A Survey and Comparative Study of Hard and Soft Real-time Dynamic Resource Allocation Strategies for Multi/Many-core Systems

Multi-/many-core systems are envisioned to satisfy the ever-increasing performance requirements of complex applications in various domains such as embedded and high-performance computing. Such systems need to cater to increasingly dynamic workloads, requiring efficient dynamic resource allocation strategies to satisfy hard or soft real-time constraints. This article provides an extensive survey of hard and soft real-time dynamic resource allocation strategies proposed since the mid-1990s and highlights the emerging trends for multi-/many-core systems. The survey covers a taxonomy of the resource allocation strategies and considers their various optimization objectives, which have been used to provide comprehensive comparison. The strategies employ various principles, such as market and biological concepts, to perform the optimizations. The trend followed by the resource allocation strategies, open research challenges, and likely emerging research directions have also been provided

Driving the Network-on-Chip Revolution to Remove the Interconnect Bottleneck in Nanoscale Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip

The sustained demand for faster, more powerful chips has been met by the availability of chip manufacturing processes allowing for the integration of increasing numbers of computation units onto a single die. The resulting outcome, especially in the embedded domain, has often been called SYSTEM-ON-CHIP (SoC) or MULTI-PROCESSOR SYSTEM-ON-CHIP (MP-SoC). MPSoC design brings to the foreground a large number of challenges, one of the most prominent of which is the design of the chip interconnection. With a number of on-chip blocks presently ranging in the tens, and quickly approaching the hundreds, the novel issue of how to best provide on-chip communication resources is clearly felt. NETWORKS-ON-CHIPS (NoCs) are the most comprehensive and scalable answer to this design concern. By bringing large-scale networking concepts to the on-chip domain, they guarantee a structured answer to present and future communication requirements. The point-to-point connection and packet switching paradigms they involve are also of great help in minimizing wiring overhead and physical routing issues. However, as with any technology of recent inception, NoC design is still an evolving discipline. Several main areas of interest require deep investigation for NoCs to become viable solutions: • The design of the NoC architecture needs to strike the best tradeoff among performance, features and the tight area and power constraints of the onchip domain. • Simulation and verification infrastructure must be put in place to explore, validate and optimize the NoC performance. • NoCs offer a huge design space, thanks to their extreme customizability in terms of topology and architectural parameters. Design tools are needed to prune this space and pick the best solutions. • Even more so given their global, distributed nature, it is essential to evaluate the physical implementation of NoCs to evaluate their suitability for next-generation designs and their area and power costs. This dissertation performs a design space exploration of network-on-chip architectures, in order to point-out the trade-offs associated with the design of each individual network building blocks and with the design of network topology overall. The design space exploration is preceded by a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art interconnect fabrics with themselves and with early networkon- chip prototypes. The ultimate objective is to point out the key advantages that NoC realizations provide with respect to state-of-the-art communication infrastructures and to point out the challenges that lie ahead in order to make this new interconnect technology come true. Among these latter, technologyrelated challenges are emerging that call for dedicated design techniques at all levels of the design hierarchy. In particular, leakage power dissipation, containment of process variations and of their effects. The achievement of the above objectives was enabled by means of a NoC simulation environment for cycleaccurate modelling and simulation and by means of a back-end facility for the study of NoC physical implementation effects. Overall, all the results provided by this work have been validated on actual silicon layout

Framework for simulation of fault tolerant heterogeneous multiprocessor system-on-chip

Due to the ever growing requirement in high performance data computation, current Uniprocessor systems fall short of hand to meet critical real-time performance demands in (i) high throughput (ii) faster processing time (iii) low power consumption (iv) design cost and time-to-market factors and more importantly (v) fault tolerant processing. Shifting the design trend to MPSOCs is a work-around to meet these challenges. However, developing efficient fault tolerant task scheduling and mapping techniques requires optimized algorithms that consider the various scenarios in Multiprocessor environments. Several works have been done in the past few years which proposed simulation based frameworks for scheduling and mapping strategies that considered homogenous systems and error avoidance techniques. However, most of these works inadequately describe today\u27s MPSOC trend because they were focused on the network domain and didn\u27t consider heterogeneous systems with fault tolerant capabilities; In order to address these issues, this work proposes (i) a performance driven scheduling algorithm (PD SA) based on simulated annealing technique (ii) an optimized Homogenous-Workload-Distribution (HWD) Multiprocessor task mapping algorithm which considers the dynamic workload on processors and (iii) a dynamic Fault Tolerant (FT) scheduling/mapping algorithm to employ robust application processing system. The implementation was accompanied by a heterogeneous Multiprocessor system simulation framework developed in systemC/C++. The proposed framework reads user data, set the architecture, execute input task graph and finally generate performance variables. This framework alleviates previous work issues with respect to (i) architectural flexibility in number-of-processors, processor types and topology (ii) optimized scheduling and mapping strategies and (iii) fault-tolerant processing capability focusing more on the computational domain; A set of random as well as application specific STG benchmark suites were run on the simulator to evaluate and verify the performance of the proposed algorithms. The simulations were carried out for (i) scheduling policy evaluation (ii) fault tolerant evaluation (iii) topology evaluation (iv) Number of processor evaluation (v) Mapping policy evaluation and (vi) Processor Type evaluation. The results showed that PD scheduling algorithm showed marginally better performance than EDF with respect to utilization, Execution-Time and Power factors. The dynamic Fault Tolerant implementation showed to be a viable and efficient strategy to meet real-time constraints without posing significant system performance degradation. Torus topology gave better performance than Tile with respect to task completion time and power factors. Executing highly heterogeneous Tasks showed higher power consumption and execution time. Finally, increasing the number of processors showed a decrease in average Utilization but improved task completion time and power consumption; Based on the simulation results, the system designer can compare tradeoffs between a various design choices with respect to the performance requirement specifications. In general, designing an optimized Multiprocessor scheduling and mapping strategy with added fault tolerant capability will enable to develop efficient Multiprocessor systems which meet future performance goal requirements. This is the substance of this work

Multiprocessor System-on-Chips based Wireless Sensor Network Energy Optimization

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an integrated part of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) used to monitor the physical or environmental conditions without human intervention. In WSN one of the major challenges is energy consumption reduction both at the sensor nodes and network levels. High energy consumption not only causes an increased carbon footprint but also limits the lifetime (LT) of the network. Network-on-Chip (NoC) based Multiprocessor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs) are becoming the de-facto computing platform for computationally extensive real-time applications in IoT due to their high performance and exceptional quality-of-service. In this thesis a task scheduling problem is investigated using MPSoCs architecture for tasks with precedence and deadline constraints in order to minimize the processing energy consumption while guaranteeing the timing constraints. Moreover, energy-aware nodes clustering is also performed to reduce the transmission energy consumption of the sensor nodes. Three distinct problems for energy optimization are investigated given as follows: First, a contention-aware energy-efficient static scheduling using NoC based heterogeneous MPSoC is performed for real-time tasks with an individual deadline and precedence constraints. An offline meta-heuristic based contention-aware energy-efficient task scheduling is developed that performs task ordering, mapping, and voltage assignment in an integrated manner. Compared to state-of-the-art scheduling our proposed algorithm significantly improves the energy-efficiency. Second, an energy-aware scheduling is investigated for a set of tasks with precedence constraints deploying Voltage Frequency Island (VFI) based heterogeneous NoC-MPSoCs. A novel population based algorithm called ARSH-FATI is developed that can dynamically switch between explorative and exploitative search modes at run-time. ARSH-FATI performance is superior to the existing task schedulers developed for homogeneous VFI-NoC-MPSoCs. Third, the transmission energy consumption of the sensor nodes in WSN is reduced by developing ARSH-FATI based Cluster Head Selection (ARSH-FATI-CHS) algorithm integrated with a heuristic called Novel Ranked Based Clustering (NRC). In cluster formation parameters such as residual energy, distance parameters, and workload on CHs are considered to improve LT of the network. The results prove that ARSH-FATI-CHS outperforms other state-of-the-art clustering algorithms in terms of LT.University of Derby, Derby, U

High-level services for networks-on-chip

Future technology trends envision that next-generation Multiprocessors Systems-on- Chip (MPSoCs) will be composed of a combination of a large number of processing and storage elements interconnected by complex communication architectures. Communication and interconnection between these basic blocks play a role of crucial importance when the number of these elements increases. Enabling reliable communication channels between cores becomes therefore a challenge for system designers. Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) appeared as a strategy for connecting and managing the communication between several design elements and IP blocks, as required in complex Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). The topic can be considered as a multidisciplinary synthesis of multiprocessing, parallel computing, networking, and on- chip communication domains. Networks-on-Chip, in addition to standard communication services, can be employed for providing support for the implementation of system-level services. This dissertation will demonstrate how high-level services can be added to an MPSoC platform by embedding appropriate hardware/software support in the network interfaces (NIs) of the NoC. In this dissertation, the implementation of innovative modules acting in parallel with protocol translation and data transmission in NIs is proposed and evaluated. The modules can support the execution of the high-level services in the NoC at a relatively low cost in terms of area and energy consumption. Three types of services will be addressed and discussed: security, monitoring, and fault tolerance. With respect to the security aspect, this dissertation will discuss the implementation of an innovative data protection mechanism for detecting and preventing illegal accesses to protected memory blocks and/or memory mapped peripherals. The second aspect will be addressed by proposing the implementation of a monitoring system based on programmable multipurpose monitoring probes aimed at detecting NoC internal events and run-time characteristics. As last topic, new architectural solutions for the design of fault tolerant network interfaces will be presented and discussed

Temperature-Aware Design and Management for 3D Multi-Core Architectures

Vertically-integrated 3D multiprocessors systems-on-chip (3D MPSoCs) provide the means to continue integrating more functionality within a unit area while enhancing manufacturing yields and runtime performance. However, 3D MPSoCs incur amplified thermal challenges that undermine the corresponding reliability. To address these issues, several advanced cooling technologies, alongside temperature-aware design-time optimizations and run-time management schemes have been proposed. In this monograph, we provide an overall survey on the recent advances in temperature-aware 3D MPSoC considerations. We explore the recent advanced cooling strategies, thermal modeling frameworks, design-time optimizations and run-time thermal management schemes that are primarily targeted for 3D MPSoCs. Our aim of proposing this survey is to provide a global perspective, highlighting the advancements and drawbacks on the recent state-of-the-ar

Lifetime reliability of multi-core systems: modeling and applications.

Huang, Lin.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-232).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Abstract --- p.iAcknowledgement --- p.ivChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Preface --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- Background --- p.5Chapter 1.3 --- Contributions --- p.6Chapter 1.3.1 --- Lifetime Reliability Modeling --- p.6Chapter 1.3.2 --- Simulation Framework --- p.7Chapter 1.3.3 --- Applications --- p.9Chapter 1.4 --- Thesis Outline --- p.10Chapter I --- Modeling --- p.12Chapter 2 --- Lifetime Reliability Modeling --- p.13Chapter 2.1 --- Notation --- p.13Chapter 2.2 --- Assumption --- p.16Chapter 2.3 --- Introduction --- p.16Chapter 2.4 --- Related Work --- p.19Chapter 2.5 --- System Model --- p.21Chapter 2.5.1 --- Reliability of A Surviving Component --- p.22Chapter 2.5.2 --- Reliability of a Hybrid k-out-of-n:G System --- p.26Chapter 2.6 --- Special Cases --- p.31Chapter 2.6.1 --- Case I: Gracefully Degrading System --- p.31Chapter 2.6.2 --- Case II: Standby Redundant System --- p.33Chapter 2.6.3 --- Case III: l-out-of-3:G System with --- p.34Chapter 2.7 --- Numerical Results --- p.37Chapter 2.7.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.37Chapter 2.7.2 --- Experimental Results and Discussion --- p.40Chapter 2.8 --- Conclusion --- p.43Chapter 2.9 --- Appendix --- p.44Chapter II --- Simulation Framework --- p.47Chapter 3 --- AgeSim: A Simulation Framework --- p.48Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.48Chapter 3.2 --- Preliminaries and Motivation --- p.51Chapter 3.2.1 --- Prior Work on Lifetime Reliability Analysis of Processor- Based Systems --- p.51Chapter 3.2.2 --- Motivation of This Work --- p.53Chapter 3.3 --- The Proposed Framework --- p.54Chapter 3.4 --- Aging Rate Calculation --- p.57Chapter 3.4.1 --- Lifetime Reliability Calculation --- p.58Chapter 3.4.2 --- Aging Rate Extraction --- p.60Chapter 3.4.3 --- Discussion on Representative Workload --- p.63Chapter 3.4.4 --- Numerical Validation --- p.65Chapter 3.4.5 --- Miscellaneous --- p.66Chapter 3.5 --- Lifetime Reliability Model for MPSoCs with Redundancy --- p.68Chapter 3.6 --- Case Studies --- p.70Chapter 3.6.1 --- Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling --- p.71Chapter 3.6.2 --- Burst Task Arrival --- p.75Chapter 3.6.3 --- Task Allocation on Multi-Core Processors --- p.77Chapter 3.6.4 --- Timeout Policy on Multi-Core Processors with Gracefully Degrading Redundancy --- p.78Chapter 3.7 --- Conclusion --- p.79Chapter 4 --- Evaluating Redundancy Schemes --- p.83Chapter 4.1 --- Introduction --- p.83Chapter 4.2 --- Preliminaries and Motivation --- p.85Chapter 4.2.1 --- Failure Mechanisms --- p.85Chapter 4.2.2 --- Related Work and Motivation --- p.86Chapter 4.3 --- Proposed Analytical Model for the Lifetime Reliability of Proces- sor Cores --- p.88Chapter 4.3.1 --- "Impact of Temperature, Voltage, and Frequency" --- p.88Chapter 4.3.2 --- Impact of Workloads --- p.92Chapter 4.4 --- Lifetime Reliability Analysis for Multi-core Processors with Vari- ous Redundancy Schemes --- p.95Chapter 4.4.1 --- Gracefully Degrading System (GDS) --- p.95Chapter 4.4.2 --- Processor Rotation System (PRS) --- p.97Chapter 4.4.3 --- Standby Redundant System (SRS) --- p.98Chapter 4.4.4 --- Extension to Heterogeneous System --- p.99Chapter 4.5 --- Experimental Methodology --- p.101Chapter 4.5.1 --- Workload Description --- p.102Chapter 4.5.2 --- Temperature Distribution Extraction --- p.102Chapter 4.5.3 --- Reliability Factors --- p.103Chapter 4.6 --- Results and Discussions --- p.103Chapter 4.6.1 --- Wear-out Rate Computation --- p.103Chapter 4.6.2 --- Comparison on Lifetime Reliability --- p.105Chapter 4.6.3 --- Comparison on Performance --- p.110Chapter 4.6.4 --- Comparison on Expected Computation Amount --- p.112Chapter 4.7 --- Conclusion --- p.118Chapter III --- Applications --- p.119Chapter 5 --- Task Allocation and Scheduling for MPSoCs --- p.120Chapter 5.1 --- Introduction --- p.120Chapter 5.2 --- Prior Work and Motivation --- p.122Chapter 5.2.1 --- IC Lifetime Reliability --- p.122Chapter 5.2.2 --- Task Allocation and Scheduling for MPSoC Designs --- p.124Chapter 5.3 --- Proposed Task Allocation and Scheduling Strategy --- p.126Chapter 5.3.1 --- Problem Definition --- p.126Chapter 5.3.2 --- Solution Representation --- p.128Chapter 5.3.3 --- Cost Function --- p.129Chapter 5.3.4 --- Simulated Annealing Process --- p.130Chapter 5.4 --- Lifetime Reliability Computation for MPSoC Embedded Systems --- p.133Chapter 5.5 --- Efficient MPSoC Lifetime Approximation --- p.138Chapter 5.5.1 --- Speedup Technique I - Multiple Periods --- p.139Chapter 5.5.2 --- Speedup Technique II - Steady Temperature --- p.139Chapter 5.5.3 --- Speedup Technique III - Temperature Pre- calculation --- p.140Chapter 5.5.4 --- Speedup Technique IV - Time Slot Quantity Control --- p.144Chapter 5.6 --- Experimental Results --- p.144Chapter 5.6.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.144Chapter 5.6.2 --- Results and Discussion --- p.146Chapter 5.7 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.152Chapter 6 --- Energy-Efficient Task Allocation and Scheduling --- p.154Chapter 6.1 --- Introduction --- p.154Chapter 6.2 --- Preliminaries and Problem Formulation --- p.157Chapter 6.2.1 --- Related Work --- p.157Chapter 6.2.2 --- Problem Formulation --- p.159Chapter 6.3 --- Analytical Models --- p.160Chapter 6.3.1 --- Performance and Energy Models for DVS-Enabled Pro- cessors --- p.160Chapter 6.3.2 --- Lifetime Reliability Model --- p.163Chapter 6.4 --- Proposed Algorithm for Single-Mode Embedded Systems --- p.165Chapter 6.4.1 --- Task Allocation and Scheduling --- p.165Chapter 6.4.2 --- Voltage Assignment for DVS-Enabled Processors --- p.168Chapter 6.5 --- Proposed Algorithm for Multi-Mode Embedded Systems --- p.169Chapter 6.5.1 --- Feasible Solution Set --- p.169Chapter 6.5.2 --- Searching Procedure for a Single Mode --- p.171Chapter 6.5.3 --- Feasible Solution Set Identification --- p.171Chapter 6.5.4 --- Multi-Mode Combination --- p.177Chapter 6.6 --- Experimental Results --- p.178Chapter 6.6.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.178Chapter 6.6.2 --- Case Study --- p.180Chapter 6.6.3 --- Sensitivity Analysis --- p.181Chapter 6.6.4 --- Extensive Results --- p.183Chapter 6.7 --- Conclusion --- p.185Chapter 7 --- Customer-Aware Task Allocation and Scheduling --- p.186Chapter 7.1 --- Introduction --- p.186Chapter 7.2 --- Prior Work and Problem Formulation --- p.188Chapter 7.2.1 --- Related Work and Motivation --- p.188Chapter 7.2.2 --- Problem Formulation --- p.191Chapter 7.3 --- Proposed Design-Stage Task Allocation and Scheduling --- p.192Chapter 7.3.1 --- Solution Representation and Moves --- p.193Chapter 7.3.2 --- Cost Function --- p.196Chapter 7.3.3 --- Impact of DVFS --- p.198Chapter 7.4 --- Proposed Algorithm for Online Adjustment --- p.200Chapter 7.4.1 --- Reliability Requirement for Online Adjustment --- p.201Chapter 7.4.2 --- Analytical Model --- p.203Chapter 7.4.3 --- Overall Flow --- p.204Chapter 7.5 --- Experimental Results --- p.205Chapter 7.5.1 --- Experimental Setup --- p.205Chapter 7.5.2 --- Results and Discussion --- p.207Chapter 7.6 --- Conclusion --- p.211Chapter 7.7 --- Appendix --- p.211Chapter 8 --- Conclusion and Future Work --- p.214Chapter 8.1 --- Conclusion --- p.214Chapter 8.2 --- Future Work --- p.215Bibliography --- p.23

Addressing Manufacturing Challenges in NoC-based ULSI Designs

Hernández Luz, C. (2012). Addressing Manufacturing Challenges in NoC-based ULSI Designs [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/1669

Dependable Embedded Systems

This Open Access book introduces readers to many new techniques for enhancing and optimizing reliability in embedded systems, which have emerged particularly within the last five years. This book introduces the most prominent reliability concerns from today’s points of view and roughly recapitulates the progress in the community so far. Unlike other books that focus on a single abstraction level such circuit level or system level alone, the focus of this book is to deal with the different reliability challenges across different levels starting from the physical level all the way to the system level (cross-layer approaches). The book aims at demonstrating how new hardware/software co-design solution can be proposed to ef-fectively mitigate reliability degradation such as transistor aging, processor variation, temperature effects, soft errors, etc. Provides readers with latest insights into novel, cross-layer methods and models with respect to dependability of embedded systems; Describes cross-layer approaches that can leverage reliability through techniques that are pro-actively designed with respect to techniques at other layers; Explains run-time adaptation and concepts/means of self-organization, in order to achieve error resiliency in complex, future many core systems