REDEFINE is a reconfigurable SoC architecture that provides a unique platform for high performance and low power computing by exploiting the synergistic interaction between coarse grain dynamic dataflow model of computation (to expose abundant parallelism in the applications) and runtime composition of efficient compute structures (on the reconfigurable computation resources). Computer architectures based on the dynamic dataflow model of computation have to be an infinite resource implementation to be able to exploit all available parallelism in all applications. It is not feasible for any real architectural implementation. When limited resource implementations are considered, there is a possibility of loss of performance (inability to efficiently exploit available parallelism). In this thesis, we study the throttling of execution in the REDEFINE architecture to maximize the architecture efficiency. We have formulated it as a design space exploration problem at two levels i.e. architectural configurations and throttling schemes. Reduced feature/high level simulation or feature specific analytical approaches are very useful for the selective study/exploration of early in design phase architectures/systems. Our approach is similar to that of SEASAME Framework which is used for the study of MPSoC (Multiprocessor SoC) architectures. We have used abstraction (feature reduction) at the levels of architecture and model of computation to make the problem approachable and practically feasible. A feature specific fast hybrid (mixed level) simulation framework for the early in design phase study is developed and implemented for the huge design space exploration (1284 throttling schemes, 128 architectural configurations and 10 applications i.e. 1.6 million executions). We have done performance modeling in terms of selection of important performance criteria, ranking of the explored throttling schemes and investigation of the effectiveness of the design space exploration using statistical hypothesis testing. We found some interesting obvious/intuitive and some non-obvious/counterintuitive results. The two performance criteria namely Exec.T and Avg.TU were found sufficient to represent the performance and the resource usage characteristics of the architecture independent of the throttling schemes, the architectural configurations and the applications. The ranking of the throttling schemes based on the selected performance criteria is found to be statistically very significant. The intuitive throttling schemes span the range of performance from the best to the worst. We found absence of trade-off amongst all of the performance criteria. The best throttling schemes give appreciable overall performance (25%) and resource usage (37%) gains in the throttling unit simultaneously. The design space exploration of the throttling schemes is found to be fine and uniform.

The ever-increasing functional and nonfunctional requirements in real-time safety-critical embedded systems call for new design flows that solve the specification, validation, and synthesis problems. Ensuring key properties, such as functional determinism and temporal predictability, has been the main objective of many embedded system design models. Dataflow models of computation (such as KPN, SDF, CSDF, etc.) are widely used to model stream-based embedded systems due to their inherent functional determinism. Since the introduction of the (C)SDF model, a considerable effort has been made to solve the static-periodic scheduling problem. Ensuring boundedness and liveness is the essence of the proposed algorithms in addition to optimizing some nonfunctional performance metrics (e.g. buffer minimization, throughput maximization, etc.). However, nowadays real-time embedded systems are so complex that real-time operating systems are used to manage hardware resources and host real-time tasks. Most of real-time operating systems rely on priority-driven scheduling algorithms (e.g. RM, EDF, etc.) instead of static schedules which are inflexible and difficult to maintain. This thesis addresses the real-time scheduling problem of dataflow graph specifications; i.e. transformation of the dataflow specification to a set of independent real-time tasks w.r.t. a given priority-driven scheduling policy such that the following properties are satisfied: (1) channels are bounded and overflow/underflow-free; (2) the task set is schedulable on a given uniprocessor (or multiprocessor) architecture. This problem requires the synthesis of scheduling parameters (e.g. periods, priorities, processor allocation, etc.) and channel capacities. Furthermore, the thesis considers two performance optimization problems: buffer minimization and throughput maximization.

Les systèmes temps-réel critiques sont de plus en plus complexes, et les exigences fonctionnelles et non-fonctionnelles ne cessent plus de croître. Le flot de conception de tels systèmes doit assurer, parmi d’autres propriétés, le déterminisme fonctionnel et la prévisibilité temporelle. Le déterminisme fonctionnel est inhérent aux modèles de calcul flot de données (ex. KPN, SDF, etc.) ; c’est pour cela qu’ils sont largement utilisés pour modéliser les systèmes embarqués de traitement de flux. Un effort considérable a été accompli pour résoudre le problème d’ordonnancement statique périodique et à mémoire de communication bornée des graphes flot de données. Cependant, les systèmes embarqués temps-réel optent de plus en plus pour l’utilisation de systèmes d’exploitation temps-réel et de stratégies d’ordonnancement dynamique pour gérer les tâches et les ressources critiques. Cette thèse aborde le problème d’ordonnancement temps-réel dynamique des graphes flot de données ; ce problème consiste à assigner chaque acteur dans un graphe à une tâche temps-réel périodique (i.e. calcul des périodes, des phases, etc.) de façon à : (1) assurer l’ordonnançabilité des tâches sur une architecture et pour une stratégie d’ordonnancement (ex. RM, EDF) données ; (2) exclure statiquement les exceptions d’overflow et d’underflow sur les buffers de communication ; et (3) optimiser les performances du système (ex. maximisation du débit, minimisation des tailles des buffers). / The ever-increasing functional and nonfunctional requirements in real-time safety-critical embedded systems call for new design flows that solve the specification, validation, and synthesis problems. Ensuring key properties, such as functional determinism and temporal predictability, has been the main objective of many embedded system design models. Dataflow models of computation (such as KPN, SDF, CSDF, etc.) are widely used to model stream-based embedded systems due to their inherent functional determinism. Since the introduction of the (C)SDF model, a considerable effort has been made to solve the static-periodic scheduling problem. Ensuring boundedness and liveness is the essence of the proposed algorithms in addition to optimizing some nonfunctional performance metrics (e.g. buffer minimization, throughput maximization, etc.). However, nowadays real-time embedded systems are so complex that real-time operating systems are used to manage hardware resources and host real-time tasks. Most of real-time operating systems rely on priority-driven scheduling algorithms (e.g. RM, EDF, etc.) instead of static schedules which are inflexible and difficult to maintain. This thesis addresses the real-time scheduling problem of dataflow graph specifications; i.e. transformation of the dataflow specification to a set of independent real-time tasks w.r.t. a given priority-driven scheduling policy such that the following properties are satisfied: (1) channels are bounded and overflow/underflow-free; (2) the task set is schedulable on a given uniprocessor (or multiprocessor) architecture. This problem requires the synthesis of scheduling parameters (e.g. periods, priorities, processor allocation, etc.) and channel capacities. Furthermore, the thesis considers two performance optimization problems: buffer minimization and throughput maximization.