Reducing complexity of multiobjective design space exploration in VLIW-based embedded systems

Abstract

Architectures based on very-long instruction word (VLIW) have found fertile ground in multimedia electronic appliances thanks to their ability to exploit high degrees of instruction level parallelism (ILP) with a reasonable trade-off in complexity and silicon cost. Specialization of such architectures involves the configuration of both hardware-related aspects (e.g., register files, functional units, memory subsystem) and software-related issues (e.g., the compilation strategy). The complex interactions between the components of such systems will force a human designer to rely on judgment and experience in designing them, possibly eliminating interesting configurations, and making tuning of the system, for either power, energy, or performance, difficult. In this paper we propose tools and methodologies to efficiently cope with this complexity from a multiobjective perspective. We first analyze the impact of ILP-oriented code transformations using two alternative compilation profiles to quantitatively show the effect of such transformations on typical design objectives like performance, power dissipation, and energy consumption. Next, by means of statistical analysis, we collect useful data to predict the effectiveness of a given compilation profiles for a specific application. Information gathered from such analysis can be exploited to drastically reduce the computational effort needed to perform the design space exploration.