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Existing models used in real-time scheduling are inadequate to take advantage of simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which has been shown to improve performance in many areas of computing, but has seen little application to real-time systems. The SMART task model, which allows for combining SMT and real time by accounting for the variable task execution costs caused by SMT, is introduced, along with methods and conditions for scheduling SMT tasks under global earliest-deadline-first scheduling. The benefits of using SMT are demonstrated through a large-scale schedulability study in which we show that task systems with utilizations 30% larger than what would be schedulable without SMT can be correctly scheduled. This artifact includes benchmark experiments used to compare execution times with and without SMT and code to duplicate the reported schedulability experiments.
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Simultaneous Multithreading and Hard Real Time: Can it be Safe?
The applicability of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) to real-time systems has been hampered by the difficulty of obtaining reliable execution costs in an SMT-enabled system. This problem is addressed by introducing a scheduling framework, called CERT-MT, that combines scheduling-aware timing analysis with a cyclic-executive scheduler in a way that minimizes SMT-related timing variations. The proposed scheduling-aware timing analysis is based on maximum observed execution times and accounts for the uncertainty inherent in measurement-based timing analysis. The timing analysis is found to work for tasks with and without SMT, though some adjustments are required in the former case. A large-scale schedulability study is presented that shows CERT-MT can schedule systems with total utilizations approaching 1.4 times the core count, without sacrificing safety.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1717589
- PAR ID:
- 10183928
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 32nd Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 14:1-14:25
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.4230/DARTS.6.1.1
