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

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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.