A Heterogeneous Cluster with Reconfigurable Accelerator for Energy Efficient Near-Sensor Data Analytics

Satyajit Das (1, 2) , Kevin Martin (1) , Philippe Coussy (1) , Davide Rossi (2)

1 Lab-STICC_UBS_CACS_MOCS
2 DISI - Department of Computer Science and Engineering [Bologna]

IoT end-nodes require high performance and extreme energy efficiency to cope with complex near-sensor data analytics algorithms. Processing on multiple programmable processors operating in near-threshold is emerging as a promising solution to exploit the energy boost given by low-voltage operation, while recovering the related frequency degradation with parallelism. In this work, we present a heterogeneous cluster architecture extending a traditional parallel processor cluster with a reconfigurable Integrated Programmable Array (IPA) accelerator. While programmable processors guarantee programming legacy to easily manage peripherals, radio software stacks as well as the global program flow, offloading data-intensive and control-intensive kernels to the IPA leads to much higher system level performance and energy-efficiency. Experimental results show that the proposed heterogeneous cluster outperforms an 8-core homogeneous architecture by up to 4.8x in performance and 4.5x in energy efficiency when executing a mix of control-intensive and data-intensive kernels typical of near-sensor data analytics applications.

Mots clés: Coarse grain reconfigurable architectures; Multi-core embedded systems

Domaines: Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]; Systèmes embarqués

Satyajit Das, Kevin Martin, Philippe Coussy, Davide Rossi. A Heterogeneous Cluster with Reconfigurable Accelerator for Energy Efficient Near-Sensor Data Analytics. International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), May 2018, Florence, Italy. ⟨hal-01827425⟩