Evolvable multi-processor: A novel MPSoC architecture with evolvable task decomposition and scheduling

Multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) approach is an emerging trend for designing high performance computational systems. This trend faces some restrictive challenges in hardware and software developments. This paper presents a novel MPSoC system, which tries to overcome some of these major challenges using new architectural techniques. The main novelty of this system is accomplishment of both task decomposition and scheduling activities at run-time using hardware units. Hence, parallel programming or compile-time parallelisation is not required in this system and thus, it can directly and efficiently execute single-processor sequential programmes. This system utilises evolutionary algorithms to perform decomposition and scheduling operations, and therefore it is called evolvable multi-processor (EvoMP) system. This approach finds an efficient scheme to distribute different segments of the running application among available computational resources. Such a dynamic adaptability is also beneficial to achieve advantageous features like low-cost fault tolerance. This paper presents the operational and architectural details, improvements, constraints, and the obtained experimental results of the EvoMP.