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.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Charles R. Leech: orcid.org/0000-0002-2403-3873

ORCID for Graeme McLachlan Bragg: orcid.org/0000-0002-5201-7977

ORCID for Geoff Merrett: orcid.org/0000-0003-4980-3894

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