A Flexible Framework for Fast Multi-objective Design Space Exploration of Embedded Systems

Abstract

AbstractThe evaluation of the best system-level architecture in terms of energy and performance is of mainly importance for a broad range of embedded SOC platforms. In this paper, we address the problem of the efficient exploration of the architectural design space for parameterized microprocessor-based systems. The architectural design space is multi-objective, so our aim is to find all the Pareto-optimal configurations representing the best power-performance design trade-offs by varying the architectural parameters of the target system. In particular, the paper presents a Design Space Exploration (DSE) framework tuned to efficiently derive Pareto-optimal curves. The main characteristics of the proposed framework consist of its flexibility and modularity, mainly in terms of target architecture, related system-level executable models, exploration algorithms and system-level metrics. The analysis of the proposed framework has been carried out for a parameterized superscalar architecture executing a selected set of benchmarks. The reported results have shown a reduction of the simulation time of up to three orders of magnitude with respect to the full search strategy, while maintaining a good level of accuracy (under 4% on average).KeywordsDesign SpaceVery Large Scale IntegrationDesign Space ExplorationPareto PointTarget ArchitectureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.