A survey and taxonomy of on-chip monitoring of multicore systems-on-chip

Abstract

Billion transistor systems-on-chip increasingly require dynamic management of their hardware components and careful coordination of the tasks that they carry out. Diverse real-time monitoring functions assist towards this objective through the collection of important system metrics, such as throughput of processing elements, communication latency, or resource utilization for each application. The online evaluation of these metrics can result in localized or global decisions that attempt to improve aspects of system behavior, system performance, quality-of-service, power and thermal effects under nominal conditions. This work provides a comprehensive categorization of monitoring approaches used in multiprocessor SoCs. As adaptive systems are encountered in many disciplines, it is imperative to present the prominent research efforts in developing online monitoring methods. To this end we offer a taxonomy that groups strongly related techniques that designers increasingly use to produce more efficient and adaptive chips. The provided classification helps to understand and compare architectural mechanisms that can be used in systems, while one can envisage the innovations required to build real adaptive and intelligent systems-on-chip.