Towards cognitive reconfigurable hardware : Self-aware learning in RTR fault-tolerant SoCs

• Traditional embedded systems are evolving into power-and-performance-domain self-aware intelligent systems in order to overcome complexity and uncertainty. Without human control, they need to keep operative states in applications such as drone-based delivery or robotic space landing. Nowadays, the partial and run-time reconfiguration (RTR) of FPGA-based Systems-on-chip (SoC) can enable dynamic hardware acceleration or self-healing structures, but this conversely increases system-memory traffic. This paper introduces the basis of cognitive reconfigurable hardware and presents the design of an FPGA-based RTR SoC that becomes conscious of its monitored hardware and learns to make decisions that maintain a desired system performance, particularly when triggering hardware acceleration and dynamic fault-tolerant (FT) schemes on RTR cores. Self-awareness is achieved by evaluating monitored metrics in critical AXI-cores, supported by hardware performance counters. We suggest a reinforcement-learning algorithm that helps the system to search out when and which reconfigurable FT-scheme can be triggered. Executing random sequences of an embedded benchmark suite simulates unpredictability and bus traffic. The evaluation shows the effectiveness and implications of our approach.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Annan elektroteknik och elektronik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Datorsystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Computer Systems (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Inbäddad systemteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Embedded Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

cognitive hardware

partial and run-time reconfiguration

FPGA

complex adaptive systems

self-awareness

self-healing

machine learning

dynamic fault-tolerance

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)