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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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Analysis and Mitigation of Shared Resource Contention on Heterogeneous Multicore: An Industrial Case Study
n this paper, we present a solution to the industrial challenge put forth by ARM in 2022. We systematically analyze the effect of shared resource contention to an augmented reality head-up display (AR-HUD) case-study application of the industrial challenge on a heterogeneous multicore platform, NVIDIA Jetson Nano. We configure the AR-HUD application such that it can process incoming image frames in real-time at 20Hz on the platform. We use Microarchitectural Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks as aggressor workloads of the challenge and show that they can dramatically impact the latency and accuracy of the AR-HUD application. This results in significant deviations of the estimated trajec- tories from known ground truths, despite our best effort to mitigate their influence by using cache partitioning and real-time scheduling of the AR- HUD application. To address the challenge, we propose RT-Gang++, a partitioned real-time gang scheduling framework with last-level cache (LLC) and integrated GPU bandwidth throttling capabilities. By applying RT-Gang++, we are able to achieve desired level of performance of the AR-HUD application even in the presence of fully loaded aggressor tasks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2038923
- PAR ID:
- 10511355
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Computers
- ISSN:
- 0018-9340
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Due to the emergence of parallel architectures and parallel programming frameworks, modern real-time applications are often composed of parallel tasks that can occupy multiple processors at the same time. Among parallel task models, gang scheduling has received much attention in recent years due to its performance efficiency and applicability to parallel architectures such as graphics processing units. Despite this attention, the soft real-time (SRT) scheduling of gang tasks has received little attention. This paper, for the first time, considers the SRT-feasibility problem for gang tasks. Necessary and sufficient feasibility conditions are presented that relate the SRTfeasibility problem to the HRT-feasibility problem of “equivalent” task systems. Based on these conditions, intractability results for SRT gang scheduling are derived. This paper also presents server-based scheduling policies, corresponding schedulability tests, and an improved schedulability condition for the global-earlies-tdeadline-first (GEDF) scheduling of gang tasks. Moreover, GEDF is shown to be non-optimal in scheduling SRT gang tasks.more » « less
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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
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2024.3386059
