Characterization of Multi-core Processors for Power-Estimation at System-level

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Nebel
• Subject Area: Computer Architecture, Embedded and Massively Parallel Systems
• Term: from 2010 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 166220900

The overall goal of this cooperative project is to advance the understanding of the relation between power consumption of multi-core processors, their architecture und the applications running on them. This will lead to compact yet accurate models of their power dissipation under consideration of architectural parameters and under consideration of the particular application software. These models can be used to fast yet sufficiently accurate estimate the power consumption of different system configurations and hence enable an efficient design space exploration of power aware embedded systems. Finally the project will contribute to the competitiveness of the European semiconductor, system integrator and EDA industry as well as the Indian design industry by addressing the problem of platform-based design space exploration (DSE) under consideration of power and performance constraints early in the design process. High performance usually causes high power consumption. As a consequence, a main challenge in today s embedded system design is to find the perfect balance between performance and power, which is addressed by this proposal. From a scientific perspective this project s objective for achieving the above goal is to develop a characterization-methodology with focus on embedded multi-core processor power dissipation on a very high level of abstraction, allowing fast and early power estimations. The basic block granularity at TLM2 proposed in this project serves as best trade-off between accuracy and estimation time. Eventually, the project will help to establish a closer working cooperation between the two project partners University of Oldenburg and IIT Delhi, strengthening their cooperation through a joint R&D project, and at the same time increasing mobility of the involved researchers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: India
• Partner Organisation: Department of Science and Technology (DST)
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. M. Balakrishnan