Analysis of Dynamic Memory Bandwidth Regulation in Multi-core Real-Time Systems

One of the primary sources of unpredictability in modern multi-core embedded systems is contention over shared memory resources, such as caches, interconnects, and DRAM. Despite significant achievements in the design and analysis of multi-core systems, there is a need for a theoretical framework that can be used to reason on the worst-case behavior of real-time workload when both processors and memory resources are subject to scheduling decisions. In this paper, we focus our attention on dynamic allocation of main memory bandwidth. In particular, we study how to determine the worst-case response time of tasks spanning through a sequence of time intervals, each with a different bandwidth-to-core assignment. We show that the response time computation can be reduced to a maximization problem over assignment of memory requests to different time intervals, and we provide an efficient way to solve such problem. As a case study, we then demonstrate how our proposed analysis can be used to improve the schedulability of Integrated Modular Avionics systems in the presence of memory-intensive workload.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) 2018 conferenc

MORPHOSYS: efficient colocation of QoS-constrained workloads in the cloud

In hosting environments such as IaaS clouds, desirable application performance is usually guaranteed through the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which specify minimal fractions of resource capacities that must be allocated for use for proper operation. Arbitrary colocation of applications with different SLAs on a single host may result in inefficient utilization of the host’s resources. In this paper, we propose that periodic resource allocation and consumption models be used for a more granular expression of SLAs. Our proposed SLA model has the salient feature that it exposes flexibilities that enable the IaaS provider to safely transform SLAs from one form to another for the purpose of achieving more efficient colocation. Towards that goal, we present MorphoSys: a framework for a service that allows the manipulation of SLAs to enable efficient colocation of workloads. We present results from extensive trace-driven simulations of colocated Video-on-Demand servers in a cloud setting. The results show that potentially-significant reduction in wasted resources (by as much as 60%) are possible using MorphoSys.First author draf

Trading Safety Versus Performance: Rapid Deployment of Robotic Swarms with Robust Performance Constraints

In this paper we consider a stochastic deployment problem, where a robotic swarm is tasked with the objective of positioning at least one robot at each of a set of pre-assigned targets while meeting a temporal deadline. Travel times and failure rates are stochastic but related, inasmuch as failure rates increase with speed. To maximize chances of success while meeting the deadline, a control strategy has therefore to balance safety and performance. Our approach is to cast the problem within the theory of constrained Markov Decision Processes, whereby we seek to compute policies that maximize the probability of successful deployment while ensuring that the expected duration of the task is bounded by a given deadline. To account for uncertainties in the problem parameters, we consider a robust formulation and we propose efficient solution algorithms, which are of independent interest. Numerical experiments confirming our theoretical results are presented and discussed

A C-DAG task model for scheduling complex real-time tasks on heterogeneous platforms: preemption matters

Recent commercial hardware platforms for embedded real-time systems feature heterogeneous processing units and computing accelerators on the same System-on-Chip. When designing complex real-time application for such architectures, the designer needs to make a number of difficult choices: on which processor should a certain task be implemented? Should a component be implemented in parallel or sequentially? These choices may have a great impact on feasibility, as the difference in the processor internal architectures impact on the tasks' execution time and preemption cost. To help the designer explore the wide space of design choices and tune the scheduling parameters, in this paper we propose a novel real-time application model, called C-DAG, specifically conceived for heterogeneous platforms. A C-DAG allows to specify alternative implementations of the same component of an application for different processing engines to be selected off-line, as well as conditional branches to model if-then-else statements to be selected at run-time. We also propose a schedulability analysis for the C-DAG model and a heuristic allocation algorithm so that all deadlines are respected. Our analysis takes into account the cost of preempting a task, which can be non-negligible on certain processors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a large set of synthetic experiments by comparing with state of the art algorithms in the literature