A correlation-based design space exploration methodology for multi-processor systems-on-chip

Given the increasing complexity of multi-processor systems-on-chip, a wide range of parameters must be tuned to find the best trade-offs in terms of the selected system figures of merit (such as energy, delay and area). This optimization phase is called Design Space Exploration (DSE) consisting of a Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) problem. In this paper, we propose an iterative design space exploration methodology exploiting the statistical properties of known system configurations to infer, by means of a correlation-based analysis, the next design points to be analyzed with low-level simulations. In fact, the knowledge of few design points is used to predict the expected improvement of unknown configurations. We show that the correlation of the configurations within the multi-processor design space can be modeled successfully with analytical functions and, thus, speed up the overall exploration phase. This makes the proposed methodology a model-assisted heuristic that, for the first time, exploits the correlation about architectural configurations to converge to the solution of the multi-objective problem.