Architecture Support for Task Out-of-Order Execution in MPSoCs

Abstract

Multi-processor system on chip (MPSoC) has been widely applied in embedded systems in the past decades. However, it has posed great challenges to efficiently design and implement a rapid prototype for diverse applications due to heterogeneous instruction set architectures (ISA), programming interfaces and software tool chains. In order to solve the problem, this paper proposes a novel high level architecture support for automatic out-of-order (OoO) task execution on FPGA based heterogeneous MPSoCs. The architecture support is composed of a hierarchical middleware with an automatic task level OoO parallel execution engine. Incorporated with a hierarchical OoO layer model, the middleware is able to identify the parallel regions and generate the sources codes automatically. Besides, a runtime middleware Task-Scoreboarding analyzes the inter-task data dependencies and automatically schedules and dispatches the tasks with parameter renaming techniques. The middleware has been verified by the prototype built on FPGA platform. Examples and a JPEG case study demonstrate that our model can largely ease the burden of programmers as well as uncover the task level parallelism.