A Safari Through the MPSoC Run-Time Management Jungle

The multiprocessor SoC (MPSoC) revolution is fueled by the need to execute multiple advanced multimedia applications on a single embedded computing platform. At design-time, the applications that will run in parallel and their respective user requirements are unknown. Hence, a run-time manager (RTM) is needed to match all application needs with the available platform resources and services. Creating such a run-time manager requires two decisions. First, one needs to decide what functionality to implement. Second, one has to decide how to implement this functionality in order to meet boundary conditions like e.g. real-time performance. This paper is the first to detail a generic view on MPSoC run-time management functionality and its design space trade-offs. We substantiate the run-time components and the implementation trade-offs with academic state-of-the-art solutions and a brief overview of some industrial multiprocessor run-time management examples. We show a clear trend towards more hardware acceleration, a limited distribution of management functionality over the platform and increasing support for adaptive multimedia applications. In addition, we briefly detail upcoming run-time management research issues.