Fast dynamic binary rewriting for flexible thread migration on shared-ISA heterogeneous MPSoCs

Heterogeneous MPSoCs where different types of cores share a baseline ISA but implement different operational accelerators combine programmability with flexible customization. They hold promise for high performance under power and area limitations. However, transparent binary execution and dynamic scheduling is hard on those platforms. The state-of-the-art approach for transparent accelerated execution is fault-and-migrate (FAM): when a thread executes an accelerating instruction unavailable on the host core, it is forcibly migrated to an accelerating core which implements the instruction natively. Unfortunately, this approach prohibits dynamic scheduling through flexible thread migration, which is essential to any asymmetric platform for efficient utilization of heterogeneous resources. © 2014 IEEE