Application Control and Monitoring in Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Systems

Abstract

Multiprocessor systems provide both highperformance and energy-efficient execution of applications on mobile and embedded systems under dynamic workload requirements, and can provide increased lifetime for devices in energy-constrained environments. However, their increasing complexity means that management at runtime has become a non-trivial task, especially in heterogeneous multiprocessor systems. In addition, there is no standardised mechanism to expose and manage the sources of control and monitoring from within applications and hardware resources at runtime. This paper presents an analysis of applications, platforms and runtime management approaches to motivate the need for a standardised framework that enables fully applicationand platform-agnostic runtime management. The exposure of application controls and requirements through the presented framework is demonstrated with a stereo matching algorithm, including runtime management of multi-threading and frequency scaling on the 61-core Xeon Phi platform. In addition, the trading of application parameters, such as throughput and accuracy, is demonstrated within the framework using a runtime controller on the Odroid-XU3 platform. An open-source implementation of this framework has been released. 1

An Application- and Platform-agnostic Runtime Management Framework for Multicore Systems

“…In addition to the experiments presented in this paper, the framework has been used to explore temperature variability of a heterogeneous platform for reliability modelling (Tenentes et al, 2017) and to demonstrate how application knobs and monitors can provide additional opportunities for system optimisation (Leech et al, 2018a). Research is ongoing to provide further validation of the framework and to integrate additional applications, devices and RTMs.…”