Compiler-Directed High-Performance Intermittent Computation with Power Failure Immunity

• Published in: Proceedings / IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium pp. 40 - 54
• Main Authors: Choi, Jongouk, Kittinger, Larry, Liu, Qingrui, Jung, Changhee
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2022
• Subjects: Codes; Computational efficiency; Energy harvesting; Power system reliability; Program processors; Real-time systems; Static analysis
• ISSN: 2642-7346
• DOI: 10.1109/RTAS54340.2022.00012

This paper introduces power failure immunity (PFI), an essential program execution property for energy harvesting systems to achieve efficient intermittent computation. PFI ensures program code regions never fail more than once i.e., at most single in-region outage, during intermittent computation as if they are immunized after the first power outage. To enforce PFI automatically for such batteryless systems that use a tiny energy buffer instead, we present its compiler-directed enforcement. The compiler leverages a precise static analysis to partition the program into recoverable regions with the energy buffer size in mind so that their execution can be completed-using the full energy buffered in a single charge cycle-regardless of program execution paths. In this way, no matter how unstable the energy harvesting source is, no region fails more than once.In the virtue of PFI, this paper presents ROCKCLIMB, a high-performance and rollback-free intermittent computation scheme. It guarantees that PFI-enforced regions never fail, i.e., there is no in-region outage at all. To achieve this, ROCKCLIMB checks if the fully buffered energy is secured at each region boundary. If it is not secured, ROCKCLIMB waits until the energy buffer is fully charged, before executing the following region. In particular, the rollback-free nature of ROCKCLIMB obviates the need to log memory writes-required for rollback recovery-since no region is power-interrupted. As a result, PFI+ROCKCLIMB achieves rollback-free and memory-log-free intermittent computation, ensuring forward execution progress and maximizing it even in the presence of frequent power outages. Our real board experiments demonstrate that PFI+ROCKCLIMB outperforms the state-of-the-art work by 5%-550% on average in various energy harvesting conditions.