Marvin Damschen

"Worst-Case Execution Time Guarantees for Runtime-Reconfigurable Architectures"

( MPI-SWS talk in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

Real-time embedded systems need to be analyzable for execution time guarantees. Despite significant scientific advances, however, timing analysis lags years behind current microarchitectures with out-of-order scheduling pipelines, several hardware threads and multiple (shared) cache layers. To satisfy the increasing demand for predictable performance, analyzable performance features are required. We introduce runtime-reconfigurable instruction set processors as one way to escape the scarcity of analyzable performance features while preserving the flexibility of the system. To this end, we first present a reconfiguration controller for guaranteed reconfiguration delays of accelerators onto an FPGA. We propose a novel timing analysis approach to obtain worst-case execution time (WCET) guarantees for applications that utilize runtime-reconfigurable custom instructions (CIs), which each utilize one or more accelerators. Given the constrained reconfigurable area of an FPGA, we solve the problem of selecting Cis for each computational kernel of an application to optimize its worst-case execution time. Finally, we show that runtime reconfiguration provides the unique feature of optimized static WCET guarantees and optimization of the average-case execution time (maintaining statically-given WCET guarantees) by repurposing reconfigurable area for different selections of CIs at runtime.

Bio: Marvin Damschen received his Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jörg Henkel in Dec. 2018. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair for Embedded Systems at KIT. His main research interests are timing analysis and architectures for real-time embedded systems with special focus on runtime-reconfigurable architectures. Marvin Damschen received a B.Sc. degree - with distinction - and M.Sc. degree - with distinction - in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Paderborn, Germany, in 2012 and 2014 respectively.