4,404 research outputs found
DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability
The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints
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
Actors: The Ideal Abstraction for Programming Kernel-Based Concurrency
GPU and multicore hardware architectures are commonly
used in many different application areas to accelerate problem solutions
relative to single CPU architectures. The typical approach to accessing
these hardware architectures requires embedding logic into the programming
language used to construct the application; the two primary forms
of embedding are: calls to API routines to access the concurrent functionality,
or pragmas providing concurrency hints to a language compiler
such that particular blocks of code are targeted to the concurrent functionality.
The former approach is verbose and semantically bankrupt,
while the success of the latter approach is restricted to simple, static
uses of the functionality.
Actor-based applications are constructed from independent, encapsulated
actors that interact through strongly-typed channels. This paper
presents a first attempt at using actors to program kernels targeted at
such concurrent hardware. Besides the glove-like fit of a kernel to the actor
abstraction, quantitative code analysis shows that actor-based kernels
are always significantly simpler than API-based coding, and generally
simpler than pragma-based coding. Additionally, performance measurements
show that the overheads of actor-based kernels are commensurate
to API-based kernels, and range from equivalent to vastly improved for
pragma-based annotations, both for sample and real-world applications
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