Hardware/Software Platform for Self-aware Compute Nodes

Today's design and operation principles and methods do not scale well with future reconfigurable computing systems due to an increased complexity in system architectures and applications, run-time dynamics and corresponding requirements. Hence, novel design and operation principles and methods are needed that possibly break drastically with the static ones we have built into our systems and the fixed abstraction layers we have cherished over the last decades. Thus, we propose a HW/SW platform that collects and maintains information about its state and progress which enables the system to reason about its behavior (self-awareness) and utilizes its knowledge to effectively and autonomously adapt its behavior to changing requirements (self-expression).To enable self-awareness, our compute nodes collect information using a variety of sensors, i.e. performance counters and thermal diodes, and use internal self-awareness models that process these information. For self-awareness, on-line learning is crucial such that the node learns and continuously updates its models at run-time to react to changing conditions. To enable self-expression, we break with the classic design-time abstraction layers of hardware, operating system and software. In contrast, our system is able to vertically migrate functionalities between the layers at run-time to exploit trade-offs between abstraction and optimization.This paper presents a heterogeneous multi-core architecture, that enables self-awareness and self-expression, an operating system for our proposed hardware/software platform and a novel self-expression method.