Off-Line DVFS Integration in MDE-Based Design Space Exploration Framework for MP2SoC Systems

Abstract

As the speed metric of Massively Parallel Multi-Processors System-on-Chip (MP2SoC) systems has increased over time, another metric has become more important: power consumption. Finding a tradeoff between power consumption and performance early in the design flow of MP2SoC systems in order to satisfy time-to-market is the design challenge of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools. This paper presents a Design Space Exploration (DSE) framework, named Energy-Aware Rapid Design of MP2SoC (EWARDS), aiming at exploring the performance and power capabilities of modern homogenous MP2SoC systems at design time using Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques. The proposed framework extends the Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded systems (MARTE)profile with power aspects of MP2SoC systems providing a high-level design entry. In addition, EWARDS integrates an energy-aware scheduler that strives to balance performance and energy savings by combining clustering scheduling algorithm with off-line Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) power management techniques.