SHF: Small: Uncertainty Modeling and Design Methods for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

未来的嵌入式系统将包含数十个和预计数百个不同的核心。然而，复杂性和异构性的增加带来了新的设计和优化挑战，包括由于工艺、电压和温度变化而增加的设计不确定性，以及由于故障率上升而导致的可靠性降低。因此，重新思考现有的嵌入式系统设计方法势在必行，以便在设计和优化过程中直接考虑这些问题。为了应对这些挑战，本研究开发了一种新的设计方法来解决增加的不确定性，并提高未来复杂嵌入式系统的可靠性和性能。这种新的设计方法是在一般概率不确定性模型和非概率不确定性模型的基础上发展起来的。这些不确定性模型被用来开发一个多目标计算机辅助设计自动化框架，该框架结合了基于蒙特卡罗技术和进化算法的几种算法创新。所提出的设计流程的核心是硬件/软件协同综合或映射问题，该问题通过改进的进化算法来解决。通过连接多个研究领域，包括不确定性建模、嵌入式系统的硬件/软件协同综合、稳健的多目标优化以及设计自动化工具开发，所提出的设计方法使更好的嵌入式系统的开发成为可能，这些系统通过从汽车和消费电子到军事和空间的应用对社会产生日益戏剧性的影响。这项拟议的研究还与旨在激励女学生追求科学、技术、工程和数学职业的广泛和多样化的教育和推广计划紧密结合在一起。更广泛地说，该项目的结果为旨在为下一代嵌入式系统建立稳健的多目标优化的后续研究奠定了基础，从而对未来集成系统的设计产生了重大影响。

Future embedded systems will contain tens and projected hundreds of heterogeneous cores. The increased complexity and heterogeneity, however, come with new design and optimization challenges including increased design uncertainties due to process, voltage, and temperature variations and poor reliability due to elevated rates of faults. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink existing embedded system design approaches in order to directly consider these issues during the design and optimization processes. To address these challenges, this research develops a new design method to address the increased uncertainties and to improve reliability and performance of future complex embedded systems. This new design method is developed with both general probabilistic and non-probabilistic uncertainty models. These uncertainty models are used to develop a multi-objective computer-aided design automation framework, which incorporates several algorithmic innovations based on Monte Carlo techniques and evolutionary algorithms. At the heart of the proposed design flow lies the hardware/software co-synthesis or mapping problem, which is solved with enhanced evolutionary algorithms. By bridging several areas of research including uncertainty modeling, hardware/software co-synthesis of embedded systems, robust multi-objective optimization, and design automation tools development, the proposed design method enables the development of better embedded systems, which have an increasingly dramatic impact on society via applications ranging from automotive and consumer electronics to military and space. The proposed research is also closely integrated with a broad and diverse education and outreach plan aimed at inspiring female students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. More broadly, the results of this project impact significantly the design of future integrated systems by building the foundation for subsequent studies aimed at establishing robust multi-objective optimization for next-generation embedded systems.