A case study into predictable and composable MPSoC reconfiguration

The number of applications running concurrently on a MPSoC is ever increasing. Moreover, the set of running applications is often unknown at design-time. Part of the resource allocation decisions must therefore be deferred to run-time. This requires a run-time manager to optimize the resource usage of the system to preserve energy and allow as many applications as possible to use the resources simultaneously. An effective resource manager should therefore be able to reconfigure the resource assignment of running applications. To this end, a run-time task migration mechanism is needed. A user should however not notice the reconfiguration, as this would impact the perceived quality of the system. Hence, the reconfiguration mechanism should provide timing guarantees on its operation and it should not interfere with other applications running on the same system (i.e., it should be predictable and composable). In this paper, we present a practical implementation of such a predictable and composable MPSoC reconfiguration mechanism. We demonstrate the use of this mechanism on a JPEG decoder whose tasks are migrated at run-time while running on a state-of-the-art MPSoC platform