An educational environment for designing and performance tuning of embedded systems
Pages 29 - es
Abstract
Teaching how to design and tune an embedded system is indeed a difficult task, since the student has to learn the many trade-offs that lead to the final system configuration.
Existing tools are often too complex, or do not stress the basic steps in the design path. These steps are very useful during the first training sessions.
The environment Csim 2, which is used at our university, permits the student to become familiar with concepts of program locality, cache structure and performance tuning, while analyzing actual data produced by the actual software that has to be tied with the embedded system.
The student can analyze program behavior by means of locality graphs, or run extensive parametric simulations in order to find the best configuration that minimize either system cost, power consumption, or execution time. Further optimizations allow the designer to explore more sophisticated features like selective cacheing, cache locking, scratch memory, and code mapping for better cache exploitation.
In this paper we show the basic capabilities of the environment, and some example of training sessions. By means of graphs about program locality and performance metrics, the student is readily conducted to learn how to select an adequate embedded system configuration.
References
[1]
{CCITT84} 32 Kbit/s Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (ADPCM), CCITT (Int'l Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee), 1984.
[2]
{Easton78} M. Easton, "Computation of cold-start miss ratio," IEEE Trans. Computers, vol. C-27, no. 5, pp. 404--8, May 1978.
[3]
{Furber93} S. B. Furber, P. Day, J. D. Garsidex, N. C. Paver, and J. V. Woods, "A Micropipelined ARM," Proc. IFIP TC 10/WG 10.5 Int'l Conf. on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI '93), Sept. 1993.
[4]
{Gajski95} D. D. Gajski and F. Vahid, "Specification and Design of Embedded Software-Hardware Systems," IEEE Design & Test of Computers, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 1995.
[5]
{Gallagher81} N. Gallagher and G. Wise, "A theoretical analysis of the properties of median filters," IEEE Trans. Acoustics Speech and Signal Proc., vol. 29, pp. 1136--1141, 1981.
[6]
{Grimsrud96} K. Grimsrud, J. Archibald, R. Frost, and B. Nelson, "Locality as a Visualization Tool," IEEE Trans. Computers, vol. 45, no. 11, pp. 1319--1326, Nov. 1996.
[7]
{Jaggar97} D. Jaggar, "ARM Architecture and Systems," IEEE Micro, pp. 9--11, July 1997.
[8]
{Lorenzini98} S. Lorenzini, G. Luculli, and C. A. Prete, "A Fast Procedure Placement Algorithm for Optimal Cache Use," Proc. MELECON'98, Tel Aviv, Israel, May 1998.
[9]
{Prete97b} C. A. Prete, M. Graziano, and F. Lazzarini, "The ChARM Tool for Tuning Embedded Systems: Selecting and tuning system configurations to meet cost, performance, and power consumption requirements," IEEE Micro, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 67--76, July/Aug. 1997.
[10]
{Wallace91} G. K. Wallace, "The JPEG Still Picture Compression Standard," Communications of the ACM, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 30--44, Apr. 1991.
- An educational environment for designing and performance tuning of embedded systems
Recommendations
A cache design for high performance embedded systems
Cache exploitation in embedded systemsFuture embedded applications will require high performance processors integrating fast and low-power cache. Dynamic Non-Uniform Cache Architectures (D-NUCA) have been proposed to overcome the performance limit introduced by wire delays when designing ...
A Self-Tuning Cache Architecture for Embedded Systems
DATE '04: Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe - Volume 1Memory accesses can account for about half of a microprocessor system's power consumption. Customizing a microprocessor cache's total size, line size and associativity to a particular program is well known to have tremendous benefits for performance and ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
June 1998
116 pages
ISBN:9781450347365
DOI:10.1145/1275182
Copyright © 1998 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 01 June 1998
Check for updates
Qualifiers
- Article
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 9 of 10 submissions, 90%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 141Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)23
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 30 Nov 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in