Testbed for thermal and performance analysis in MPSoC systems

Abstract

Many modern computing platforms in the safety-critical domains are based on heterogeneous Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC). Such computing platforms are expected to guarantee high-performance within a strict thermal envelope. This paper introduces a testbed for thermal and performance analysis. The testbed allows the users to develop advanced scheduling and resource allocation techniques aiming at finding an optimal trade-off between the peak temperature and the achieved performance. This paper presents a new, open-source Thermobench tool for data collection and analysis of user-defined workloads. Furthermore, a methodology for shortening the time needed for the data collection is proposed. Experiments show that a significant amount of time can be saved. Specifically, time reduction from 60 minutes to 15 minutes is achieved with the i.MX8 MPSoC from NXP while running a set of user-defined benchmarks that stress CPU, GPU, and different levels of the memory hierarchy.