A runtime controller for OpenCL applications on heterogeneous system architectures

Heterogeneous architectures nowadays are becoming very at-tractive in the embedded and mobile markets thanks to the possibility to exploit the best computational resource to op-timize the performance per Watt figure of merit. Unfortu-nately, deciding the right resource to use and its operating frequency is a difficult problem that depends on the actual conditions in which the system is operating. This work aims at proposing a runtime controller, integrated in Linux Oper-ating System (OS), for optimizing the power efficiency of a running application deciding the system configuration. Our experimental results over a set of applications from the Poly-bench suite on the Odroid XU3 board show that our con-troller is able to obtain a power efficiency of more than 90% of the one achievable via offline profiling.