CAREER: System-Level Power/Performance Analysis for Embedded Systems Design

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The goal of this research is to provide a set of formal and semiformal techniques for system-level power/performance analysis that can help the designer to select the right platform starting from a set of target applications. By platform we mean a family of heterogeneous architectures (which consist of both programmable and dedicated components) that satisfy a set of architectural constraints imposed to allow re-use of hardware and software components. Following the principle of orthogonalization of concerns during the design process, this methodology is based on the key idea of making a clear distinction between applications and architectures. Our approach to system-level analysis has three main objectives: 1) Application and platform modeling 2) Performance model evaluation 3) Performance model validation. Although the proposed methodology is completely general, our initial focus is on portable embedded multimedia systems (e.g., slim hosts like PDAs, network computers). For these systems, as opposed to the reactive embedded systems used in safety critical applications, the average behavior is far more important than the worst-case behavior. The proposed methodology complements the existing techniques for extreme-case performance analysis by incorporating the environment characteristics into system performance evaluation. Being targeted at system-level, the results of this analysis are not confined to any particular hardware/software implementation. Taken together, our proposed techniques will allow media systems designers to explore architectures more rapidly, estimate the impact of different design choices more robustly, and use large multimedia data benchmarks more effectively.