On robust task-accurate performance estimation

Task-accurate performance estimation methods are widely applied in early design phases to explore different architecture options. These methods rely on accurate annotations generated by software profiling or real measurements to guarantee accurate results. However, in practice, such accurate annotations are not available in early design phases due to lack of source code and hardware platform. Instead, estimated mean or worst-case annotations are usually used, which makes the final result inaccurate because of the errors induced by the estimations, especially for designs with tight time constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology that combines Distributionally Robust Monte Carlo Simulation with task-accurate performance estimation method to guarantee robust system performance estimation in early design phases, i.e., determining the lower bound of the confidence level of fulfilling a specific time constraint. Instead of using accurate annotations, our method only uses estimated annotations in the form of intervals and it does not make any assumptions of the distribution types of these intervals.