Evaluating energy-aware task allocation strategies for MPSOCS

Abstract

Because of current market trends, the evaluation of task allocation strategies in multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoCs) must take into account both performance and energy consumption. Furthermore, complex interconnection structures, such as networks-on-chip (NoCs), must be considered. Simulators for the evaluation of energy consumption of detailed communication patterns in NoCs are available, as well as performance simulators that consider detailed task execution in processors. However, in order to evaluate task allocation strategies in MPSoCs, these two types of simulation models must be combined, since communication and computation events interfere with each other. Besides that, this simulator must implement low-power mechanisms, such as dynamic voltage scaling (DVS), in order to evaluate allocation algorithms that explore the trade-off between performance and energy. A cycle-accurate simulation of the processor and communication behaviors, however, would be too time-consuming, making impossible a fast exploration of different allocation algorithms. This work presents an MPSoC simulator that implements the appropriate abstractions for a precise evaluation of the energy consumption of task allocation algorithms that explore DVS, which is based on the scheduling of synthetic task graphs. A NoC mesh topology is considered, due to its simplicity and scalability. Experiments that implement the allocation of task graphs using different bin-packing heuristics combined with DVS demonstrate the energy-performance design space that may be explored by task allocation algorithms. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.