Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
Note: [] Corresponding author: Jihong Kim, Room 315-2, Building 302, Seoul National University, Shillim-dong, Kwanak-gu, Seoul 151-742, Korea. Tel.: +82 2 880 1861; Fax: +82 2 871 4912; E-mail: jihong@davinci.snu.ac.kr.
Abstract: For mobile multiprocessor applications, achieving high performance with low energy consumption is a challenging task. In order to help programmers to meet these design requirements, system development tools play an important role. In this paper, we describe one such development tool, ePRO-MP, which profiles and optimizes both performance and energy consumption of multi-threaded applications running on top of Linux for ARM11 MPCore-based embedded systems. One of the key features of ePRO-MP is that it can accurately estimate the energy consumption of multi-threaded applications without requiring a power measurement equipment, using a regression-based energy model. We also describe another key benefit of ePRO-MP, an automatic optimization function, using two example problems. Using the automatic optimization function, ePRO-MP can achieve high performance and low power consumption without programmer intervention. Our experimental results show that ePRO-MP can improve the performance and energy consumption by 6.1% and 4.1%, respectively, over a baseline version for the co-running applications optimization example. For the producer-consumer application optimization example, ePRO-MP improves the performance and energy consumption by 60.5% and 43.3%, respectively over a baseline version.
Keywords: Multi-processor, multi-threaded software, embedded software profiling tool, performance, energy, energy model
