A platform for developing adaptable multicore applications

Computer systems are resource constrained. Application adaptation is a useful way to optimize system resource usage while satisfying the application performance constraints. Previous application adaptation efforts, however, were ad-hoc, time-consuming, and highly application-specific with limited portability between computer systems. In this work, our goal is to provide a development platform to systematically explore and rigorously apply portable application-specific runtime optimization. We present OCCAM, a software platform for developing multicore adaptive applications. OCCAM's design-time platform consists of APIs and data structures that allow application developers to specify the performance constraints and application-specific optimization techniques. OCCAM's run-time system dynamically manages the application behavior and optimizes system resource usage. OCCAM targets emerging Recognition, Mining, and Synthesis Applications (RMS). Using a set of RMS benchmarks, the experimental study demonstrates that OCCAM can successfully optimize resource usage under application performance constraints across a wide range of computer platforms, with an average of 38% energy savings on an Intel Atom-based, energy-constrained portable system, and an average of 24% energy savings on a high-performance, dual-core computer platform. These savings are accomplished with low overhead. We have also successfully extended OCCAM applications to run on a 16-core setup.