ReKonf: A Reconfigurable Adaptive ManyCore Architecture

The "one-architecture-fits-all" design philosophy is inadequate for catering to the diverse characteristics of applications running on manyCore architectures. After evaluating various configurations of manyCore architectures for a variety of applications, we designed ReKonf, a reconfigurable adaptive manyCore architecture. ReKonf dynamically configures its reconfigurable components to morph into significantly different configurations on the same architecture by continuously monitoring vital parameters of applications. ReKonf adapts the architecture by tracking core utilization, live cache utilization and cache sharing between threads, at runtime without losing execution state. Our evaluation of various applications on a cycle accurate simulator shows that the (reconfigurable) architecture suitable for such applications can be classified into three main variants: Chip Multiprocessor mode; Symmetric Multiprocessor mode; and Clustered mode, with up to 256 processing cores. Our results show that improvements from 32% to 72% over a baseline configuration can be observed by choosing the right configuration for an application. We also propose architecture components that should be reconfigurable in future manyCore architectures.