Operating system integrated energy aware scratchpad allocation strategies for multiprocess applications

Abstract

Various scratchpad allocation strategies have been developed in the past. Most of them target the reduction of energy consumption. These approaches share the necessity of having direct access to the scratchpad memory. In earlier embedded systems this was always true, but with the increasing complexity of tasks systems have to perform, an additional operating system layer between the hardware and the application is becoming mandatory. This paper presents an approach to integrate a scratchpad memory manager into the operating system. The goal is to minimize energy consumption. In contrast to previous work, compile time knowledge about the application's behavior is taken into account. A set of fast heuristic allocation methods is proposed in this paper. An in-depth study and comparison of achieved energy savings and cycle reductions was performed. The results show that even in the highly dynamic environment of an operating system equipped embedded system, up to 83% energy consumption reduction can be achieved.