A Flexible Framework for Fast Multi-Objective Design Space Exploration of Embedded Systems

Gianluca Palermo, Cristina Silvano, Vittorio Zaccaria
January 2003
Cite DOI URL

Abstract

The evaluation of the best system-level architecture in terms of energy and performance is of mainly importance for a broad range of embedded SOC platforms. In this paper, we address the problem of the efficient exploration of the architectural design space for parameterized microprocessor-based systems. The architectural design space is multi-objective, so our aim is to find all the Pareto-optimal configurations representing the best power-performance design trade-offs by varying the architectural parameters of the target system. In particular, the paper presents a Design Space Exploration (DSE) framework tuned to efficiently derive Pareto-optimal curves. The main characteristics of the proposed framework consist of its flexibility and modularity, mainly in terms of target architecture, related system-level executable models, exploration algorithms and system-level metrics. The analysis of the proposed framework has been carried out for a parameterized superscalar architecture executing a selected set of benchmarks. The reported results have shown a reduction of the simulation time of up to three orders of magnitude with respect to the full search strategy, while maintaining a good level of accuracy (under 4% on average).

Type
Conference paper
Publication
Proceedings of PATMOS 2003: IEEE International Workshop on Power and Timing Modeling, Optimization and Simulation
Gianluca Palermo
Gianluca Palermo
Full Professor

Gianluca Palermo received the M.Sc. degree in Electronic Engineering in 2002, and the Ph.D degree in Computer Engineering in 2006 from Politecnico di Milano. He is currently an associate professor at Department of Electronics and Information Technology in the same University. Previously he was also consultant engineer in the Low Power Design Group of AST – STMicroelectronics working on network on-chip and research assistant at the Advanced Learning and Research Institute (ALaRI) of the Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland). His research interests include design methodologies and architectures for embedded and HPC systems, focusing on AutoTuning aspects.

Vittorio Zaccaria
Vittorio Zaccaria
Associate Professor

I am an associate professor at Politecnico di Milano and I have worked in embedded processor architecture R&D for one of the top semiconductor companies in the world. My group is currently working on topics related to embedded systems (hardware and software), security, cryptography, operating systems.