Design Space Exploration of Embedded Applications on Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Platforms

Abstract

CPU-GPU platforms possess the potential of enhancing the performance of applications through some unique and diverse capabilities of both CPU-GPU devices. As a result, the methodologies for CPU/GPU system design space exploration for various applications are now considerably more challenging on these heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, we present a heuristic algorithm for partitioning the computation of applications between a CPU and GPU, while satisfying the user-defined constraints. Our methodology leverages the SIMD-related computing and hierarchical memory model of GPUs to optimize application mapping and allocation to CPU-GPU systems. The algorithm partitions the application, which is specified as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), for a CPU-GPU platform to meet the objectives specified by the user. The effectiveness of our methodology is demonstrated by efficiently partitioning and executing MJPEG decoder and benchmark applications on a CPU-GPU system.