High level analysis of multiprocessor system on chip

Issam Maalej (1, 2) , Guy Gogniat (2) , Mohamed Abid (1) , Jean Luc Philippe (2)

1 CES - Computer, Electronics & Smart engineering systems design
2 LESTER - Laboratoire d'Electronique des Systèmes TEmps Réel

Traditionally codesign flow aims to help the designers to take decisions about the system architecture, however due to the complexity of both system architectures and applications it is now necessary to perform before any codesign flow a first application analysis step in order to highlight the application's specificity. An efficient way to analyze the application is to define accurate metrics that exhibit the application's specificity impacting the system performance. In this paper, we propose several metrics that allow an efficient analysis of a system right after the specification of the application (tasks graph) before any design flow step. These metrics enable to measure some characteristics of the application as communication data size and data sharing between tasks... As they are defined before any design flow step they do not measure directly the system performance or the costs but they provide information that leads to optimize these costs. Several experimental results performed on an UMTS application demonstrate the efficiency of these metrics to exhibit the main characteristics of an application. The results also show the ability of the proposed metrics to correctly measure the applications specificity. Finally, the results show the interest of the metrics to be used in a clustering approach or other codesign flow.

Domaines: Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]

Issam Maalej, Guy Gogniat, Mohamed Abid, Jean Luc Philippe. High level analysis of multiprocessor system on chip. 2004, pp.8. ⟨hal-00089415⟩