Parametrized Exact Hardware-Software Partitioning

2026-10-06

AI Summary

This study addresses the NP-hard problem of hardware/software partitioning in computing architectures. Leveraging the directed pathwidth of task graphs, this work proposes a novel family of problem formulations that subsumes existing models, along with exact fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms. Methodologically, by integrating directed pathwidth analysis, FPT theory, and integer linear programming (ILP), the proposed approach achieves exact and efficient solutions for this problem family. The primary theoretical contribution lies in extending the modeling framework for hardware/software partitioning and establishing its fixed-parameter tractability. Empirically, experiments on real-world application scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method achieves up to a 200-fold speedup over general-purpose ILP solvers such as Gurobi, highlighting its practical efficacy and computational advantage.

Abstract

When optimizing computing architecture for specific computationally intensive tasks, such as evaluating or training a neural network, it is important to identify what computational subtasks will offer the greatest decrease in cost (e.g., wall clock time or energy usage). This problem is known as Hardware-Software (HS) Partitioning, and it has a variety of formulations, many of which are NP-Hard. In this paper, we will define a family of HS Partitioning formulations which admit an exact fixed parameter tractable algorithm based on the directed pathwidth of the given task graph and show that this family of problems contains multiple existing formulations such as makespan minimization. Finally, we examine task graphs with small directed pathwidth that arise in real world applications and show that our algorithm can provide a speed up of up to 200x over a comparable linear programming approach utilizing the Gurobi ILP Library.

Problem

• Hardware-Software Partitioning
• computational cost optimization
• task graph
• NP-Hard
• makespan minimization

Innovation

• Hardware-Software Partitioning
• Fixed Parameter Tractable
• Directed Pathwidth
• Makespan Minimization
• Task Graph