ICED: An Integrated CGRA Framework Enabling DFVS-Aware Acceleration

Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) are a promising solution to enable energy-efficient acceleration of applications from different domains. By leveraging reconfiguration at the functional level, they can adapt to significantly different computational patterns. However, the relationships of voltage and frequency with the utilization of CGRA resources and the dynamic management of them are not well explored, leading to inefficient designs. CGRAs have also been successful in accelerating data-dependent streaming applications. However, in these applications, the execution time of each kernel in the pipeline might dynamically vary depending on the characteristics of the input. This also leads to under-utilization of resources for the dynamically changing kernels that do not limit the application throughput. DVFS can also improve energy efficiency for these applications by dynamically changing the voltage and frequency levels of tiles that host non-performance-constraining kernels. This paper proposes ICED – an integrated DVFS-aware framework to map applications on CGRAs that support power islands. ICED proposes a CGRA architecture supporting DVFS islands at varying granularity (from a single tile to a group of tiles) and the related DVFS-aware compilation and mapping toolchain. ICED is the first work that introduces DVFS support for spatio-temporal CGRAs at power-island levels. The experimental evaluation shows that ICED improves average utilization by 2.3× and energy-efficiency by 1.32× over a conventional CGRA. With streaming applications, ICED can achieve up to 1.26× energy-efficiency compared with a state-of-the-art CGRA that introduces partial dynamic reconfiguration to adapt to variations in kernels’ throughput.