Keynote: “Design space exploration and run-time resource management in the embedded multi-core era”

It is widely understood that the next revolution of virtual platform-based design is the holistic optimization of hardware parameters, task mapping and scheduling, and application tuning for many-cores. As a community, we have learned that finding the best trade-off in terms of selected figures of merit can be achieved only by considering the integrated hardware and software dimensions, by evaluating an enormous number of configurations, each characterized by a long simulation time. The problem worsens when dealing with small ecosystems such as embedded systems-on-chip where the environment is too constrained to assume that a sophisticated run-time algorithm can be implemented to schedule efficiently the access to resources. In this keynote I will explain why some newest findings in global optimization can be used to address effectively virtual-platform design. I am going then to describe how sophisticated algorithms based on response-surface prediction models can efficiently identify optimal configurations in a significant number of platform optimization scenarios. Finally, I am going to outline some research directions stemming from the MULTICUBE and 2PARMA EU projects that I think will untap the full potential of platform optimization.