With the technology trend of hardware and workload consolidation for embedded systems and the rapid development of edge computing, there has been increasing interest in supporting parallel real-time tasks to better utilize the multi-core platforms while meeting the stringent real-time constraints. For parallel real-time tasks, the federated scheduling paradigm, which assigns each parallel task a set of dedicated cores, achieves good theoretical bounds by ensuring exclusive use of processing resources to reduce interferences. However, because cores share the last-level cache and memory bandwidth resources, in practice tasks may still interfere with each other despite executing on dedicated cores. Such resource interferences due to concurrent accesses can be even more severe for embedded platforms or edge servers, where the computing power and cache/memory space are limited. To tackle this issue, in this work, we present a holistic resource allocation framework for parallel real-time tasks under federated scheduling. Under our proposed framework, in addition to dedicated cores, each parallel task is also assigned with dedicated cache and memory bandwidth resources. Further, we propose a holistic resource allocation algorithm that well balances the allocation between different resources to achieve good schedulability. Additionally, we provide a full implementation of our framework by extending the federated scheduling system with Intel’s Cache Allocation Technology and MemGuard. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of our proposed framework via extensive numerical evaluations and empirical experiments using real benchmark programs.
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RT-Gang: Real-Time Gang Scheduling Framework for Safety-Critical Systems
In this paper, we present RT-Gang: a novel realtime gang scheduling framework that enforces a one-gang-at-atime policy. We find that, in a multicore platform, co-scheduling
multiple parallel real-time tasks would require highly pessimistic worst-case execution time (WCET) and schedulability analysis—even when there are enough cores—due to contention in shared hardware resources such as cache and DRAM controller.
In RT-Gang, all threads of a parallel real-time task form a real-time gang and the scheduler globally enforces the one-gangat-a-time scheduling policy to guarantee tight and accurate task WCET. To minimize under-utilization, we integrate a state-of-the-art memory bandwidth throttling framework to allow safe execution of best-effort tasks. Specifically, any idle cores, if exist, are used to schedule best-effort tasks but their maximum memory bandwidth usages are strictly throttled to tightly bound interference to real-time gang tasks.
We implement RT-Gang in the Linux kernel and evaluate it on two representative embedded multicore platforms using both synthetic and real-world DNN workloads. The results show that RT-Gang dramatically improves system predictability and the
overhead is negligible.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1815959
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10097576
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings - IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium
- ISSN:
- 1545-3421
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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