SHF: Small: Virtualizing Coordinated Resource Management of Flows on Handhelds with VIADUCT

Pennsylvania State Univ University Park, University Park PA

Investigators

Abstract

Handheld devices such as cell phones, tablets and wearables, are gaining rapid adoption in a ubiquitous world. Correspondingly, there is an explosion of very demanding and interactive applications such as media streaming, interactive games, video conferencing and social networking, that users are deploying on such devices. Despite tremendous improvements in the energy efficiencies of individual components found in these devices, piece-meal optimizations of hardware components are inadequate to accommodate the demanding needs of these applications that employ multiple CPU cores, accelerators, memory systems, system peripherals and sensors, concurrently in very sophisticated ways. Lack of coordination among system resources leads to low resource utilization and poor system-level energy efficiencies when running such applications. Rather than throw more hardware at this problem, this project proposes VIADUCT, which allocates and orchestrates system-level resources to boost parallelism and resource utilization for these platforms in a more energy-efficient fashion. Recognizing that many of these applications periodically process frames of data that need to flow in a pipelined manner through several hardware components within soft real-time bounds, VIADUCT creates a virtual channel per flow of such frames in an application. The channel holds resources allocated across all the hardware components, with runtime coordination to ensure seamless frame movements without the conventional interface inefficiencies across the components. Fine-grain scheduling and resource management leverages knowledge of high level semantics to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) for each flow in the most energy-efficient fashion. The specific research contributions are in hardware interfaces, mechanisms and policies to chain the hardware components for creating a virtual channel for a flow, architecting the memory system as an efficient conduit to sustain this flow, and designing the system to sustain several concurrent flows. The project aims to provide a holistic evaluation testbed for such platforms amongst the broader research community, and also aims to involve under-represented groups in the research and enhance Penn State?s curriculum in related topics.