Reducing fine-grain communication overhead in multithread code generation for heterogeneous MPSoC

Abstract

Heterogeneous MPSoCs present unique opportunities for emerging embedded applications, which require both high-performance and programmability. Although, software programming for these MPSoC architectures requires tedious and error-prone tasks, thereby automatic code generation tools are required. A code generation method based on fine-grain specification can provide more design space and optimization opportunities, such as exploiting fine-level parallelism and more efficient partitions. However, when partitioned, fine-grain models may require a large number of inter-processor communications, decreasing the overall system performance. This paper presents a Simulink-based multithread code generation method, which applies Message Aggregation optimization technique to reduce the number of interprocessor communications. This technique reduces the communication overheads in terms of execution time by reduction on the number of messages exchanged and in terms of memory size by the reduction on the number of channels. The paper also presents experiment results for one multimedia application, showing performance improvements and memory reduction obtained with Message Aggregation technique.