Heterogeneous Heartbeats: A framework for dynamic management of Autonomous SoCs

Modern computer systems are formed from many interacting systems and heterogeneous components, that face increasing constraints on performance, power consumption, and temperature. Such systems have complex run-time dynamics which cannot easily be predicted or modelled at design-time, creating a need for online dynamic systems management. The Heartbeats API is a popular open source project which provides a standardised way for applications to monitor and publish their progress in multi-core CPU systems, but it does not allow hardware components to be monitored or to observe the progress of other components of the system. This paper presents work which extends the capacities of the Heartbeats API across the whole system while maintaining backwards compatibility with the legacy software API. To demonstrate the framework's capabilities an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) case study is explored, where a power-aware HW/SW image processing application is implemented on a reconfigurable SoC and an approximate energy saving of 30% is observed for an example input video. Current progress is also discussed on some applications which build upon the framework, including an CubeSat experiment for an Adaptive Heterogeneous FDIR system that will launch in 2016 by the European Space Agency.