Push-assisted migration of real-time tasks in multi-core processors

Multicores are becoming ubiquitous, not only in general-purpose but also embedded computing. This trend is a reflexion of contemporary embedded applications posing steadily increasing demands in processing power. On such platforms, prediction of timing behavior to ensure that deadlines of real-time tasks can be met is becoming increasingly difficult. While real-time multicore scheduling approaches help to assure deadlines based on firm theoretical properties, their reliance on task migration poses a significant challenge to timing predictability in practice. Task migration actually (a) reduces timing predictability for contemporary multicores due to cache warm-up overheads while (b) increasing traffic on the network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect. This paper puts forth a fundamentally new approach to increase the timing predictability of multicore architectures aimed at task migration in embedded environments. A task migration between two cores imposes cache warm-up overheads on the ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: LCTRTS
• Authors: Abhik Sarkar, Frank Mueller, Harini Ramaprasad, Sibin Mohan
• Keywords: LCTRTS 2009, Real-time Tasks, Software Engineering, Task Migration, Timing Predictability