Adaptative Dynamic Architecture for MPSOC – ADAM

ADAM stands for “Adaptive Dynamic Architecture for MP2SoCs”. It is a direct spin-off of the ARAMIS project submitted last year to the ANR, and put on a waiting list in December 2006.

ADAM is a prospective research project that directly addresses the hot topic of MP2SoC self-adaptability to altered operating conditions, like loss of performance, appearance of faulty hardware resources, and temperature overhead. The architectures targeted by ADAM are MP2SoC, Massively Parallel MultiProcessor systems on chip (more than one hundred of processing elements) containing homogeneous functional blocks (all blocks can perform the work requested by the application), but structurally heterogeneous (with different and process dependant performances, electrical and timing characteristics and reliability). Taking simultaneously these problems into account is mandatory to ensure the reliability and competitiveness of embedded systems to come.

Three French laboratories with international reputation have joined their effort to propose a unified approach to the self-adaptability in MP2SoC issue. Considering a 2D mesh hardware architecture with a Network on Chip interconnecting clusters containing processing elements and local memories, the proposal can be summarized as a three steps process : non-intrusive online monitoring, online diagnosis/test, and online remapping. The main contribution of the ADAM project is to make these three steps finely interact through the use of onchip dynamic event databases: local databases of formatted/historized events and a global database of architecture instant maps, or architecture audited views classified by event types.