The DRACON Embedded Many-Core: Hardware-Enhanced Run-Time Management Using a Network of Dedicated Control Nodes

Many-core systems provide abundant computing power for parallel applications. The run-time manager of an embedded system has to efficiently exploit the available resources while guaranteeing a high responsiveness. We propose a dedicated hardware infrastructure to improve the scalability and responsiveness of a run-time task manager. The hardware enhancements constitute a hierarchy of global and local control nodes which communicate by means of message passing. The global nodes facilitate a distributed task manager which performs the task scheduling and a flexible task synchronization scheme at run-time. A low-latency interface between the run-time system and the processing cores is provided by the local nodes. Based on simulations using a SystemC model, we demonstrate the advantages of our approach in terms of application performance. The design feasibility is substantiated by means of gate-level analysis. We compare our results against state-of-the-art software and hardware-based run-time management systems.