PEARL: Power- and Energy-Aware Multicore Intermittent Computing

TL;DR

PEARL is a novel system that enhances multicore microcontrollers for efficient intermittent computing by using minimal hardware modifications and adaptive software, significantly improving performance and reducing energy consumption.

Contribution

PEARL introduces a low-cost hardware and software framework that enables existing multicore MCUs to operate efficiently under intermittent power conditions.

Findings

PEARL outperforms existing solutions by up to 30x in performance.

PEARL reduces energy consumption by up to 32x.

The system effectively manages power and energy adaptation with minimal overhead.

Abstract

Low-power multicore platforms are suitable for running data-intensive tasks in parallel, but they are highly inefficient for computing on intermittent power. In this work, we present PEARL (PowEr And eneRgy-aware MuLticore Intermittent Computing), a novel systems support that can make existing multicore microcontroller (MCU) platforms suitable for efficient intermittent computing. PEARL achieves this by leveraging only a three-threshold voltage tracking circuit and an external fast non-volatile memory, which multicore MCUs can smoothly interface. PEARL software runtime manages these components and performs energy- and power-aware adaptation of the multicore configuration to introduce minimal backup overheads and boost performance. Our evaluation shows that PEARL outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions by up to 30x and consumes up to 32x less energy.