On Multiplayer Techniques for Crowdsourcing Mapping onto Custom Domain-Specific Architectures

One of the grand challenges in the design of portable/wearable devices is to achieve optimal efficiency and flexibility in a tiny low power package. Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) hold great promise for energy-efficient flexible designs for a domain of applications. CGRAs are very promising due to the ability to highly customize such architectures to an application domain. However, mapping applications onto such architectures is a perennially difficult problem the greater the customization of architecture, the greater the difficulty of mapping applications onto that architecture efficiently. Our previous research has shown that crowdsourcing can be a highly effective means to solve small and moderate sized mapping problems. This paper presents a case study on multiplayer techniques with the goal of scaling to larger and more complex mapping problems in a graceful manner. To conduct this case study, we have designed a multiplayer version of our interactive mapping game, UNTANGLED. In this work, we used the benchmarks that are 2 to 5 times as large as those we have served to players to date. Our results show that multiplayer techniques are effective, and the most effective style of presentation depends on player experience, with more experienced players benefitting from a higher level of autonomy. Keywords-mapping, placement, coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures, custom domain-specific architectures, crowdsourcing