Resource Manager for Non-preemptive Heterogeneous Multiprocessor System-on-chip

Increasingly more MPSoC platforms are being developed to meet the rising demands from concurrently executing applications. These systems are often heterogeneous with the use of dedicated IP blocks and application domain specific processors. While there is a host of research done to provide good performance guarantees and to analyze applications for preemptive uniprocessor systems, the field of heterogeneous, non-preemptive MPSoCs is a mostly unexplored territory. In this paper, we propose to use a resource manager (RM) to improve the resource utilization of these systems. The basic functionalities of such a component are introduced. A high-level simulation model of such a system is developed to study the performance of RM, and a case study is performed for a system running an H.263 and a JPEG decoder. The case study illustrates at what control granularity a resource manager can effectively regulate the progress of applications such that they meet their performance requirements