An orchestrated approach to efficiently manage resources in heterogeneous system architectures

Nowadays, we are witnessing trends in technology, fabrication processes and computing architectures that lead to the design and development of processing systems constituted by a relevant number of independent, heterogeneous execution resources. The aim is to achieve high-performance while leveraging on other aspects, such as energy consumption. Indeed, heterogeneity comes at the cost of greater design and management complexity. To reach an optimal solution, system architects need to take into account the efficiency of systems' units, i.e., general purpose processors eventually with one or more kinds of accelerators (e.g., GPUs or FPGAs), as well as the workload. This often leads to inefficiency in the exploitation of such resources, and therefore in performance/energy. Within this context, we are proposing a runtime resource manager able to observe the system execution and to dynamically optimise its behaviour with respect to one or more identified functional parameters, according to the architectural characteristics, and the users' and the applications' needs. Such an adaptation characteristic is intrinsically embedded in the device as a software layer, called Orchestrator, able to adapt the runtime resource management according to the target objectives and to the inputs from the external environment.