Hw-sw components for parallel embedded computing on noc-based mpsocs
- Autores: Jaime Joven Murillo
- Directores de la Tesis: J. Carrabina (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2010
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Jesús José Labarta Mancho (presid.), Lluís Terés Terés (secret.), Federico Angiolini (voc.)
- Materias:
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- Resumen
Recently, on the on-chip and embedded domain, we are witnessing the growing of the Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) era, Networkon-chip (NoCs) have been proposed to be a viable, efficient, scalable, predictable and flexible solution to interconnect IP blocks on a chip, or fullfeatured bus-based systems in order to create highly complex systems. Thus, the paradigmto high-performance embedded computing is arriving through high hardware parallelism and concurrent software stacks to achieve maximum system platform composability and flexibility using pre-designed IP cores. These are the emerging NoC-based MPSoCs architectures. However, as the number of IP cores, on a single chip increases exponentially, many new challenges arise.
The first challenge is the design of a suitable hardware interconnection to provide adequate Quality of Service (QoS) ensuring certain bandwidth and latency bounds for inter-block communication, but at a minimal power and area costs. Due to the huge NoC design space, simulation and verification environments must be put in place to explore, validate and optimize many different NoC architectures.
The second target, nowadays a hot topic, is to provide efficient and flexible parallel programming models upon new generation of highly parallel NoC-based MPSoCs. Thus, it is mandatory the use of lightweight SW libraries which are able to exploit hardware features present on the execution platform. Using these software stacks and their associated APIs according to a specific parallel programming model will let software application designers to reuse and program parallel applications effortlessly at higher levels of abstraction.
Finally, to get an efficient overall system behaviour, a key research challenge is the design of suitable HW/SW interfaces. Specially, it is crucial in heterogeneous multiprocessor systems where parallel programming models and middleware functions must abstract the communication resources during high level specification of software applications.
Thus, the main goal of this dissertation is to enrich the emerging NoC-based MPSoCs by exploring and adding engineering and scientific contribution to new challenges appeared in the last years. This dissertation focuses on all of the above points:
¿ by describing an experimental environment to design NoC-based systems, xENoC, and a NoC design space exploration tool named NoCMaker. This framework leads to a rapid prototyping and validation of NoC-based MPSoCs.
¿ by extending Network Interfaces (NIs) to handle heterogeneous traffic from different bus-based standards (e.g. AMBA, OCP-IP) in order to reuse and communicate a great variety off-the-shelf IP cores and software stacks in a transparent way from the user point of view.
¿ by providing runtime QoS features (best effort and guaranteed services) through NoC-level hardware components and software middleware routines.
¿ by exploringHW/SWinterfaces and resource sharing when a Floating Point Unit (FPU) co-processor is interfaced on a NoC-based MPSoC.
¿ by porting parallel programming models, such as shared memory or message passing models on NoC-based MPSoCs. We present the implementation of an efficient lightweight parallel programming model based on Message Passing Interface (MPI), called on-chip Message Passing Interface (ocMPI). It enables the design of parallel distributed computing at task-level or function-level using explicit parallelismand synchronizationmethods between themultiple integrated on the chip.
¿ by provide runtime application to packets QoS support on top of the OpenMP runtime library targeted for shared memory MPSoCs in order to boost or balance critical application or threads during its execution.
The key challenges explored in this dissertation are formalized on HWSW communication centric platform-based design methodology. Thus, the outcome of this work will be a robust cluster-on-chip platform for high-performance embedded computing, whereby hardware and software components can be reused at multiple levels of design abstraction.
