Presentation title

Enabling the exploration of the design space of monitoring systems: a new system-level approach

Authors

Giacomo Valente, Luigi Pomante, Tania Di Mascio and Federica Caruso

Institution(s)

University of L'Aquila

Presentation type

Technical presentation

Abstract

Billion transistor systems-on-chip even more frequently require both dynamic management of their HW/SW components and a careful coordination of the tasks they carry out.

Several monitoring systems assist towards these objectives by means of the collection of raw data useful to evaluate important system metrics.

However, monitoring systems, generally introduced in the last steps of the HW/SW design flow -- such as code instrumentation -- also provide some level of intrusiveness and overhead, leading to barely optimised design choices.

To address this issue, the literature is raising up the abstraction level at which monitoring requirements are introduced in the design flow up to the system level. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, no literature works consider monitoring requirements as part of a design space exploration, keeping them into account only at synthesis time. Consequently, the growing of the number and complexity of monitoring requirements might blow up the final system solution.

To face this problem, in this presentation we propose an innovative approach to enable the exploration of the monitoring systems design space at system level, considering the monitoring requirements into a HW/SW co-design flow.

In particular, first we propose a general enough HW/SW classification and characterisation of monitoring systems to adequately consider them at system-level. Second, we manage the monitoring requirements in a way to be considered as input for the design space exploration. Third, the steps to obtain a final monitored system are reported.

In order to perform experimental activities, we preliminary integrate the proposed approach with an existing open-source HW/SW co-design tool, and then we experiment the proposed approach with a real-world use-case.

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Additional material

• Presentation slides: [pdf]