A Scalable Monitoring Infrastructure for Self-Organizing Many-Core Architectures

Self-organizing principles can address the growing complexity and the huge challenge of management and efficient utilization of adaptive many-core architectures. Fundamental for realizing a self-organizing behavior within such architectures is a dedicated monitoring infrastructure that provides the essential information about the system status and system behavior for realizing the basic property of self-awareness. This paper therefore proposes a flexible, hierarchical and scalable monitoring infrastructure for self-organizing, adaptive many-core architectures. The employed basic monitoring unit in the bottom monitoring layer performs data aggregation and filtering and reduces the amount of data that must be processed in higher monitoring layers. The middle layer performs first data analysis and is further responsible for hiding the heterogeneity of the underlying hardware configuration to the topmost monitoring layer. The latter is finally responsible for detecting changes in the system behavior and realizing self-awareness. The proposed monitoring infrastructure was evaluated entirely using a simulation framework. Results show that the infrastructure is able of detecting changes in the system behavior of an entire many-core system causing only a minor system disturbance. Further, the prototypical implementation of the basic monitoring unit proved that it can be realized very efficiently in hardware.