Network simplex method based multiple voltage scheduling in power-efficient high-level synthesis

In this work, we focus on the problem of latency-constrained scheduling with consideration of multiple voltage technologies in High-level synthesis. Without the resource concern, we propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation and further relax it to a piecewise Linear Programming (LP) problem, which is optimally solved using the efficient piecewise-linear extended network simplex method(PLNSM). The experimental results showed 80X+ speedup compared to the general LP formulation. Considering the resource usage, we propose a two-stage heuristic Network Simplex Method based Power-efficient Multiple Voltage Scheduling(NPMVS) method. Firstly, the above relaxed LP formulation is modified to perform mobility allocation and delay assignment for the operations so as to minimize the power and the differences between the allocated operation mobilities and the predefined target mobilities. The modified formulation is solved using the PLNSM and iteratively performed to minimize power and resource density variation in control steps by gradually updating the predefined target mobilities. Secondly, with the allocated operation mobilities, we apply dependency-free operation scheduling with the objective of minimizing the resource usage. Experimental results show that the proposed method can produce optimum solutions for all 6 benchmarks with 14 groups of data in a maximum time of 0.25 second.