Automatic Design of Efficient Application-centric Architectures.

As the market for embedded devices continues to grow, the demand for high performance, low cost, and low power computation grows as well. Many embedded applications perform computationally intensive tasks such as processing streaming video or audio, wireless communication, or speech recognition and must be implemented within tight power budgets. Typically, general purpose processors are not able to meet these performance and power requirements. Custom hardware in the form of loop accelerators are often used to execute the compute-intensive portions of these applications because they can achieve significantly higher levels of performance and power efficiency. Automated hardware synthesis from high level specifications is a key technology used in designing these accelerators, because the resulting hardware is correct by construction, easing verification and greatly decreasing time-to-market in the quickly evolving embedded domain. In this dissertation, a compiler-directed approach is used to design a loop accelerator from a C specification and a throughput requirement. The compiler analyzes the loop and generates a virtual architecture containing sufficient resources to sustain the required throughput. Next, a software pipelining scheduler maps the operations in the loop to the virtual architecture. Finally, the accelerator datapath is derived from the resulting schedule. In this dissertation, synthesis of different types of loop accelerators is investigated. First, the system for synthesizing single loop accelerators is detailed. In particular, a scheduler is presented that is aware of the effects of its decisions on the resulting hardware, and attempts to minimize hardware cost. Second, synthesis of multifunction loop accelerators, or accelerators capable of executing multiple loops, is presented. Such accelerators exploit coarse-grained hardware sharing across loops in order to reduce overall cost. Finally, synthesis of post-programmable accelerators is presented, allowing changes to be made to the software after an accelerator has been created. The tradeoffs between the flexibility, cost, and energy efficiency of these different types of accelerators are investigated. Automatically synthesized loop accelerators are capable of achieving order-of-magnitude gains in performance, area efficiency, and power efficiency over processors, and programmable accelerators allow software changes while maintaining highly efficient levels of computation.Ph.D.Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61644/1/fank_1.pd

Analyzable dataflow executions with adaptive redundancy

Increasing performance requirements in the embedded systems domain have encouraged a drift from singlecore to multicore processors, and thus multicore processors are widely used in embedded systems today. Cars are an example for complex embedded systems in which the use of multicore processors is continuously increasing. A major reason for this is to consolidate different software components on one chip and thus reduce the number of electronic control units. However, the de facto standard in the automotive industry, AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture), was originally designed for singlecore processors. Although basic support for multicore processors was added, more complex architectures are currently not compatible with the software stack. Regarding the software components running on the ECUS of modern cars, requirements are diverse. On the one hand, there are safety-critical tasks, like the airbag control, anti-lock braking system, electronic stability control and emergency brake assist, and on the other hand, tasks which do not have any safety-related requirements at all, for example tasks controlling the infotainment system. Trends like autonomous driving lead to even more demanding tasks in the system since such tasks are both safety-critical and data-intensive. As embedded applications, like those in the automotive domain, become more complex, new approaches are necessary. Data-intensive tasks are usually tackled with large-scale computing frameworks. In this thesis, some major concepts of such frameworks are transferred to the high-performance embedded systems domain. For this purpose, the thesis describes a runtime environment (RTE) that is suitable for different kinds of multi- and manycore hardware architectures. The RTE follows a dataflow execution model based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Graphs are divided into sections which are scheduled separately. For each section, the RTE uses a DAG scheduling heuristic to compute multiple schedules covering different redundancy configurations. This allows the RTE to dynamically change the redundancy of parts of the graph at runtime despite the use of fixed schedules. Alternatively, the RTE also provides an online scheduler. To specify suitable graphs, the RTE also provides a programming model which shares similarities with common large-scale computing frameworks, for example Apache Spark. Using this programming model, three common distributed algorithms, namely Cannon's algorithm, the Cooley-Tukey algorithm and bitonic sort, were implemented. With these three programs, the performance of the RTE was evaluated for a variety of configurations on two different hardware architectures. The results show that the proposed RTE is able to reach the performance of established parallel computation frameworks and that for suitable graphs with reasonable sectionings the negative influence on the runtime is either small or non-existent.Aufgrund steigender Anforderungen an die Leistungsfähigkeit von eingebetteten Systemen finden Mehrkernprozessoren mittlerweile auch in eingebetteten Systemen Verwendung. Autos sind ein Beispiel für eingebettete Systeme, in denen die Verbreitung von Mehrkernprozessoren kontinuierlich zunimmt. Ein Hauptgrund ist, dass es dadurch möglich wird, mehrere Applikationen, für die ursprünglich mehrere Electronic Control Units (ECUs) notwendig waren, auf ein und demselben Chip auszuführen und dadurch die Anzahl der ECUs im Gesamtsystem zu verringern. Der De-facto-Standard AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) wurde jedoch ursprünglich nur im Hinblick auf Einkernprozessoren entworfen und, obwohl der Softwarestack um grundlegende Unterstützung für Mehrkernprozessoren erweitert wurde, sind komplexere Architekturen nicht damit kompatibel. Die Anforderungen der Softwarekomponenten von modernen Autos sind vielfältig. Einerseits gibt es hochgradig sicherheitskritische Tasks, die beispielsweise die Airbags, das Antiblockiersystem, die Fahrdynamikregelung oder den Notbremsassistenten steuern und andererseits Tasks, die keinerlei sicherheitskritische Anforderungen aufweisen, wie zum Beispiel Tasks zur Steuerung des Infotainment-Systems. Neue Trends wie autonomes Fahren führen zu weiteren anspruchsvollen Tasks, die sowohl hohe Leistungs- als auch Sicherheitsanforderungen aufweisen. Da die Komplexität eingebetteter Anwendungen, beispielsweise im Automobilbereich, stetig zunimmt, sind neue Ansätze erforderlich. Für komplexe, datenintensive Aufgaben werden in der Regel Cluster-Computing-Frameworks eingesetzt. In dieser Arbeit werden Konzepte solcher Frameworks auf den Bereich der eingebetteten Systeme übertragen. Dazu beschreibt die Arbeit eine Laufzeitumgebung (RTE) für eingebettete Mehrkernarchitekturen. Die RTE folgt einem Datenfluss-Ausführungsmodell, das auf gerichteten azyklischen Graphen basiert. Graphen können in Abschnitte eingeteilt werden, für welche separat mehrere unterschiedlich redundante Schedules mit Hilfe einer Scheduling-Heuristik berechnet werden. Dieser Ansatz erlaubt es, die Redundanz von Teilen der Anwendung zur Laufzeit zu verändern. Alternativ unterstützt die RTE auch Scheduling zur Laufzeit. Zur Erzeugung von Graphen stellt die RTE ein Programmiermodell bereit, welches sich an etablierten Frameworks, insbesondere Apache Spark, orientiert. Damit wurden drei Beispielanwendungen implementiert, die auf gängigen Algorithmen basieren. Konkret handelt es sich um Cannon's Algorithmus, den Cooley-Tukey-Algorithmus und bitonisches Sortieren. Um die Leistungsfähigkeit der RTE zu ermitteln, wurden diese drei Anwendungen mehrfach mit verschiedenen Konfigurationen auf zwei Hardware-Architekturen ausgeführt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die RTE in ihrer Leistungsfähigkeit mit etablierten Systemen vergleichbar ist und die Laufzeit bei einer sinnvollen Graphaufteilung im besten Fall nur geringfügig beeinflusst wird

Automatic Design of Application Specific Instruction Set Extensions Through Dataflow Graph Exploration

General-purpose processors are often incapable of achieving the challenging cost, performance, and power demands of high-performance applications. To meet these demands, most systems employ a number of hardware accelerators to off-load the computationally demanding portions of the application. As an alternative to this strategy, we examine customizing the computation capabilities of a processor for a particular application. The processor is extended with hardware in the form of a set of custom function units and instruction set extensions. To effectively identify opportunities for creating custom hardware, a dataflow graph design space exploration engine heuristically identifies candidate computation subgraphs without artificially constraining their size or shape. The engine combines estimates of performance gain, cost, and inherent limitations of the processor to grow candidate graphs in profitable directions while pruning unprofitable paths. This paper describes the dataflow graph exploration engine and evaluates its effectiveness across a set of embedded applications.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44572/1/10766_2004_Article_476941.pd

Fast, frequency-based, integrated register allocation and instruction scheduling

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENC

Resource management for data streaming applications

This dissertation investigates novel middleware mechanisms for building streaming applications. Developing streaming applications is a challenging task because (i) they are continuous in nature; (ii) they require fusion of data coming from multiple sources to derive higher level information; (iii) they require efficient transport of data from/to distributed sources and sinks; (iv) they need access to heterogeneous resources spanning sensor networks and high performance computing; and (v) they are time critical in nature. My thesis is that an intuitive programming abstraction will make it easier to build dynamic, distributed, and ubiquitous data streaming applications. Moreover, such an abstraction will enable an efficient allocation of shared and heterogeneous computational resources thereby making it easier for domain experts to build these applications. In support of the thesis, I present a novel programming abstraction, called DFuse, that makes it easier to develop these applications. A domain expert only needs to specify the input and output connections to fusion channels, and the fusion functions. The subsystems developed in this dissertation take care of instantiating the application, allocating resources for the application (via the scheduling heuristic developed in this dissertation) and dynamically managing the resources (via the dynamic scheduling algorithm presented in this dissertation). Through extensive performance evaluation, I demonstrate that the resources are allocated efficiently to optimize the throughput and latency constraints of an application.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Ramachandran, Umakishore; Committee Member: Chervenak, Ann; Committee Member: Cooper, Brian; Committee Member: Liu, Ling; Committee Member: Schwan, Karste

Polymorphic Pipeline Array: A Flexible Multicore Accelerator for Mobile Multimedia Applications.

Mobile computing in the form of smart phones, netbooks, and PDAs has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Moving ahead to the next generation of mobile devices, we believe that multimedia will become a more critical and product-differentiating feature. High definition audio and video as well as 3D graphics provide richer interfaces and compelling capabilities. However, these algorithms also bring different computational challenges than wireless signal processing. Multimedia algorithms are more complex featuring more control flow and variable computational requirements where execution time is not dominated by innermost vector loops. Further, data access is more complex where media applications typically operate on multi-dimensional vectors of data rather than single-dimensional vectors with simple strides. Thus, the design of current mobile platforms requires re-examination to account for these new application domains. In this dissertation, we focus on the design of a programmable, low-power accelerator for multimedia algorithms referred to as a Polymorphic Pipeline Array (PPA). The PPA design is inspired by coarse-grain reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) that consist of an array of function units interconnected by a mesh style interconnect. The PPA improves upon CGRAs by attacking two major limitations: scalability and acceleration limited to innermost loops. The large number of resources are fully utilized by exploiting both Lne-grain instruction-level and coarse-grain pipeline parallelism, and the acceleration is extended beyond innermost loops to encompass the whole region of applications. Various compiler and architectural optimizations are presented for CGRAs that form the basic building blocks of PPA. Two compiler techniques are presented that systematically construct the schedule with intelligent heuristics. Modulo graph embedding leverages graph embedding technique for scheduling in CGRAs and edgecentric modulo scheduling provides a communication-oriented way to address the scheduling problem. For architectural improvement, a novel control path design is presented that leverages the token network of dataflow machines to reduce the instructionmemory power. The PPA is designed with flexibility and programmability as first-order requirements to enable the hardware to be dynamically customizable to the application. A PPA exploit pipeline parallelism found in streaming applications to create a coarsegrain hardware pipeline to execute streaming media applications.Ph.D.Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64732/1/parkhc_1.pd

Characterization and Avoidance of Critical Pipeline Structures in Aggressive Superscalar Processors

In recent years, with only small fractions of modern processors now accessible in a single cycle, computer architects constantly fight against propagation issues across the die. Unfortunately this trend continues to shift inward, and now the even most internal features of the pipeline are designed around communication, not computation. To address the inward creep of this constraint, this work focuses on the characterization of communication within the pipeline itself, architectural techniques to avoid it when possible, and layout co-design for early detection of problems. I present work in creating a novel detection tool for common case operand movement which can rapidly characterize an applications dataflow patterns. The results produced are suitable for exploitation as a small number of patterns can describe a significant portion of modern applications. Work on dynamic dependence collapsing takes the observations from the pattern results and shows how certain groups of operations can be dynamically grouped, avoiding unnecessary communication between individual instructions. This technique also amplifies the efficiency of pipeline data structures such as the reorder buffer, increasing both IPC and frequency. I also identify the same sets of collapsible instructions at compile time, producing the same benefits with minimal hardware complexity. This technique is also done in a backward compatible manner as the groups are exposed by simple reordering of the binarys instructions. I present aggressive pipelining approaches for these resources which avoids the critical timing often presumed necessary in aggressive superscalar processors. As these structures are designed for the worst case, pipelining them can produce greater frequency benefit than IPC loss. I also use the observation that the dynamic issue order for instructions in aggressive superscalar processors is predictable. Thus, a hardware mechanism is introduced for caching the wakeup order for groups of instructions efficiently. These wakeup vectors are then used to speculatively schedule instructions, avoiding the dynamic scheduling when it is not necessary. Finally, I present a novel approach to fast and high-quality chip layout. By allowing architects to quickly evaluate what if scenarios during early high-level design, chip designs are less likely to encounter implementation problems later in the process.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Scott Wills; Committee Member: David Schimmel; Committee Member: Gabriel Loh; Committee Member: Hsien-Hsin Lee; Committee Member: Yorai Ward

Methodology for complex dataflow application development

This thesis addresses problems inherent to the development of complex applications for reconfig- urable systems. Many projects fail to complete or take much longer than originally estimated by relying on traditional iterative software development processes typically used with conventional computers. Even though designer productivity can be increased by abstract programming and execution models, e.g., dataflow, development methodologies considering the specific properties of reconfigurable systems do not exist. The first contribution of this thesis is a design methodology to facilitate systematic develop- ment of complex applications using reconfigurable hardware in the context of High-Performance Computing (HPC). The proposed methodology is built upon a careful analysis of the original application, a software model of the intended hardware system, an analytical prediction of performance and on-chip area usage, and an iterative architectural refinement to resolve identi- fied bottlenecks before writing a single line of code targeting the reconfigurable hardware. It is successfully validated using two real applications and both achieve state-of-the-art performance. The second contribution extends this methodology to provide portability between devices in two steps. First, additional tool support for contemporary multi-die Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is developed. An algorithm to automatically map logical memories to hetero- geneous physical memories with special attention to die boundaries is proposed. As a result, only the proposed algorithm managed to successfully place and route all designs used in the evaluation while the second-best algorithm failed on one third of all large applications. Second, best practices for performance portability between different FPGA devices are collected and evaluated on a financial use case, showing efficient resource usage on five different platforms. The third contribution applies the extended methodology to a real, highly demanding emerging application from the radiotherapy domain. A Monte-Carlo based simulation of dose accumu- lation in human tissue is accelerated using the proposed methodology to meet the real time requirements of adaptive radiotherapy.Open Acces