Both energy-efficiency and real-time performance are critical requirements in many embedded systems applications such as self-driving car, robotic system, disaster response, and security/safety control. These systems entail a myriad of real-time tasks, where each task itself is a parallel task that can utilize multiple computing units at the same time. Driven by the increasing demand for parallel tasks, multi-core embedded processors are inevitably evolving to many-core. Existing work on real-time parallel tasks mostly focused on real-time scheduling without addressing energy consumption. In this paper, we address hard real-time scheduling of parallel tasks while minimizing their CPU energy consumption on multicore embedded systems. Each task is represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with nodes indicating different threads of execution and edges indicating their dependencies. Our technique is to determine the execution speeds of the nodes of the DAGs to minimize the overall energy consumption while meeting all task deadlines. It incorporates a frequency optimization engine and the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) scheme into the classical real-time scheduling policies (both federated and global) and makes them energy-aware. The contributions of this paper thus include the first energy-aware online federated scheduling and also the first energy-aware global scheduling of DAGs. Evaluation using synthetic workload through simulation shows that our energy-aware real-time scheduling policies can achieve up to 68% energy-saving compared to classical (energy-unaware) policies. We have also performed a proof of concept system evaluation using physical hardware demonstrating the energy efficiency through our proposed approach.
more »
« less
Bringing Inter-Thread Cache Benefits to Federated Scheduling
Multiprocessor scheduling of hard real-time tasks modeled by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) exploits the inherent parallelism presented by the model. For DAG tasks, a node represents a request to execute an object on one of the available processors. In one DAG task, there may be multiple execution requests for one object, each represented by a distinct node. These distinct execution requests offer an opportunity to reduce their combined cache overhead through coordinated scheduling of objects as threads within a parallel task. The goal of this work is to realize this opportunity by incorporating the cache-aware BUNDLE-scheduling algorithm into federated scheduling of sporadic DAG task sets.This is the first work to incorporate instruction cache sharing into federated scheduling. The result is a modification of the DAG model named the DAG with objects and threads (DAG-OT). Under the DAG-OT model, descriptions of nodes explicitly include their underlying executable object and number of threads. When possible, nodes assigned the same executable object are collapsed into a single node; joining their threads when BUNDLE-scheduled. Compared to the DAG model, the DAG-OT model with cache-aware scheduling reduces the number of cores allocated to individual tasks by approximately 20 percent in the synthetic evaluation and up to 50 percent on a novel parallel computing platform implementation. By reducing the number of allocated cores, the DAG-OT model is able to schedule a subset of previously infeasible task sets.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1724227
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10183411
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 281 to 295
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The BUNDLE and BUNDLEP scheduling algorithms are cache-cognizant thread-level scheduling algorithms and associated worst case execution time and cache overhead (WCETO) techniques for hard real-time multi-threaded tasks. The BUNDLE-based approaches utilize the inter-thread cache benefit to reduce WCETO values for jobs. Currently, the BUNDLE-based approaches are limited to scheduling a single task. This work aims to expand the applicability of BUNDLE-based scheduling to multiple task multi-threaded task sets. BUNDLE-based scheduling leverages knowledge of potential cache conflicts to selectively preempt one thread in favor of another from the same job. This thread-level preemption is a requirement for the run-time behavior and WCETO calculation to receive the benefit of BUNDLE-based approaches. This work proposes scheduling BUNDLE-based jobs non-preemptively according to the earliest deadline first (EDF) policy. Jobs are forbidden from preempting one another, while threads within a job are allowed to preempt other threads. An accompanying schedulability test is provided, named Threads Per Job (TPJ). TPJ is a novel schedulability test, input is a task set specification which may be transformed (under certain restrictions); dividing threads among tasks in an effort to find a feasible task set. Enhanced by the flexibility to transform task sets and taking advantage of the inter-thread cache benefit, the evaluation shows TPJ scheduling task sets fully preemptive EDF cannot.more » « less
-
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.more » « less
-
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.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Federated scheduling is a generalization of partitioned scheduling for parallel tasks on multiprocessors, and has been shown to be a competitive scheduling approach. However, federated scheduling may waste resources due to its dedicated allocation of processors to parallel tasks. In this work we introduce a novel algorithm for scheduling parallel tasks that require more than one processor to meet their deadlines (i.e., heavy tasks). The proposed algorithm computes a deterministic schedule for each heavy task based on its internal graph structure. It efficiently exploits the processors allocated to each task and thus reduces the number of processors required by the task. Experimental evaluation shows that our new federated scheduling algorithm significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art federated-based scheduling approaches, including semi-federated scheduling and reservation-based federated scheduling, that were developed to tackle resource waste in federated scheduling, and a stretching algorithm that also uses the tasks' graph structures.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/RTAS48715.2020.00005
