Enabling Cross-ISA Offloading for COTS Binaries

Work offloading allows a mobile device, i.e., the client, to execute its computation-intensive code remotely on a more powerful server to improve its performance and to extend its battery life. However, the difference in instruction set architectures (ISAs) between the client and the server poses a great challenge to work offloading. Most of the existing solutions rely on language-level virtual machines to hide such differences. Therefore, they have to tie closely to the specific programming languages. Other approaches try to recompile the mobile applications to achieve the specific goal of offloading, so their applicability is limited to the availability of the source code. To overcome the above limitations, we propose to extend the capability of dynamic binary translation across clients and servers to offload the identified computation-intensive binary code regions automatically to the server at runtime. With this approach, the native binaries on the client can be offloaded to the server seamlessly without the limitations mentioned above. A prototype has been implemented using an existing retargetable dynamic binary translator. Experimental results show that our system achieves 1.93X speedup with 48.66% reduction in energy consumption for six real-world applications, and 1.62X speedup with 42.4% reduction in energy consumption for SPEC CINT2006 benchmarks.