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Institute
- FG Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme (3) (remove)
In the last 30 years, communication became one of the most important pillars of our civilization. Every day terabytes of information are moved wired and wireless between computers. In order to transport this amount of data, researchers and industry increase the data rates of the underlying communication networks with impressive speed. However, such ultra-high data rates are unavailable at the communication endpoints.
One reason why ultra-high data rates are still not available for the communication endpoints is their inability to handle the protocol processing at this data rate. In order to enable communication endpoints to process high-volume data streams, the protocol processing has to be parallelized and optimized on all processing levels. However, parallelization and optimization are cumbersome tasks, which are further complicated as the protocol processing is traditionally carried out by the operating system.
This thesis aims at circumventing these problems by moving the protocol processing into external processing hardware and interpreting communication protocols as stream processing problems. In order to achieve ultra-high data rates at the communication endpoints, a protocol stream processing design approach was developed and evaluated. The design process is separated into implementation, soft real-time analysis, parallelization, and mapping steps, which allow a scalable protocol implementation without paradigm changes. Furthermore, a data link protocol for 100 Gbit/s wireless was developed and implemented with the new stream processing design concept, in order to show its feasibility. The data link protocol is configurable for different communication conditions and easy to parallelize by providing different granularities of packets. The proposed design-process has shown to be suitable for uncovering bottlenecks and helping with debugging the individual stages of the protocol.
The tiny logic elements in modern integrated circuits increase the rate of transient failures significantly. Therefore, redundancy on various levels is necessary to retain reliability. However, for mixed-criticality scenarios, the typical processor designs offer either too little fault-tolerance or too much redundancy for one part of the applications. Amongst others, we specifically address redundant processor internal functional units (FU) to cope with transient errors and support wear leveling. A real-time operating system (RTOS) was extended to control our prototypical hardware platform and, since it can be configured deterministically within few clock cycles, we are able to reconfigure the FUs dynamically, at process switching time, according to the specified critically of the running processes. Our mechanisms were integrated into the Plasma processor and the Plasma-RTOS. With few changes to the original software code, it was, for example, possible to quickly change from fault-detecting to fault-correcting modes of the processor on demand.
System reconfiguration of hardware resources has been done in multiple system domains. Such systems are usually found in the context of FPGAs, where reconfiguration is done usually over its primitives (e.g., LUTs, Flip-Flops). Or even in the context of MPSoC designs, where core management (e.g., lock-step operation in multi-core designs) is the most used approach. However, recent works have shown that configuration at Functional Units (FUs) granularity might come with benefits. For example, it can increase the configuration space due to its finer granularity, and, as a consequence, the options to deal with problems (e.g., due to aging) in the units itself. Within this context, this paper presents a system capable to configure its FUs (e.g., ALUs, multipliers, dividers) into different operation modes. The system uses an Operating System to control HW reconfiguration during process switching time and takes into account the health state of its units in a mixed-criticality applications scenario. Results show that, within this scenario, the system is able to reconfigure itself accomplishing health state modifications of its HW elements.