支援多核心架構之程式轉換技術

Abstract

發展嵌入式系統時須考量不同軟硬體平台的特性及各類系統資源的有效運用。在未來以多核心架構為基礎的嵌入式系統成為主流後，如何針對不同平台特性設計系統提升整體效能，並同時降低發展成本變得更加重要。針對這個問題，本論文提出使用程式轉換的技術，使得開發者可專心發展應用程式，不須考慮過多軟硬體平台的細節，並能仰賴各種程式轉換工具針對不同的軟硬體特性產生適用的程式碼。為了驗證此方法的可行性，我們以Java語言為基礎，在不同嵌入式平台，包括一個雙核心架構的平台上作試驗，並得到實驗結果的支持。

Embedded systems are characterized by their scarce computing resources and heterogeneous hardware-software configurations. With multi-core architecture entering the embedded systems market, developing efficient software applications, and delivering them timely, becomes even more challenging. One main obstacle to embedded software development is to tune applications for different system configurations in order to maximize system performance in terms of execution speed, memory, energy consumption, and so on. Often, a particular software design that performs well in one configuration may work miserably in another. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the use of program transformation techniques as a solution to this problem. The idea is to have a framework where developers can concentrate on developing applications without devoting excessive effort on low-level hardware and system software details, and rely on different program transformation schemes to produce programs for specific platforms. With the framework, we have experimented with various Java benchmarks on different platforms, including an embedded platform containing two cores. The result shows that program transformation can improve performance significantly with considerably less development and tuning effort.