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

Handheld devices such as cell phones, tablets and wearables, are gaining

rapid adoption in a ubiquitous world. Correspondingly, there is an

explosion of very demanding and interactive applications such as media

streaming, interactive games, video conferencing and social networking,

that users are deploying on such devices. Despite tremendous

improvements in the energy efficiencies of individual components found

in these devices, piece-meal optimizations of hardware components are

inadequate to accommodate the demanding needs of these applications that

employ multiple CPU cores, accelerators, memory systems, system

peripherals and sensors, concurrently in very sophisticated ways. Lack

of coordination among system resources leads to low resource utilization

and poor system-level energy efficiencies when running such

applications. Rather than throw more hardware at this problem, this

project proposes VIADUCT, which allocates and orchestrates system-level

resources to boost parallelism and resource utilization for these

platforms in a more energy-efficient fashion.

Recognizing that many of these applications periodically process frames

of data that need to flow in a pipelined manner through several hardware

components within soft real-time bounds, VIADUCT creates a virtual

channel per flow of such frames in an application. The channel holds

resources allocated across all the hardware components, with runtime

coordination to ensure seamless frame movements without the conventional

interface inefficiencies across the components. Fine-grain scheduling

and resource management leverages knowledge of high level semantics to

provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) for each flow in the most

energy-efficient fashion. The specific research contributions are in

hardware interfaces, mechanisms and policies to chain the hardware

components for creating a virtual channel for a flow, architecting the

memory system as an efficient conduit to sustain this flow, and

designing the system to sustain several concurrent flows. The project

aims to provide a holistic evaluation testbed for such platforms amongst

the broader research community, and also aims to involve

under-represented groups in the research and enhance Penn State?s

curriculum in related topics.