ARDiS: A Portable and Unified Resource Management Framework in Real Hardware Systems

Abstract

Designing efficient RM strategies is a cornerstone of modern computing, driving innovations in performance optimization, energy efficiency, and security. While simulators have long been the go-to tools for RM research, they fail to balance accuracy and practicality: high-fidelity simulators are excruciatingly slow, and low-fidelity ones compromise on reliability. Real hardware offers unparalleled precision and accuracy but remains underutilized due to significant barriers, including fragmented implementations, lack of portability, and prohibitive development overhead. We present ARDiS, the first open-source 1 and portable framework to provide a unified, architecture-agnostic platform for running system-level resource management (RM) techniques directly on real hardware. ARDiS eliminates the need to “reinvent the wheel,” enabling researchers to design, implement, and evaluate sophisticated RM strategies—including machine learning-based approaches—with minimal effort and maximum reproducibility. To demonstrate its versatility, we evaluate ARDiS on two real-world hardware platforms: a server-grade heterogeneous processor (Intel i9-12900) and a resource-constrained embedded system (NVIDIA Jetson TX2). Through extensive experimentation, we validate the ability of ARDiS to deliver accurate, scalable, and reproducible results across diverse platforms and application domains. By lowering the barriers to hardware-based RM research, ARDiS empowers the design automation community to explore new frontiers in system-level optimization and innovation.