Transparent and energy-efficient speculation on NUMA architectures for embedded MPSoCs

Abstract

High-end embedded systems such as smart phones, game consoles, GPS-enabled automotive systems, and home entertainment centers, are becoming ubiquitous. Like their general-purpose counterparts, and for many of the same energy-related reasons, embedded systems are turning to multicore architectures. Moreover, as the demand for more compute-intensive capabilities for embedded systems increases, these multicore architectures will evolve into many-core systems for improved performance or performance/area/Watt. These systems are often organized as cluster based Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures that provide the programmer with a shared-memory abstraction, with the cost of sharing memory (in terms of performance, energy, and complexity) varying substantially depending on the locations of the communicating processes. This paper investigates one of the principal challenges presented by these emerging NUMA architectures for embedded systems: providing efficient, energy-effective and convenient mechanisms for synchronization and communication. In this paper, we propose an initial solution based on hardware support for speculative synchronization.