Power-Aware Phase Oriented Reconfigurable Architecture
Guilherme Korol, Michael Guilherme Jordan, Marcelo Brandalero, Mateus Beck Rutzig, Antonio Carlos Schneider Beck · 2019
CGRAs have emerged as an energy-efficient solution providing on-demand acceleration in heterogeneous systems. However, the diversity and unpredictability of workloads pose a challenge in managing CGRA resources whenever a power budget has to be met. This work proposes a hardware module to, transparently and automatically, perform power-gating of CGRA resources. The module implements a greedy algorithm to find the near-optimal CGRA size, which is particular to the current application phase, so part of the CGRA can be switched off with no (or little) performance penalty. As soon as a change in program phase is detected, the proposed method can adapt the CGRA to the phase in progress. Results show an average of 29% power reduction and 43% energy reduction with 1.4% performance penalty compared to a CGRA with no power management.