Octopus

Abstract
In the MOBY DICK project we develop and define the architecture of a new generation of mobile hand-held computers called Mobile Digital Companions. The Companions must meet several major requirements: high performance, energy efficient, a notion of Quality of Service (QoS), small size, and low design complexity. To address these requirements we need to revise the architecture of the hardware, the operating system, and applications. -The approach is based on dedicated functionality and the extensive use of energy reduction techniques at all levels of system design. The Mobile Digital Companion has an unconventional architecture that saves energy by using system decomposition at different levels of the architecture and exploits locality of reference with dedicated, optimised modules. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch called Octopus exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies. The switch is implemented as a simplified ATM switch and provides Quality of Service guarantees and enough bandwidth for multimedia applications. We have built a testbed of the architecture, of which we will present performance and energy consumption characteristics

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