HDGM: Hierarchical Dynamic Goal Management for Many-Core Resource Allocation
Amir M. Rahmani, Axel Jantsch, Nikil D. Dutt · IEEE Embedded Systems Letters · 2017
Many-core systems are highly complex and require thorough orchestration of different goals across the computing abstraction stack to satisfy embedded system constraints. Contemporary resource management approaches typically focus on a fixed objective, while neglecting the need for replanning (i.e., updating the objective function). This trend is particularly observable in existing resource allocation and application mapping approaches that allocate a task to a tile to maximize a fixed objective (e.g., the cores' and network's performance), while minimizing others (e.g., latency and power consumption). However, embedded system goals typically vary over time, and also over abstraction levels, requiring a new approach to orchestrate these varying goals. We motivate the problem by showcasing conflicts resulting from state-of-the-art fixed-objective resource allocation approaches, and highlight the need to incorporate dynamic goal management from the very early stages of design. We then present the concept of a hierarchical dynamic goal manager that considers the priority, significance, and constraints of each application, while holistically coupling the overlapping and/or contradicting goals of different applications to satisfy embedded system constraints.