, and the wide range of design options available to a CGRA designer, covering a large number of existing CGRA designs. The impact of different options on flexibility, performance, and power-efficiency is discussed, as well as the need for compiler support. The ADRES CGRA design template is studied in more detail as a use case to illustrate the need for design space exploration, for compiler support and for the manual fine-tuning of source code

A system for routing arbitrary directed graphs on SIMD architectures

There are many problems which can be described in terms of directed graphs that contain a large number of vertices where simple computations occur using data from connecting vertices. A method is given for parallelizing such problems on an SIMD machine model that is bit-serial and uses only nearest neighbor connections for communication. Each vertex of the graph will be assigned to a processor in the machine. Algorithms are given that will be used to implement movement of data along the arcs of the graph. This architecture and algorithms define a system that is relatively simple to build and can do graph processing. All arcs can be transversed in parallel in time O(T), where T is empirically proportional to the diameter of the interconnection network times the average degree of the graph. Modifying or adding a new arc takes the same time as parallel traversal

이종 멀티 코어 프로세서에서 SDF/L 그래프 스케줄링 기법

학위논문(석사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 컴퓨터공학부, 2021.8. Ha Soonhoi.Although dataflow models are known to thrive at exploiting task-level parallelism of an application, it is difficult to exploit the parallelism of data. Data-level parallelism can be represented well with loop structures, but these structures are not explicitly specified in most existing dataflow models. SDF/L model was introduced to overcome this shortcoming by specifying the loop structures explicitly in a hierarchical fashion. To the best of our knowledge however, scheduling of SDF/L graph onto heterogeneous processors has not been considered in any previous work. In this dissertation, we introduce a scheduling technique of an application represented by the SDF/L model onto heterogeneous processors. In the proposed method, we explore the mapping of tasks using an evolutionary meta-heuristic and schedule hierarchically in a bottom-up fashion, creating parallel loop schedules at lower levels first and then re-using them when constructing the schedule at a higher level. To verify the efficiency of the proposed scheduling methodology, we apply it to benchmark examples and randomly generated SDF/L graphs.데이터플로우 모델은 애플리케이션의 태스크를 병렬 처리할 때 좋은 모델로 알려져 있지만 데이터를 병렬로 처리하는 데에 활용하기는 어렵다. 데이터 수준 병렬 처리는 루프 구조를 통해 표현될 수 있으나 기존 데이터플로우 모델에서 명시적으로 루프 구조는 명세하는 방법이 없었다. 이러한 단점을 극복하기 위해 계층적 구조를 활용하여 루프 구조를 명시적으로 명세할 수 있는 SDF/L 모델이 제안되었다. 그러나 이기종 프로세서에 대한 SDF/L 그래프의 스케줄링은 이전까지 고려되지 않은 것으로 파악된다. 본 논문에서는 SDF/L 모델로 표현되는 애플리케이션을 이기종 프로세서에 대하여 스케줄링하는 기법을 소개한다. 제안된 방법에서는 먼저 진화적 메타 휴리스틱을 사용하여 태스크 매핑을 탐색한다. 이후 하위 수준에서 병렬 루프 스케줄을 만든 다음 상위 수준에서 스케줄 구성할 때 재사용하는 상향식의 계층적 태스크 스케줄링을 수행한다. 제안하는 스케줄링 기법의 효율성을 검증하기 위해 벤치마크 예제와 무작위로 생성된 SDF/L 그래프에 기법을 적용하였다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Related Work 6 2.1 SDF Scheduling with Data-level Parallelism 8 2.2 Hierarchical Scheduling 9 Chapter 3 Problem and Challenges 11 3.1 Notations and Problem Description 11 3.2 Challenges 12 Chapter 4 Proposed methodology 15 4.1 Mapping Exploration 15 4.2 Priority Assignment and List Scheduling Heuristic 17 4.3 Hierarchical Scheduling 18 4.4 Complexity 23 Chapter 5 Experiments 24 5.1 Benchmarks 25 5.2 Randomly Generated Graphs 30 Chapter 6 Conclusions 35 Bibliography 37 요 약 41석