Energy-aware communication and remapping of tasks for reliable multimedia multiprocessor systems

Abstract

Shrinking transistor geometries, aggressive voltage scaling and higher operating frequencies have negatively impacted the dependability of embedded multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). Fault-tolerance and energy efficiency are the two most desired features of modernday MPSoCs. For most of the multimedia applications, task communication energy constitutes more than 40% of the overall application energy. In this paper, an integer linear programming (ILP) based approach is proposed to reduce the communication energy and fault-tolerant migration overhead of throughput-constrained multimedia applications modeled using synchronous data flow graphs (SDFGs). The ILP is solved at compile-time for all fault-scenarios to generate task-core mappings satisfying an application throughput requirement. These mappings are stored in a table which is looked up at run-time as and when faults occur. Experiments conducted with real and synthetic applications demonstrate that the proposed technique reduces communication energy by an average 40% and migration overhead by 33% as compared to the existing fault-tolerant techniques. © 2012 IEEE.