Energy Based Design Space Exploration of Multiprocessor VLIW Architectures

Today energy is an important factor in designing a multiprocessor system. The overall goal of this work is to propose a methodology for design space exploration of VLIW multiprocessors. We have developed a framework which enables us to explore energy - performance trade-off for state of the art VLIW processors and multiprocessors. Our methodology is capable of simultaneously exploring process-processor binding while tuning the individual VLIW processors to support specific operation concurrency requirements of processes bound to it. We extend existing uniprocessor instruction level energy estimation techniques to multiprocessors. The implementation is based on popular public domain tools like IMPACT and SystemC. Its completeness, robustness and efficacy is demonstrated through a case study on MPEG-2 decoder.