Graph-based Performance Estimation on Customized MIPS Processors
Saaim Valiani · RIT Scholar Works (Rochester Institute of Technology) · 2018
The desire for greater processor performance with shrinking technologies and increasing heterogeneity, leads to a need for improvement in performance estimation. Being able to estimate the performance of an application without needing to implement the application on the available hardware and soft-core choices can decrease development time and help expedite the process of choosing which platform would be the best choice to use for development. This thesis work focuses on using a graph-based description of an application to estimate performance. By using a graph-based approach, the need for a hardware specific implementation is eliminated and the design space is simplified. Breaking down an application into a graph allows a new approach review to be taken as nodes of the graph can be assigned to levels in the pipelined architecture. This research uses pipelined customized Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) processors as the platform choice. The customized ISA soft-core processors allow the user more control over the resources used in the processor and provides a viable hardware/software choice to demonstrate the capabilities of the graph-based approach. The testcase applications used were the Dot Product, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) application, and the AES with TBox application. The results of this work show that performance can be accurately estimated on a customized processor using a graph-based approach for the application with accuracy ranging from approximately 75% to 89%.