Compiling a gesture recognition application for a low-power spatial architecture
Abstract
Energy efficiency is one of the main performance goals when designing processors for embedded systems. Typically, the simpler the processor, the less energy it consumes. Thus, an ultra-low power multicore processor will, likely have very small distributed memory with a simple interconnect. To compile for such an architecture, a partitioning strategy that can tune between space and communication minimization is crucial to fit a program in its limited resources and achieve good performance. A careful program layout design is also critical. Aside fulfilling the space constraint, a compiler needs to be able to optimize for program latency to satisfy a certain timing requirement as well. To satisfy all aforementioned constraints, we present a flexible code partitioning strategy and light-weight mechanisms to express parallelism and program layout. First, we compare two strategies for partitioning program structures and introduce a language construct to let programmers choose which strategies to use and when. The compiler then partitions program structures with a mix of both strategies. Second, we add supports for programmer-specified parallelism and program layout through imposing additional spatial constraints to the compiler. We evaluate our compiler by implementing an accelerometer-based gesture recognition application on GA144, a recent low-power minimalistic multicore architecture. When compared to MSP430, GA144 is overall 19x more energy-efficient and 23x faster when running this application. Without these inventions, this application would not be able to fit on GA144.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jun 13, 2016
- Source ID
- 10.1145/2980930.2907962
Entities
People
- Michael Schuldt
- Phitchaya Mangpo Phothilimthana
- Rastislav BodÃk
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Basic Energy Sciences
- Office of Science
- United States Department of Energy
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of Washington