Applying Real-Time Scheduling Theory to the Synchronous Data Flow Model of Computation

Schedulability analysis techniques that are well understood within the real-time scheduling community are applied to the analysis of recurrent real-time workloads that are modeled using the synchronous data-flow graph (SDFG) model. An enhancement to the standard SDFG model is proposed, that permits the specification of a real-time latency constraint between a specified input and a specified output of an SDFG. A technique is derived for transforming such an enhanced SDFG to a collection of traditional 3-parameter sporadic tasks, thereby allowing for the analysis of systems of SDFG tasks using the methods and algorithms that have previously been developed within the real-time scheduling community for the analysis of systems of such sporadic tasks. The applicability of this approach is illustrated by applying prior results from real-time scheduling theory to construct an exact preemptive uniprocessor schedulability test for collections of recurrent processes that are each represented using the enhanced SDFG model

Pinwheel Scheduling for Fault-tolerant Broadcast Disks in Real-time Database Systems

The design of programs for broadcast disks which incorporate real-time and fault-tolerance requirements is considered. A generalized model for real-time fault-tolerant broadcast disks is defined. It is shown that designing programs for broadcast disks specified in this model is closely related to the scheduling of pinwheel task systems. Some new results in pinwheel scheduling theory are derived, which facilitate the efficient generation of real-time fault-tolerant broadcast disk programs.National Science Foundation (CCR-9308344, CCR-9596282

Semi-Partitioned Scheduling of Dynamic Real-Time Workload: A Practical Approach Based on Analysis-Driven Load Balancing

Recent work showed that semi-partitioned scheduling can achieve near-optimal schedulability performance, is simpler to implement compared to global scheduling, and less heavier in terms of runtime overhead, thus resulting in an excellent choice for implementing real-world systems. However, semi-partitioned scheduling typically leverages an off-line design to allocate tasks across the available processors, which requires a-priori knowledge of the workload. Conversely, several simple global schedulers, as global earliest-deadline first (G-EDF), can transparently support dynamic workload without requiring a task-allocation phase. Nonetheless, such schedulers exhibit poor worst-case performance. This work proposes a semi-partitioned approach to efficiently schedule dynamic real-time workload on a multiprocessor system. A linear-time approximation for the C=D splitting scheme under partitioned EDF scheduling is first presented to reduce the complexity of online scheduling decisions. Then, a load-balancing algorithm is proposed for admitting new real-time workload in the system with limited workload re-allocation. A large-scale experimental study shows that the linear-time approximation has a very limited utilization loss compared to the exact technique and the proposed approach achieves very high schedulability performance, with a consistent improvement on G-EDF and pure partitioned EDF scheduling

Semi-Partitioned Scheduling of Dynamic Real-Time Workload: A Practical Approach Based on Analysis-Driven Load Balancing

Recent work showed that semi-partitioned scheduling can achieve near-optimal schedulability performance, is simpler to implement compared to global scheduling, and less heavier in terms of runtime overhead, thus resulting in an excellent choice for implementing real-world systems. However, semi-partitioned scheduling typically leverages an off-line design to allocate tasks across the available processors, which requires a-priori knowledge of the workload. Conversely, several simple global schedulers, as global earliest-deadline first (G-EDF), can transparently support dynamic workload without requiring a task-allocation phase. Nonetheless, such schedulers exhibit poor worst-case performance. This work proposes a semi-partitioned approach to efficiently schedule dynamic real-time workload on a multiprocessor system. A linear-time approximation for the C=D splitting scheme under partitioned EDF scheduling is first presented to reduce the complexity of online scheduling decisions. Then, a load-balancing algorithm is proposed for admitting new real-time workload in the system with limited workload re-allocation. A large-scale experimental study shows that the linear-time approximation has a very limited utilization loss compared to the exact technique and the proposed approach achieves very high schedulability performance, with a consistent improvement on G-EDF and pure partitioned EDF scheduling

Constant bandwidth servers with constrained deadlines

The Hard Constant Bandwidth Server (H-CBS) is a reservation-based scheduling algorithm often used to mix hard and soft real-time tasks on the same system. A number of variants of the H-CBS algorithm have been proposed in the last years, but all of them have been conceived for implicit server deadlines (i.e., equal to the server period). However, recent promising results on semi-partitioned scheduling together with the demand for new functionality claimed by the Linux community, urge the need for a reservation algorithm that is able to work with constrained deadlines. This paper presents three novel H-CBS algorithms that support constrained deadlines. The three algorithms are formally analyzed, and their performance are compared through an extensive set of simulations