As embedded systems become more complex, designers face a number of challenges at different levels: they need to boost performance, while keeping energy consumption as low as possible, they need to reuse existent software code, and at the same time they need to take advantage of the extra logic available in the chip, represented by multiple processors working together. This book describes several strategies to achieve such different and interrelated goals, by the use of adaptability. Coverage includes reconfigurable systems, dynamic optimization techniques such as binary translation and trace reuse, new memory architectures including homogeneous and heterogeneous multiprocessor systems, communication issues and NOCs, fault tolerance against fabrication defects and soft errors, and finally, how one can combine several of these techniques together to achieve higher levels of performance and adaptability. The discussion also includes how to employ specialized software to improve this new adaptive system, and how this new kind of software must be designed and programmed.

Dynamic Reconfigurable Architectures and Transparent Optimization Techniques presents a detailed study on new techniques to cope with the aforementioned limitations. First, characteristics of reconfigurable systems are discussed in details, and a large number of case studies is shown. Then, a detailed analysis of several benchmarks demonstrates that such architectures need to attack a diverse range of applications with very different behaviours, besides supporting code compatibility. This requires the use of dynamic optimization techniques, such as Binary Translation and Trace reuse. Finally, works that combine both reconfigurable systems and dynamic techniques are discussed and a quantitative analysis of one them, the DIM architecture, is presented.

As embedded systems become more complex, designers face a number of challenges at different levels: they need to boost performance, while keeping energy consumption as low as possible, they need to reuse existent software code, and at the same time they need to take advantage of the extra logic available in the chip, represented by multiple processors working together. This book describes several strategies to achieve such different and interrelated goals, by the use of adaptability. Coverage includes reconfigurable systems, dynamic optimization techniques such as binary translation and trace reuse, new memory architectures including homogeneous and heterogeneous multiprocessor systems, communication issues and NOCs, fault tolerance against fabrication defects and soft errors, and finally, how one can combine several of these techniques together to achieve higher levels of performance and adaptability. The discussion also includes how to employ specialized software to improve this new adaptive system, and how this new kind of software must be designed and programmed.

Dynamic Reconfigurable Architectures and Transparent Optimization Techniques presents a detailed study on new techniques to cope with the aforementioned limitations. First, characteristics of reconfigurable systems are discussed in details, and a large number of case studies is shown. Then, a detailed analysis of several benchmarks demonstrates that such architectures need to attack a diverse range of applications with very different behaviours, besides supporting code compatibility. This requires the use of dynamic optimization techniques, such as Binary Translation and Trace reuse. Finally, works that combine both reconfigurable systems and dynamic techniques are discussed and a quantitative analysis of one them, the DIM architecture, is presented.

This book describes several approaches to adaptability that are applied for the optimization of parallel applications, such as thread-level parallelism exploitation and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling on multicore systems. This book explains how software developers can apply a novel technique to adapt the number of threads at runtime without any modification in the source code nor recompilation. This book is useful for software developers in general since it offers realistic examples throughout to demonstrate various techniques presented.