Automated energy/performance macromodeling of embedded software

Anish Muttreja, Anand Raghunathan, Srivaths Ravi, Niraj K. Jha

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Efficient energy and performance estimation of embedded software is a critical part of any system-level design flow. Macromodeling based estimation is an attempt to speed up estimation by exploiting reuse that is inherent in the design process. Macromodeling involves pre-characterizing reusable software components to construct high-level models, which express the execution time or energy consumption of a sub-program as a function of suitable parameters. During simulation, macromodels can be used instead of detailed hardware models, resulting in orders of magnitude simulation speedup. However, in order to realize this potential, significant challenges need to be overcome in both the generation and use of macromodels - including how to identify the parameters to be used in the macromodel, how to define the template function to which the macromodel is fitted, etc. This paper presents an automatic methodology to perform characterization-based high-level software macromodeling, which addresses the aforementioned issues. Given a sub-program to be macromodeled for execution time and/or energy consumption, the proposed methodology automates the steps of parameter identification, data collection through detailed simulation, macromodel template selection, and fitting. We propose a novel technique to identify potential macromodel parameters and perform data collection, which draws from the concept of data structure serialization used in distributed programming. We utilize symbolic regression techniques to concurrently filter out irrelevant macromodel parameters, construct a macromodel function, and derive the optimal coefficient values to minimize fitting error. Experiments with several realistic benchmarks suggest that the proposed methodology improves estimation accuracy and enables wide applicability of macromodeling to complex embedded software, while realizing its potential for estimation speedup. We describe a case study of how macromodeling can be used to rapidly explore algorithm-level energy tradeoffs, for the zlib data compression library.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)99-102
Number of pages4
JournalProceedings - Design Automation Conference
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004
EventProceedings of the 41st Design Automation Conference - San Diego, CA, United States
Duration: Jun 7 2004Jun 11 2004

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Control and Systems Engineering

Keywords

  • Data Serialization
  • Embedded Software
  • Genetic Programming
  • Macromodeling
  • Symbolic Regression

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