Automated checkpointing for enabling intensive applications on energy harvesting devices
Azalia Mirhoseini, Ebrahim M. Songhori, Farinaz Koushanfar · International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design · 2013
We propose a framework that enables intensive computation on ultra-low power devices with discontinuous energy-harvesting supplies. We devise an optimization algorithm that efficiently partitions the applications into smaller computational steps during high-level synthesis. Our system finds low-overhead checkpoints that minimize recomputation cost due to power losses, then inserts the checkpoints at the design's register-transfer level. The checkpointing rate is automatically adapted to the source's realtime behavior. We evaluate our mechanisms on a battery-less RF energy-harvester platform. Extensive experiments targeting applications in medical implant devices demonstrate our approach's ability to successfully execute complex computations for various supply patterns with low time, energy, and area overheads.