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Virtual Runtime Application Partitions for Resource Management in Massively Parallel Architectures

Syed M. A. H. Jafri, Virtual Runtime Application Partitions for Resource Management in Massively Parallel Architectures. TUCS Dissertations 191. 2015.

Abstract:

This thesis presents a novel design paradigm, called Virtual Runtime Application Partitions (VRAP), to judiciously utilize the on-chip resources. As the dark silicon era approaches, where the power considerations will allow only a fraction chip to be powered on, judicious resource management will become a key consideration in future designs. Most of the works on resource management treat only the physical components (i.e. computation, communication, and memory blocks) as resources and manipulate the component to application mapping to optimize various parameters (e.g. energy efficiency). To further enhance the optimization potential, in addition to the physical resources we propose to manipulate abstract resources (i.e. voltage/frequency operating point, the fault-tolerance strength, the degree of parallelism, and the configuration architecture). The proposed framework (i.e. VRAP) encapsulates methods, algorithms, and hardware blocks to provide each application with the abstract resources tailored to its needs. To test the efficacy of this concept, we have developed three distinct self adaptive environments: (i) Private Operating Environment (POE), (ii) Private Reliability Environment (PRE), and (iii) Private Configuration Environment (PCE) that collectively ensure that each application meets its deadlines using minimal platform resources. In this work several novel architectural enhancements, algorithms and policies are presented to realize the virtual runtime application partitions efficiently. Considering the future design trends, we have chosen Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) and Network on Chips (NoCs) to test the feasibility of our approach. Specifically, we have chosen Dynamically Reconfigurable Resource Array (DRRA) and McNoC as the representative CGRA and NoC platforms. The proposed techniques are compared and evaluated using a variety of quantitative experiments. Synthesis and simulation results demonstrate VRAP significantly enhances the energy and power efficiency compared to state of the art.

BibTeX entry:

@PHDTHESIS{phdJafri_SyedMxAxHx15a,
  title = {Virtual Runtime Application Partitions for Resource Management in Massively Parallel Architectures},
  author = {Jafri, Syed M. A. H.},
  number = {191},
  series = {TUCS Dissertations},
  year = {2015},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Embedded Computer and Electronic Systems (ECES)

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