Paper Info
Title
QUICKRECALL: A Low Overhead HW/SW Approach for Enabling Computations across Power Cycles in Transiently Powered Computers
Abstract
Transiently Powered Computers (TPCs) are a new class of batteryless embedded systems that depend solely on energy harvested from external sources for performing computations. Enabling long-running computations on TPCs is a major challenge due to the highly intermittent nature of the power supply (often bursts of <; 100ms), resulting in frequent system reboots. Prior work seeks to address this issue by frequently checkpointing system state in flash memory, preserving it across power cycles. However, this involves a substantial overhead due to the high erase/write times of flash memory. This paper proposes the use of FRAM, an emerging non-volatile memory technology that combines the benefits of SRAM and flash, to seamlessly enable long-running computations in TPCs. We propose a lightweight, in-situ checkpointing technique for TPCs using FRAM that decreases the time taken for saving and restoring a checkpoint to only 12.6μs, which is over two orders of magnitude lower than the corresponding overhead using flash. We have implemented and evaluated our technique, QUICKRECALL, using the TI MSP430FR5739 FRAM-enabled microcontroller. Experimental results show that our highly-efficient checkpointing translates to a significant speedup (1.4x - 4.5x) in program execution time.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/VLSID.2014.63
VLSI Design
Keywords
Field
DocType
checkpointing,computer power supplies,flash memories,FRAM,QUICKRECALL,flash memory,in-situ checkpointing technique,low overhead HW-SW,power cycles,transiently powered computers,Embedded Systems,Energy Harvesting,FRAM,Low power design,Non-volatile memory,Transiently Powered Computers
Flash memory,Computer science,Energy harvesting,Real-time computing,Electronic engineering,Non-volatile memory,Microcontroller,Speedup,Computation,Parallel computing,Static random-access memory,Execution time,Embedded system
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1063-9667
50
1.79
References 
Authors
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hrishikesh Jayakumar11307.80
Arnab Raha219719.45
Vijay Raghunathan31932170.13