Heterogeneity-aware Multicore Synchronization for Intermittent Systems
Journal
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
Journal Volume
20
Journal Issue
5s
Date Issued
2021
Author(s)
Abstract
Intermittent systems enable batteryless devices to operate through energy harvesting by leveraging the complementary characteristics of volatile (VM) and non-volatile memory (NVM). Unfortunately, alternate and frequent accesses to heterogeneous memories for accumulative execution across power cycles can significantly hinder computation progress. The progress impediment is mainly due to more CPU time being wasted for slow NVM accesses than for fast VM accesses. This paper explores how to leverage heterogeneous cores to mitigate the progress impediment caused by heterogeneous memories. In particular, a delegable and adaptive synchronization protocol is proposed to allow memory accesses to be delegated between cores and to dynamically adapt to diverse memory access latency. Moreover, our design guarantees task serializability across multiple cores and maintains data consistency despite frequent power failures. We integrated our design into FreeRTOS running on a Cypress device featuring heterogeneous dual cores and hybrid memories. Experimental results show that, compared to recent approaches that assume single-core intermittent systems, our design can improve computation progress at least 1.8x and even up to 33.9x by leveraging core heterogeneity. ? 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.
Subjects
batteryless devices
data consistency
intermittent computing
Multicore synchronization
task concurrency
Digital storage
Energy harvesting
Battery-less
Batteryless device
Complementary characteristics
Data consistency
Heterogeneous memory
Intermittent computing
Intermittent systems
Multi-cores
Task concurrency
Synchronization
Type
conference paper