SHF: Small: Virtualizing Coordinated Resource Management of Flows on Handhelds with VIADUCT

手机、平板电脑和可穿戴设备等手持设备在这个无处不在的世界中得到了迅速的普及。相应地，用户在这些设备上部署的要求非常高的交互式应用程序如媒体流媒体、互动游戏、视频会议和社交网络也呈爆炸式增长。尽管这些设备中单个组件的能效有了极大的提高，但硬件组件的零碎优化不足以满足这些以非常复杂的方式同时使用多个CPU核心、加速器、存储系统、系统外围设备和传感器的应用的苛刻需求。在运行这类应用程序时，系统资源之间缺乏协调会导致资源利用率低和系统级能源效率低下。这个项目没有在这个问题上投入更多的硬件，而是提出了高架桥，它分配和协调系统级资源，以更节能的方式提高这些平台的并行性和资源利用率。高架桥认识到，许多这些应用程序定期处理需要在软实时范围内以流水线方式流经多个硬件组件的数据帧，高架桥在应用程序中为此类帧的流创建一个虚拟通道。该通道保留在所有硬件组件上分配的资源，并具有运行时协调，以确保无缝的帧移动，而不会出现跨组件的传统接口低效。细粒度调度和资源管理利用高级语义知识，以最节能的方式为每个流提供服务质量(Qos)。具体的研究贡献包括硬件接口、机制和策略，用于链接硬件组件以创建流的虚拟通道，将存储系统构建为维持该流的有效管道，以及设计该系统以支持多个并发流。该项目旨在为更广泛的研究社区中的此类平台提供一个全面的评估试验台，并旨在让代表性不足的群体参与研究，并加强宾夕法尼亚州立大学在相关主题中的课程。

Handheld devices such as cell phones, tablets and wearables, are gainingrapid adoption in a ubiquitous world. Correspondingly, there is anexplosion of very demanding and interactive applications such as mediastreaming, interactive games, video conferencing and social networking,that users are deploying on such devices. Despite tremendousimprovements in the energy efficiencies of individual components foundin these devices, piece-meal optimizations of hardware components areinadequate to accommodate the demanding needs of these applications thatemploy multiple CPU cores, accelerators, memory systems, systemperipherals and sensors, concurrently in very sophisticated ways. Lackof coordination among system resources leads to low resource utilizationand poor system-level energy efficiencies when running suchapplications. Rather than throw more hardware at this problem, thisproject proposes VIADUCT, which allocates and orchestrates system-levelresources to boost parallelism and resource utilization for theseplatforms in a more energy-efficient fashion.Recognizing that many of these applications periodically process framesof data that need to flow in a pipelined manner through several hardwarecomponents within soft real-time bounds, VIADUCT creates a virtualchannel per flow of such frames in an application. The channel holdsresources allocated across all the hardware components, with runtimecoordination to ensure seamless frame movements without the conventionalinterface inefficiencies across the components. Fine-grain schedulingand resource management leverages knowledge of high level semantics toprovide Quality-of-Service (QoS) for each flow in the mostenergy-efficient fashion. The specific research contributions are inhardware interfaces, mechanisms and policies to chain the hardwarecomponents for creating a virtual channel for a flow, architecting thememory system as an efficient conduit to sustain this flow, anddesigning the system to sustain several concurrent flows. The projectaims to provide a holistic evaluation testbed for such platforms amongstthe broader research community, and also aims to involveunder-represented groups in the research and enhance Penn State?scurriculum in related topics.