ECE PhD Proposal Review: Jinghan Zhang

PhD Proposal Review: Design Space Exploration: Designing a Unified Platform for a Domain of Streaming Applications

Jinghan Zhang

Location: Zoom Link

Abstract: Many demanding streaming applications share functional and structural similarities with
other applications in their respective domain, e.g. video analytics, software-defined radio, and radar. This opens the opportunity for specialization (e.g. heterogeneous computing) to achieve the needed efficiency and/or performance. However, current Design Space Exploration (DSE) focuses on an individual application in isolation (e.g. one particular vision flow), but not a set of similar applications.Hence, optimizations that occur due to considering multiple applications simultaneously are missed. New DSE methodologies and tools are needed with a broader scope of application sets instead of individual applications.
This dissertation introduces a novel Domain DSE approach focusing on streaming applications. Key contributions are: (1) a formalized method to extract the functional and structural similarities of domain applications, (2) domain application generation to provide enough synthetic domains as study cases, (3) a rapid platform performance estimation and comparison at two abstraction levels: Domain Score (DS) and Analytic Performance Estimation (APE) model, (4) a methodology to evaluate a platform’s benefit for a set of applications, (5) two novel algorithms, Dynamic Score Selection (DSS) and GenetIc Domain Exploration (GIDE), to allocate a domain-specific platform to maximize the throughput across domain applications under certain constraints, and (6) Multi-Granularity Domain DSE (MG-DmDSE) to extend DSE considering multi-granularity functionality similarity in the platform allocation and application binding.