On Exploiting Energy-Aware Scheduling Algorithms for MDE-Based Design Space Exploration of MP2SoC

Massively Parallel Multi-Processors System-on-Chip (MP2SoC) architectures have been widely deployed to run challenging high-performance computations. However, the ever greater demand for energy efficiency fosters energy budgeting in MP2SoC systems. Nowadays, having the appropriate Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools for power estimation is mandatory. The major challenge for the design of such tools is to reach a better tradeoff between accuracy and time-to-market. This paper presents a Model Driven Engineering (MDE)-based energy-aware Design Space Exploration (DSE) approach allowing the designer to take the power consumption criterion into account early in the design flow. The originality of this approach is that it integrates the Energy-Aware Duplication (EAD) algorithm that strives to balance schedule lengths and energy savings by considering the most important sources of energy consumption in MP2SoC: the massive number of processing elements (PE) and the high-speed Network-on-Chip (NoC). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conducted experiments using the H.263 encoder application. The obtained results demonstrated that EAD can effectively save energy in MP2SoC systems. They also showed that our MDE approach is capable of accelerating the DSE process to make early energy-efficient design decisions.