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Alpaca: intermittent execution without checkpoints

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Brandon LuciaAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 1, Issue OOPSLA

Article No.: 96, Pages 1 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/3133920

Published: 12 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The emergence of energy harvesting devices creates the potential for batteryless sensing and computing devices. Such devices operate only intermittently, as energy is available, presenting a number of challenges for software developers. Programmers face a complex design space requiring reasoning about energy, memory consistency, and forward progress. This paper introduces Alpaca, a low-overhead programming model for intermittent computing on energy-harvesting devices. Alpaca programs are composed of a sequence of user-defined tasks. The Alpaca runtime preserves execution progress at the granularity of a task. The key insight in Alpaca is the privatization of data shared between tasks. Shared values written in a task are detected using idempotence analysis and copied into a buffer private to the task. At the end of the task, modified values from the private buffer are atomically committed to main memory, ensuring that data remain consistent despite power failures. Alpaca provides a familiar programming interface, a highly efficient runtime model, and places fewer restrictions on a target device's hardware architecture. We implemented a prototype of Alpaca as an extension to C with an LLVM compiler pass. We evaluated Alpaca, and directly compared to two systems from prior work. Alpaca eliminates checkpoints, which improves performance up to 15x, and avoids static multi-versioning, which improves memory consumption by up to 5.5x.

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Cited By

Kraemer CGelder WHester J(2024)User-directed Assembly Code Transformations Enabling Efficient Batteryless Arduino ApplicationsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36595908:2(1-32)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659590
Zhou KQiu K(2024)REC: REtime Convolutional Layers to Fully Exploit Harvested Energy for ReRAM-based CNN AcceleratorsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/365259323:6(1-25)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
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Akhunov KYldrm K(2024)CRAM-Based Acceleration for Intermittent Computing of Parallelizable TasksIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing10.1109/TETC.2023.329342612:1(48-59)Online publication date: Jan-2024
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Index Terms

Alpaca: intermittent execution without checkpoints
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
    1. Reliability
  2. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
    1. Embedded systems
      1. Embedded software

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Volume 1, Issue OOPSLA

October 2017

1786 pages

EISSN:2475-1421

DOI:10.1145/3152284

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Published: 12 October 2017

Published in PACMPL Volume 1, Issue OOPSLA

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Cited By

Kraemer CGelder WHester J(2024)User-directed Assembly Code Transformations Enabling Efficient Batteryless Arduino ApplicationsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36595908:2(1-32)Online publication date: 15-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659590
Zhou KQiu K(2024)REC: REtime Convolutional Layers to Fully Exploit Harvested Energy for ReRAM-based CNN AcceleratorsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/365259323:6(1-25)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652593
Akhunov KYldrm K(2024)CRAM-Based Acceleration for Intermittent Computing of Parallelizable TasksIEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing10.1109/TETC.2023.329342612:1(48-59)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TETC.2023.3293426
Xuan LLin CYen TChen YHsu C(2024)FASE: Energy Isolation Framework for Latency-Sensitive Applications in Intermittent Systems With Multiple PeripheralsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2023.331819943:2(456-467)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
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Zouridakis PDinakarrao S(2024)Performance- and Energy-Aware Gait-Based User Authentication With Intermittent Computation for IoT DevicesIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2023.331309743:2(600-612)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
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Reymond HBéchennec JBriday MFaucou SPuaut IRohou EGrosser TDubach CSteuwer MXue JOttoni GQuintão Pereira F(2024)SCHEMATIC: Compile-Time Checkpoint Placement and Memory Allocation for Intermittent SystemsProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444789(258-269)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
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