A Distributed Hardware Monitoring System for Runtime Verification on Multi-Tile MPSoCs

Abstract

Exhaustive verification techniques do not scale with the complexity of today’s multi-tile Multi-processor Systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). Hence, runtime verification (RV) has emerged as a complementary method, which verifies the correct behavior of applications executed on the MPSoC during runtime. In this article, we propose a decentralized monitoring architecture for large-scale multi-tile MPSoCs. In order to minimize performance and power overhead for RV, we propose a lightweight and non-intrusive hardware solution. It features a new specialized tracing interconnect that distributes and sorts detected events according to their timestamps. Each tile monitor has a consistent view on a globally sorted trace of events on which the behavior of the target application can be verified using logical and timing requirements. Furthermore, we propose an integer linear programming-based algorithm for the assignment of requirements to monitors to exploit the local resources best. The monitoring architecture is demonstrated for a four-tiled MPSoC with 20 cores implemented on a Virtex-7 field-programmable gate array (FPGA).