Remote Execution in Distributed Memory MPSoC

Abstract

Message-passing is an increasingly popular design style for MPSoCs that usually results in systems that perform better compared to external shared-memory designs performance and power-wise, this because of much decreased data transfers with external memory. This scheme relies on explicit communications between processing tasks that participate in the application. Contrarily to shared-memory multiprocessors, tasks usually get assigned to processors at design-time. In order to cope with transient performance losses originating from various phenomena such as increased processing workload or peak traffic in the communication subsystem, various adaptation mechanisms based on task migration have been proposed in the literature. As Message-passing systems usually use PE-private memory architecture, these mechanisms imply migrating application code from processor to processor, which incurs penalty in performance and power consumption. This paper proposes a local shared-memory strategy in which processors execute code hosted in a remote processor.