ARC: Application-Level Refinement and Cache Mapping for Performance Optimization on the Edge

Abstract

Recent advances in applications that are highly dependent on efficient cache utilization, in addition to the rapid growth of Edge computing systems deployed with emerging processors, generate a complex paradigm across the hardware and software continuum. In this work, we propose ARC, a novel systematic exploration methodology for application-level refinement and cache configuration mapping over emerging architectures for performance optimization. More specifically, our solution relies on workload partitioning and source code slicing mechanisms aiming to boost co-exploration of cache configuration parameters. Our proposed methodology is evaluated on a real-life IoT biomedical use case deployed over GEM5 RISC-V simulated system, showing that i) the co-impact of source code refinement and effective cache configuration leads to 61.1% execution time optimization, ii) the effective application organization and refinement leads to reduced hardware complexity. Last, we provide guidelines for application cache-friendly source code organization for performance optimization.