Modeling and Optimization of Parallel and Distributed Embedded Systems
Arslan Munir, Ross Gordon, Sanjay Ranka · 2016
Advancements in silicon technology, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), wireless communications, computer networking, and digital electronics have led to the proliferation of embedded systems in a plethora of application domains (e.g., industrial and home automation, automotive, space, medical, defense, etc.). To meet the diverse application requirements of these application domains, novel trends have emerged in embedded systems. Many times, the embedded systems in an application domain are networked together to form a multi-unit embedded system, also referred to as a distributed embedded system, which permits sophisticated applications of greater value as compared to an isolated single-unit embedded system. An emerging trend is to connect these distributed embedded systems via a wireless network instead of a bulky, wired networking infrastructure. Another emerging trend in embedded systems is to leverage multi-core (many-core) architectures to meet the continuously increasing performance demands of many application domains (e.g., medical imaging, mobile signal processing). Both single-unit and multi-unit distributed embedded systems can leverage multi-core architectures for attaining high performance and energy efficiency. The burgeoning of multi-core architectures in embedded systems induces parallel computing in embedded domain, which was previously used predominantly in supercomputing domain only. For both parallel and distributed embedded systems, modeling and optimization at various design levels (e.g., verification, simulation, analysis) is of paramount significance. Considering the short time-to-market for many embedded systems, embedded systems designers often resort to modeling approaches for evaluation of design alternatives in terms of performance, power, reliability, and/or scalability. In this dissertation, we focus on modeling, analysis, and optimization of parallel and distributed embedded systems. To illustrate the modeling and optimization of distributed embedded systems, we present our work on modeling and optimization of embedded sensor nodes in an embedded wireless sensor network (EWSN). We elaborate additional modeling issues in parallel embedded systems by our performance modeling of multi-core embedded systems. Finally, we conduct performance analysis of parallel embedded systems based on symmetric multi-processors (SMPs) and tiled multi-core architectures (TMAs).