research-article

Reflex: using low-power processors in smartphones without knowing them

Authors:

Felix Xiaozhu Lin,

Robert LiKamWa,

Lin ZhongAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 47, Issue 4

Pages 13 - 24

https://doi.org/10.1145/2248487.2150979

Published: 03 March 2012 Publication History

Abstract

To accomplish frequent, simple tasks with high efficiency, it is necessary to leverage low-power, microcontroller-like processors that are increasingly available on mobile systems. However, existing solutions require developers to directly program the low-power processors and carefully manage inter-processor communication. We present Reflex, a suite of compiler and runtime techniques that significantly lower the barrier for developers to leverage such low-power processors. The heart of Reflex is a software Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) that enables shared memory objects with release consistency among code running on loosely coupled processors. In order to achieve high energy efficiency without sacrificing performance much, the Reflex DSM leverages (i) extreme architectural asymmetry between low-power processors and powerful central processors, (ii) aggressive compile-time optimization, and (iii) a minimalist runtime that supports efficient message passing and event-driven execution. We report a complete realization of Reflex that runs on a TI OMAP4430-based development platform as well as on a custom tri-processor mobile platform. Using smartphone sensing applications reported in recent literature, we show that Reflex supports a programming style very close to contemporary smartphone programming. Compared to message passing, the Reflex DSM greatly reduces efforts in programming heterogeneous smartphones, eliminating up to 38% of the source lines of application code. Compared to running the same applications on existing smartphones, Reflex reduces the average system power consumption by up to 81%.

References

[1]

Y. Agarwal, S. Hodges, R. Chandra et al., "Somniloquy: augmenting network interfaces to reduce PC energy usage," in Proc. USENIX Symp. Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI), Boston, Massachusetts, 2009, pp. 365--380.

Digital Library

[2]

C. Barton, C. Casaval, G. Almasi et al., "Shared memory programming for large scale machines," in Proc. ACM SIGPLAN Conf. Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 2006, pp. 108--117.

Digital Library

[3]

A. Baumann, P. Barham, P. Dagand et al., "The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems," in Proc. ACM Symp. Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Big Sky, Montana, USA, 2009, pp. 29--44.

Digital Library

[4]

P. Bellens, J. M. Perez, R. M. Badia et al., "CellSs: a Programming Model for the Cell BE Architecture," in Proc. ACM/IEEE Conf. Supercomputing (SC), Tampa, Florida, 2006, pp. 86.

Digital Library

[5]

N. Brouwers, K. Langendoen, and P. Corke, "Darjeeling, a feature-rich VM for the resource poor," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Berkeley, California, 2009, pp. 169--182.

Digital Library

[6]

J. Carter, J. Bennett, and W. Zwaenepoel, "Implementation and performance of Munin," in Proc. ACM Symp. Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Pacific Grove, California, United States, 1991, pp. 152--164.

Digital Library

[7]

D. Dhurjati, S. Kowshik, V. Adve et al., "Memory safety without runtime checks or garbage collection," ACM SIGPLAN Notices, vol. 38, no. 7, pp. 69--80, 2003.

Digital Library

[8]

B. Fleisch, and G. Popek, "Mirage: A coherent distributed shared memory design," ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 211--223, 1989.

Digital Library

[9]

I. Gelado, J. E. Stone, J. Cabezas et al., "An asymmetric distributed shared memory model for heterogeneous parallel systems," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 2010, pp. 347--358.

Digital Library

[10]

C. C. Han, M. Goraczko, J. Helander et al., "CoMOS: An operating system for heterogeneous multi-processor sensor devices," Technical Report MSR-TR-2006--117, Microsoft Research, 2006.

[11]

S. Huang, A. Hormati, D. Bacon et al., "Liquid Metal: Object-Oriented Programming Across the Hardware/Software Boundary," ECOOP 2008 - Object-Oriented Programming, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 76--103: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2008.

Digital Library

[12]

J. J. Labrosse, MicroC OS II: The Real Time Kernel: Newnes, 2002.

Digital Library

[13]

C. Lattner, and V. Adve, "LLVM: A compilation framework for lifelong program analysis & transformation," in Int. Symp. Code Generation and Optimization (CGO), Palo Alto, California, 2004, pp. 75--86.

Digital Library

[14]

K. Li, "Ivy: A shared virtual memory system for parallel computing," in Proc. Int. Conf. Parallel Processing, 1988, pp. 94--101.

[15]

F. X. Lin, A. Rahmati, and L. Zhong, "Dandelion: a framework for transparently programming phone-centered wireless body sensor applications for health," in ACM Wireless Health 2010, San Diego, California, 2010, pp. 74--83.

Digital Library

[16]

F. X. Lin, Z. Wang, R. LiKamWa et al., "Transparent Programming of Heterogeneous Smartphones for Sensing," Technical Report 0310--2011, Rice University, 2011.

[17]

M. D. Linderman, J. D. Collins, H. Wang et al., "Merge: a programming model for heterogeneous multi-core systems," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Seattle, WA, USA, 2008, pp. 287--296.

Digital Library

[18]

J. Liu, L. Zhong, J. Wickramasuriya et al., "uWave: accelerometer-based personalized gesture recognition and its applications," Pervasive and Mobile Computing, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 657--675, 2009.

Digital Library

[19]

H. Lu, W. Pan, N. D. Lane et al., "SoundSense: scalable sound sensing for people-centric applications on mobile phones," in Proc. ACM/USENIX Int. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), Kraków, Poland, 2009, pp. 165--178.

Digital Library

[20]

C.-K. Luk, S. Hong, and H. Kim, "Qilin: exploiting parallelism on heterogeneous multiprocessors with adaptive mapping," in Proc. IEEE/ACM Int. Symp. Microarchitecture (MICRO), New York, New York, 2009, pp. 45--55.

Digital Library

[21]

D. Lymberopoulos, N. B. Priyantha, and F. Zhao, "mPlatform: a reconfigurable architecture and efficient data sharing mechanism for modular sensor nodes," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 2007, pp. 128--137.

Digital Library

[22]

J. Manson, W. Pugh, and S. V. Adve, "The Java memory model," in Proc. ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symp. Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), Long Beach, California, USA, 2005, pp. 378--391.

Digital Library

[23]

R. McIlroy, and J. Sventek, "Hera-JVM: a runtime system for heterogeneous multi-core architectures," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications (OOPSLA), Reno/Tahoe, Nevada, USA, 2010, pp. 205--222.

Digital Library

[24]

D. McIntire, K. Ho, B. Yip et al., "The low power energy aware processing (LEAP) embedded networked sensor system," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 2006, pp. 499--457.

Digital Library

[25]

E. B. Nightingale, O. Hodson, R. McIlroy et al., "Helios: heterogeneous multiprocessing with satellite kernels," in Proc. ACM Symp. Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Big Sky, Montana, USA, 2009, pp. 221--234.

Digital Library

[26]

NVIDIA, NVIDIA Tegra 2: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-2.html.

[27]

OKI Semiconductor, ML8953A: MEMS 3-axis accelerometer: http://www.okisemi.eu/Products/Sensors/mems_accelerometer.html.

[28]

J. Paek, J. Kim, and R. Govindan, "Energy-efficient rate-adaptive GPS-based positioning for smartphones," in Proc. ACM/USENIX Int. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), San Francisco, California, USA, 2010, pp. 299--314.

Digital Library

[29]

B. Priyantha, D. Lymberopoulos, and J. Liu, "LittleRock: Enabing Energy Efficient Continuous Sensing on Moble Phones," Technical Report MSR-TR-2010--14, Microsoft Research, 2010.

Digital Library

[30]

Qualcomm, Snapdragon MSM8660 and APQ8060 Product Brief: http://www.qualcomm.com/documents/snapdragon-msm8x60-apq8060-product-brief.

[31]

B. Saha, X. Zhou, H. Chen et al., "Programming model for a heterogeneous x86 platform," in Proc. ACM SIGPLAN Conf. Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), Dublin, Ireland, 2009, pp. 431--440.

Digital Library

[32]

Samsung, Exynos 4210 Application Processor: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/productInfo.do?fmly_id=844&partnum=Exynos%204210.

[33]

D. Scales, K. Gharachorloo, and C. Thekkath, "Shasta: A low overhead, software-only approach for supporting fine-grain shared memory," ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 174--185, 1996.

Digital Library

[34]

J. Sorber, N. Banerjee, M. D. Corner et al., "Turducken: hierarchical power management for mobile devices," in Proc. ACM/USENIX Int. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), Seattle, Washington, 2005, pp. 261--274.

Digital Library

[35]

D. J. Sorin, M. D. Hill, and D. A. Wood, A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence: Morgan & Claypool, 2011.

Digital Library

[36]

STMicroelectronics, MEMS motion sensor 3-axis - 2g/8g smart digital output piccolo accelerometer: http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/ds/12726/lis302dl.htm

[37]

Texas Instruments, OMAP5 Platform - OMAP5430, http://www.ti.com/ww/en/omap/omap5/omap5-OMAP5430.html.

[38]

Texas Instruments, "OMAP4 Applications Processor: Technical Reference Manual," 2010.

[39]

Texas Instruments, "TI SYS/BIOS Real-time Operating System v6.x User's Guide (Rev. I)," 2010.

[40]

G. Venkatesh, J. Sampson, N. Goulding et al., "Conservation cores: reducing the energy of mature computations," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 2010, pp. 205--218.

Digital Library

[41]

P. H. Wang, J. D. Collins, G. N. Chinya et al., "EXOCHI: architecture and programming environment for a heterogeneous multi-core multithreaded system," in Proc. ACM SIGPLAN Conf. Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), San Diego, California, USA, 2007, pp. 156--166.

Digital Library

[42]

R. Want, "Invited Talk: Always-on Considerations for Mobile Systems," in DAC Wrkshp. Mobile and Cloud Computing, 2010.

[43]

Y. Weinsberg, D. Dolev, T. Anker et al., "Tapping into the fountain of CPUs: on operating system support for programmable devices," in Proc. ACM Int. Conf. Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), Seattle, WA, USA, 2008, pp. 179--188.

Digital Library

[44]

S. Zhou, M. Stumm, K. Li et al., "Heterogeneous distributed shared memory," IEEE Trans. Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 540--554, 2002.

Digital Library

Cited By

Li XChen JLiu YWu KGallagher J(2023)Combatting Energy Issues for Mobile ApplicationsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/352785132:1(1-44)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3527851
Li XShi ZChen JLiu YHardavellas NCampanoni SGrot BKarpuzcu U(2022)Realizing Emotional Interactions to Learn User Experience and Guide Energy Optimization for Mobile ArchitecturesProceedings of the 55th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1109/MICRO56248.2022.00064(868-884)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MICRO56248.2022.00064
Li XHong SChen JYan GWu K(2022)Using Psychophysics to Guide Power Adaptation for Input Methods on Mobile Architectures2022 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA53966.2022.00045(514-527)Online publication date: Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCA53966.2022.00045
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Reflex: using low-power processors in smartphones without knowing them
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Distributed memory

Recommendations

Reflex: using low-power processors in smartphones without knowing them
ASPLOS '12

To accomplish frequent, simple tasks with high efficiency, it is necessary to leverage low-power, microcontroller-like processors that are increasingly available on mobile systems. However, existing solutions require developers to directly program the ...
Reflex: using low-power processors in smartphones without knowing them
ASPLOS XVII: Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

To accomplish frequent, simple tasks with high efficiency, it is necessary to leverage low-power, microcontroller-like processors that are increasingly available on mobile systems. However, existing solutions require developers to directly program the ...
By-passing the out-of-order execution pipeline to increase energy-efficiency
CF '07: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Computing frontiers

Out-of-order execution significantly increases the performanceof superscalar processors. The out-of-order execution mechanismis, however, energy-inefficient, which inhibits scaling superscalar processorsto high issue widths and large instruction ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 47, Issue 4

ASPLOS '12

April 2012

453 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2248487

Issue’s Table of Contents

ASPLOS XVII: Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
March 2012
476 pages
ISBN:9781450307598
DOI:10.1145/2150976
General Chair:
Tim Harris
Microsoft Research
,
Program Chair:
Michael L. Scott
University of Rochester

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 03 March 2012

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 47, Issue 4

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

51
Total Citations
View Citations
992
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)24
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 27 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Li XChen JLiu YWu KGallagher J(2023)Combatting Energy Issues for Mobile ApplicationsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/352785132:1(1-44)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3527851
Li XShi ZChen JLiu YHardavellas NCampanoni SGrot BKarpuzcu U(2022)Realizing Emotional Interactions to Learn User Experience and Guide Energy Optimization for Mobile ArchitecturesProceedings of the 55th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1109/MICRO56248.2022.00064(868-884)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MICRO56248.2022.00064
Li XHong SChen JYan GWu K(2022)Using Psychophysics to Guide Power Adaptation for Input Methods on Mobile Architectures2022 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA53966.2022.00045(514-527)Online publication date: Apr-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPCA53966.2022.00045
Hu JShearer ARajagopalan SLiKamWa RSong JKim MLane NBalan R(2019)BannerProceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services10.1145/3307334.3326092(236-248)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3307334.3326092
Guo LXu TXu MLiu XLin FOliveira RFelber PHu Y(2018)Power sandboxProceedings of the Thirteenth EuroSys Conference10.1145/3190508.3190533(1-15)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3190508.3190533
Li XYang YLiu YGallagher JWu KKhurshid SPăsăreanu C(2020)Detecting and diagnosing energy issues for mobile applicationsProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3395363.3397350(115-127)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3395363.3397350
Chuang HLyerly RLankes SRavindran B(2020)Scaling Shared Memory Multiprocessing Applications in Non-cache-coherent DomainsProceedings of the 13th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference10.1145/3383669.3398278(13-24)Online publication date: 30-May-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3383669.3398278
Guo LZhai SQiao YLin FDan TDahlia M(2019)TranskernelProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358865(675-691)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3358807.3358865
Brocanelli MWang X(2019)SODACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems10.1145/327552113:3(1-24)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3275521
Guo LXu TXu MLiu XLin FOliveira RFelber PHu Y(2018)Power sandboxProceedings of the Thirteenth EuroSys Conference10.1145/3190508.3190533(1-15)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3190508.3190533
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents