CEDR -- A Compiler-integrated, Extensible DSSoC Runtime

TL;DR

CEDR is a flexible, compiler-integrated runtime system for heterogeneous SoCs that enables research on hardware configuration, scheduling, and application development through plug-and-play components and real-world workload evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces CEDR, a novel extensible runtime ecosystem that unifies compile-time and run-time workflows for heterogeneous SoC research and development.

Findings

CEDR effectively evaluates hardware performance in pre-silicon scenarios.

It supports dynamic workloads with thousands of signal processing applications.

CEDR is portable across multiple hardware platforms.

Abstract

In this work, we present CEDR, a Compiler-integrated, Extensible Domain Specific System on Chip Runtime ecosystem to facilitate research towards addressing the challenges of architecture, system software and application development with distinct plug-and-play integration points in a unified compile time and run time workflow. We demonstrate the utility of CEDR on the Xilinx Zynq MPSoC-ZCU102 for evaluating performance of pre-silicon hardware in the trade space of SoC configuration, scheduling policy and workload complexity based on dynamically arriving workload scenarios composed of real-life signal processing applications scaling to thousands of application instances with FFT and matrix multiply accelerators. We provide insights into the trade-offs present in this design space through a number of distinct case studies. CEDR is portable and has been deployed and validated on Odroid-XU3, X86 and Nvidia Jetson Xavier based SoC platforms. Taken together, CEDR is a capable environment for enabling research in exploring the boundaries of productive application development, resource management heuristic development, and hardware configuration analysis for heterogeneous architectures.