Self-Adaptive On-Chip System Based on Cross-Layer Adaptation Approach

Abstract

The emergence of mobile and battery operated multimedia systems and the diversity of supported applications mount new challenges in terms of design efficiency of these systems which must provide a maximum application quality of service (QoS) in the presence of a dynamically varying environment. These optimization problems cannot be entirely solved at design time and some efficiency gains can be obtained at run-time by means of self-adaptivity. In this paper, we propose a new cross-layer hardware (HW)/software (SW) adaptation solution for embedded mobile systems. It supports application QoS under real-time and lifetime constraints via coordinated adaptation in the hardware, operating system (OS), and application layers. Our method relies on an original middleware solution used on both global and local managers. The global manager (GM) handles large, long-term variations whereas the local manager (LM) is used to guarantee real-time constraints. The GM acts in three layers whereas the LM acts in application and OS layers only. The main role of GM is to select the best configuration for each application to meet the constraints of the system and respect the preferences of the user. The proposed approach has been applied to a 3D graphics application and successfully implemented on an Altera FPGA.

Computing Swarms for Self-Adaptiveness and Self-Organization in Floating-Point Array Processing

“…The presence of hundreds of processors on the same silicon die raises difficult issues for the designer in terms of control, memory access, communication, and fault tolerance [Ahsan et al 2008]. Microprogrammed architectures can rely on hierarchical adaptation infrastructures, including, at different levels, the operating system, the application, the hardware, and in some cases a middleware layer [Loukil et al 2013;Derin et al 2013]. The application itself, or specific application monitors, can be in charge of supervising the context .…”