Toward Efficient Execution of RVC-CAL Dataflow Programs on Multicore PlatformsHautala, Ilkka; Boutellier, Jani; Nyländen, Teemu; Silvén, Olli
doi: 10.1007/s11265-018-1339-xpmid: N/A
The increasing number of cores in System on Chips (SoC) has introduced challenges in software parallelization. As an answer to this, the dataflow programming model offers a concurrent and reusability promoting approach for describing applications. In this work, a runtime for executing Dataflow Process Networks (DPN) on multicore platforms is proposed. The main difference between this work and existing methods is letting the operating system perform Central processing unit (CPU) load-balancing freely, instead of limiting thread migration between processing cores through CPU affinity. The proposed runtime is benchmarked on desktop and server multicore platforms using five different applications from video coding and telecommunication domains. The results show that the proposed method offers significant improvements over the state-of-art, in terms of performance and reliability.
Instruction Fetch Energy Reduction with Biased SRAMsMultanen, Joonas; Viitanen, Timo; Jääskeläinen, Pekka; Takala, Jarmo
doi: 10.1007/s11265-018-1367-6pmid: N/A
Especially in programmable processors, energy consumption of integrated memories can become a limiting design factor due to thermal dissipation power constraints and limited battery capacity. Consequently, contemporary improvement efforts on memory technologies are focusing more on the energy-efficiency aspects, which has resulted in biased CMOS SRAM cells that increase energy efficiency by favoring one logical value over another. In this paper, xor-masking, a method for exploiting such contemporary low power SRAM memories is proposed to improve the energy-efficiency of instruction fetching. Xor-masking utilizes static program analysis statistics to produce optimal encoding masks to reduce the occurrence of the more energy consuming instruction bit values in the fetched instructions. The method is evaluated on LatticeMico32, a small RISC core popular in ultra low power designs, and on a wide instruction word high performance low power DSP. Compared to the previous “bus invert” technique typically used with similar SRAMs, the proposed method reduces instruction read energy consumption of the LatticeMico32 by up to 13% and 38% on the DSP core.
SFF—The Single-Stream FPGA-Optimized Feedforward FFT Hardware ArchitectureIngemarsson, Carl; Gustafsson, Oscar
doi: 10.1007/s11265-018-1370-ypmid: N/A
In this paper, a fast Fourier transform (FFT) hardware architecture optimized for field-programmable gate-arrays (FPGAs) is proposed. We refer to this as the single-stream FPGA-optimized feedforward (SFF) architecture. By using a stage that trades adders for shift registers as compared with the single-path delay feedback (SDF) architecture the efficient implementation of short shift registers in Xilinx FPGAs can be exploited. Moreover, this stage can be combined with ordinary or optimized SDF stages such that adders are only traded for shift registers when beneficial. The resulting structures are well-suited for FPGA implementation, especially when efficient implementation of short shift registers is available. This holds for at least contemporary Xilinx FPGAs. The results show that the proposed architectures improve on the current state of the art.
Parallel Memory Accessing for FFT ArchitecturesKitsakis, V.; Nakos, K.; Reisis, D.; Vlassopoulos, N.
doi: 10.1007/s11265-018-1387-2pmid: N/A
The current paper introduces an efficient technique for parallel data addressing in FFT architectures performing in-place computations. The novel addressing organization provides parallel load and store of the data involved in radix-r butterfly computations and leads to an efficient architecture when r is a power of 2. The addressing scheme is based on a permutation of the FFT data, which leads to the improvement of the address generating circuit and the butterfly processor control. Moreover, the proposed technique is suitable for mixed radix applications, especially for radixes that are powers of 2 and straightforward continuous flow implementation. The paper presents the technique and the resulting FFT architecture and shows the advantages of the architecture compared to hitherto published results. The implementations on a Xilinx FPGA Virtex-7 VC707 of the in-place radix-8 FFT architectures with input sizes 64 and 512 complex points validate the results.
Design Space Exploration of 1-D FFT ProcessorLiu, Shaohan; Liu, Dake
doi: 10.1007/s11265-018-1393-4pmid: N/A
A design space exploration methodology of 1-D FFT processor is proposed to find the best hardware architecture in a quantitative way during early design. The methodology includes architecture candidate collection, coarse-grained architecture selection, and circuit level design optimizations. We show how to select a better architecture from candidates including different architectures (SDF, SDC, MDF, MDC and memory-based) with different degree of parallelism at different radices. The sub-level designs, including designs of rotator and data scaling module, are introduced for further optimizations. As a proof of concept, an FFT processor for 4G, WLAN and future 5G is designed supporting 16-4096 and 12-2400 point FFTs. Memory-based architecture with 16-datapath mixed-radix butterfly unit is selected to satisfy the demands for 1GS/s (4096) throughput. The synthesis result based on 65nm technology shows that the silicon cost and power consumption are 1.46mm2 and 68.64mW respectively. The proposed processor has better normalized throughput per area unit and normalized FFTs per energy unit than the state of the art available designs.