Schedulers as model-based design elements in programmable heterogeneous multiprocessors

As System On a Chip (SoC) designs become more like Programmable Heterogeneous Multiprocessors (PHMs), the highest levels of design will place emphasis on the custom design of elements that were traditionally associated with systems in the large. We motivate how schedulers that make dynamic, data-dependent decisions at run-time will be key design elements in PHM SoCs. Starting from a fundamental model, the role schedulers play in PHMs is developed. Model-based scheduling is introduced as an approach to designing schedulers that optimize a PHMs performance. Due to the complexity of the PHM design space, convergence on optimal design requires high-level modeling and simulation. In model-based scheduling, high-level models of scheduling decisions result in actual design elements that appear in real systems. Experiments for a simple two-processor PHM that does a mix of image and text compression are included. Results show the effectiveness of model-based scheduling.