WCET Optimizations and Architectural Support for Hard Real-Time Systems

As time predictability is critical to hard real-time systems, it is not only necessary to accurately estimate the worst-case execution time (WCET) of the real-time tasks but also desirable to improve either the WCET of the tasks or time predictability of the system, because the real-time tasks with lower WCETs are easy to schedule and more likely to meat their deadlines. As a real-time system is an integration of software and hardware, the optimization can be achieved through two ways: software optimization and time-predictable architectural support. In terms of software optimization, we fi rst propose a loop-based instruction prefetching approach to further improve the WCET comparing with simple prefetching techniques such as Next-N-Line prefetching which can enhance both the average-case performance and the worst-case performance. Our prefetching approach can exploit the program controlow information to intelligently prefetch instructions that are most likely needed. Second, as inter-thread interferences in shared caches can signi cantly a ect the WCET of real-time tasks running on multicore processors, we study three multicore-aware code positioning methods to reduce the inter-core L2 cache interferences between co-running real-time threads. One strategy focuses on decreasing the longest WCET among the co-running threads, and two other methods aim at achieving fairness in terms of the amount or percentage of WCET reduction among co-running threads. In the aspect of time-predictable architectural support, we introduce the concept of architectural time predictability (ATP) to separate timing uncertainty concerns caused by hardware from software, which greatly facilitates the advancement of time-predictable processor design. We also propose a metric called Architectural Time-predictability Factor (ATF) to measure architectural time predictability quantitatively. Furthermore, while cache memories can generally improve average-case performance, they are harmful to time predictability and thus are not desirable for hard real-time and safety-critical systems. In contrast, Scratch-Pad Memories (SPMs) are time predictable, but they may lead to inferior performance. Guided by ATF, we propose and evaluate a variety of hybrid on-chip memory architectures to combine both caches and SPMs intelligently to achieve good time predictability and high performance. Detailed implementation and experimental results discussion are presented in this dissertation

Hard Real-Time Linux for Off-The-Shelf Multicore Architectures

This document describes the research results that were obtained from the development of a real-time extension for the Linux operating system. The paper describes a full extension of the kernel, which enables hard real-time performance on a 64-bit x86 architecture. In the first part of this study, real-time systems are categorized and concepts of real-time operating systems are introduced to the reader. In addition, numerous well-known real-time operating systems are considered. QNX Neutrino, RT_PREEMPT Linux Patch and HLRT Linux Patch are analyzed in detail. The core concepts of these systems are shown and discussed. Furthermore, a test suite is developed, which is used to obtain expressive benchmarks from the systems that were analyzed before. The systems are evaluated on the basis of these benchmarks and compared to the real-time extension which is developed in this work. A requirements catalogue is defined based on the analysis of the stated operating systems. The design of a real-time extension is developed based on the specification catalogue and the identified core concepts. Furthermore, the concrete implementation of the developed real-time extension is presented in detail. Finally, the benchmarks of all analyzed systems, including the developed real-time extension, are compared to each other and evaluated

Configurable Strategies for Work-stealing

Work-stealing systems are typically oblivious to the nature of the tasks they are scheduling. For instance, they do not know or take into account how long a task will take to execute or how many subtasks it will spawn. Moreover, the actual task execution order is typically determined by the underlying task storage data structure, and cannot be changed. There are thus possibilities for optimizing task parallel executions by providing information on specific tasks and their preferred execution order to the scheduling system. We introduce scheduling strategies to enable applications to dynamically provide hints to the task-scheduling system on the nature of specific tasks. Scheduling strategies can be used to independently control both local task execution order as well as steal order. In contrast to conventional scheduling policies that are normally global in scope, strategies allow the scheduler to apply optimizations on individual tasks. This flexibility greatly improves composability as it allows the scheduler to apply different, specific scheduling choices for different parts of applications simultaneously. We present a number of benchmarks that highlight diverse, beneficial effects that can be achieved with scheduling strategies. Some benchmarks (branch-and-bound, single-source shortest path) show that prioritization of tasks can reduce the total amount of work compared to standard work-stealing execution order. For other benchmarks (triangle strip generation) qualitatively better results can be achieved in shorter time. Other optimizations, such as dynamic merging of tasks or stealing of half the work, instead of half the tasks, are also shown to improve performance. Composability is demonstrated by examples that combine different strategies, both within the same kernel (prefix sum) as well as when scheduling multiple kernels (prefix sum and unbalanced tree search)

Real-time operating system support for multicore applications

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Automação e Sistemas, Florianópolis, 2014Plataformas multiprocessadas atuais possuem diversos níveis da memória cache entre o processador e a memória principal para esconder a latência da hierarquia de memória. O principal objetivo da hierarquia de memória é melhorar o tempo médio de execução, ao custo da previsibilidade. O uso não controlado da hierarquia da cache pelas tarefas de tempo real impacta a estimativa dos seus piores tempos de execução, especialmente quando as tarefas de tempo real acessam os níveis da cache compartilhados. Tal acesso causa uma disputa pelas linhas da cache compartilhadas e aumenta o tempo de execução das aplicações. Além disso, essa disputa na cache compartilhada pode causar a perda de prazos, o que é intolerável em sistemas de tempo real críticos. O particionamento da memória cache compartilhada é uma técnica bastante utilizada em sistemas de tempo real multiprocessados para isolar as tarefas e melhorar a previsibilidade do sistema. Atualmente, os estudos que avaliam o particionamento da memória cache em multiprocessadores carecem de dois pontos fundamentais. Primeiro, o mecanismo de particionamento da cache é tipicamente implementado em um ambiente simulado ou em um sistema operacional de propósito geral. Consequentemente, o impacto das atividades realizados pelo núcleo do sistema operacional, tais como o tratamento de interrupções e troca de contexto, no particionamento das tarefas tende a ser negligenciado. Segundo, a avaliação é restrita a um escalonador global ou particionado, e assim não comparando o desempenho do particionamento da cache em diferentes estratégias de escalonamento. Ademais, trabalhos recentes confirmaram que aspectos da implementação do SO, tal como a estrutura de dados usada no escalonamento e os mecanismos de tratamento de interrupções, impactam a escalonabilidade das tarefas de tempo real tanto quanto os aspectos teóricos. Entretanto, tais estudos também usaram sistemas operacionais de propósito geral com extensões de tempo real, que afetamos sobre custos de tempo de execução observados e a escalonabilidade das tarefas de tempo real. Adicionalmente, os algoritmos de escalonamento tempo real para multiprocessadores atuais não consideram cenários onde tarefas de tempo real acessam as mesmas linhas da cache, o que dificulta a estimativa do pior tempo de execução. Esta pesquisa aborda os problemas supracitados com as estratégias de particionamento da cache e com os algoritmos de escalonamento tempo real multiprocessados da seguinte forma. Primeiro, uma infraestrutura de tempo real para multiprocessadores é projetada e implementada em um sistema operacional embarcado. A infraestrutura consiste em diversos algoritmos de escalonamento tempo real, tais como o EDF global e particionado, e um mecanismo de particionamento da cache usando a técnica de coloração de páginas. Segundo, é apresentada uma comparação em termos da taxa de escalonabilidade considerando o sobre custo de tempo de execução da infraestrutura criada e de um sistema operacional de propósito geral com extensões de tempo real. Em alguns casos, o EDF global considerando o sobre custo do sistema operacional embarcado possui uma melhor taxa de escalonabilidade do que o EDF particionado com o sobre custo do sistema operacional de propósito geral, mostrando claramente como diferentes sistemas operacionais influenciam os escalonadores de tempo real críticos em multiprocessadores. Terceiro, é realizada uma avaliação do impacto do particionamento da memória cache em diversos escalonadores de tempo real multiprocessados. Os resultados desta avaliação indicam que um sistema operacional "leve" não compromete as garantias de tempo real e que o particionamento da cache tem diferentes comportamentos dependendo do escalonador e do tamanho do conjunto de trabalho das tarefas. Quarto, é proposto um algoritmo de particionamento de tarefas que atribui as tarefas que compartilham partições ao mesmo processador. Os resultados mostram que essa técnica de particionamento de tarefas reduz a disputa pelas linhas da cache compartilhadas e provê garantias de tempo real para sistemas críticos. Finalmente, é proposto um escalonador de tempo real de duas fases para multiprocessadores. O escalonador usa informações coletadas durante o tempo de execução das tarefas através dos contadores de desempenho em hardware. Com base nos valores dos contadores, o escalonador detecta quando tarefas de melhor esforço o interferem com tarefas de tempo real na cache. Assim é possível impedir que tarefas de melhor esforço acessem as mesmas linhas da cache que tarefas de tempo real. O resultado desta estratégia de escalonamento é o atendimento dos prazos críticos e não críticos das tarefas de tempo real.Abstracts: Modern multicore platforms feature multiple levels of cache memory placed between the processor and main memory to hide the latency of ordinary memory systems. The primary goal of this cache hierarchy is to improve average execution time (at the cost of predictability). The uncontrolled use of the cache hierarchy by realtime tasks may impact the estimation of their worst-case execution times (WCET), specially when real-time tasks access a shared cache level, causing a contention for shared cache lines and increasing the application execution time. This contention in the shared cache may leadto deadline losses, which is intolerable particularly for hard real-time (HRT) systems. Shared cache partitioning is a well-known technique used in multicore real-time systems to isolate task workloads and to improve system predictability. Presently, the state-of-the-art studies that evaluate shared cache partitioning on multicore processors lack two key issues. First, the cache partitioning mechanism is typically implemented either in a simulated environment or in a general-purpose OS (GPOS), and so the impact of kernel activities, such as interrupt handlers and context switching, on the task partitions tend to be overlooked. Second, the evaluation is typically restricted to either a global or partitioned scheduler, thereby by falling to compare the performance of cache partitioning when tasks are scheduled by different schedulers. Furthermore, recent works have confirmed that OS implementation aspects, such as the choice of scheduling data structures and interrupt handling mechanisms, impact real-time schedulability as much as scheduling theoretic aspects. However, these studies also used real-time patches applied into GPOSes, which affects the run-time overhead observed in these works and consequently the schedulability of real-time tasks. Additionally, current multicore scheduling algorithms do not consider scenarios where real-time tasks access the same cache lines due to true or false sharing, which also impacts the WCET. This thesis addresses these aforementioned problems with cache partitioning techniques and multicore real-time scheduling algorithms as following. First, a real-time multicore support is designed and implemented on top of an embedded operating system designed from scratch. This support consists of several multicore real-time scheduling algorithms, such as global and partitioned EDF, and a cache partitioning mechanism based on page coloring. Second, it is presented a comparison in terms of schedulability ratio considering the run-time overhead of the implemented RTOS and a GPOS patched with real-time extensions. In some cases, Global-EDF considering the overhead of the RTOS is superior to Partitioned-EDF considering the overhead of the patched GPOS, which clearly shows how different OSs impact hard realtime schedulers. Third, an evaluation of the cache partitioning impacton partitioned, clustered, and global real-time schedulers is performed.The results indicate that a lightweight RTOS does not impact real-time tasks, and shared cache partitioning has different behavior depending on the scheduler and the task's working set size. Fourth, a task partitioning algorithm that assigns tasks to cores respecting their usage of cache partitions is proposed. The results show that by simply assigning tasks that shared cache partitions to the same processor, it is possible to reduce the contention for shared cache lines and to provideHRT guarantees. Finally, a two-phase multicore scheduler that provides HRT and soft real-time (SRT) guarantees is proposed. It is shown that by using information from hardware performance counters at run-time, the RTOS can detect when best-effort tasks interfere with real-time tasks in the shared cache. Then, the RTOS can prevent best effort tasks from interfering with real-time tasks. The results also show that the assignment of exclusive partitions to HRT tasks together with the two-phase multicore scheduler provides HRT and SRT guarantees, even when best-effort tasks share partitions with real-time tasks

Running stream-like programs on heterogeneous multi-core systems

All major semiconductor companies are now shipping multi-cores. Phones, PCs, laptops, and mobile internet devices will all require software that can make effective use of these cores. Writing high-performance parallel software is difficult, time-consuming and error prone, increasing both time-to-market and cost. Software outlives hardware; it typically takes longer to develop new software than hardware, and legacy software tends to survive for a long time, during which the number of cores per system will increase. Development and maintenance productivity will be improved if parallelism and technical details are managed by the machine, while the programmer reasons about the application as a whole. Parallel software should be written using domain-specific high-level languages or extensions. These languages reveal implicit parallelism, which would be obscured by a sequential language such as C. When memory allocation and program control are managed by the compiler, the program's structure and data layout can be safely and reliably modified by high-level compiler transformations. One important application domain contains so-called stream programs, which are structured as independent kernels interacting only through one-way channels, called streams. Stream programming is not applicable to all programs, but it arises naturally in audio and video encode and decode, 3D graphics, and digital signal processing. This representation enables high-level transformations, including kernel unrolling and kernel fusion. This thesis develops new compiler and run-time techniques for stream programming. The first part of the thesis is concerned with a statically scheduled stream compiler. It introduces a new static partitioning algorithm, which determines which kernels should be fused, in order to balance the loads on the processors and interconnects. A good partitioning algorithm is crucial if the compiler is to produce efficient code. The algorithm also takes account of downstream compiler passes---specifically software pipelining and buffer allocation---and it models the compiler's ability to fuse kernels. The latter is important because the compiler may not be able to fuse arbitrary collections of kernels. This thesis also introduces a static queue sizing algorithm. This algorithm is important when memory is distributed, especially when local stores are small. The algorithm takes account of latencies and variations in computation time, and is constrained by the sizes of the local memories. The second part of this thesis is concerned with dynamic scheduling of stream programs. First, it investigates the performance of known online, non-preemptive, non-clairvoyant dynamic schedulers. Second, it proposes two dynamic schedulers for stream programs. The first is specifically for one-dimensional stream programs. The second is more general: it does not need to be told the stream graph, but it has slightly larger overhead. This thesis also introduces some support tools related to stream programming. StarssCheck is a debugging tool, based on Valgrind, for the StarSs task-parallel programming language. It generates a warning whenever the program's behaviour contradicts a pragma annotation. Such behaviour could otherwise lead to exceptions or race conditions. StreamIt to OmpSs is a tool to convert a streaming program in the StreamIt language into a dynamically scheduled task based program using StarSs.Totes les empreses de semiconductors produeixen actualment multi-cores. Mòbils,PCs, portàtils, i dispositius mòbils d’Internet necessitaran programari quefaci servir eficientment aquests cores. Escriure programari paral·lel d’altrendiment és difícil, laboriós i propens a errors, incrementant tant el tempsde llançament al mercat com el cost. El programari té una vida més llarga queel maquinari; típicament pren més temps desenvolupar nou programi que noumaquinari, i el programari ja existent pot perdurar molt temps, durant el qualel nombre de cores dels sistemes incrementarà. La productivitat dedesenvolupament i manteniment millorarà si el paral·lelisme i els detallstècnics són gestionats per la màquina, mentre el programador raona sobre elconjunt de l’aplicació.El programari paral·lel hauria de ser escrit en llenguatges específics deldomini. Aquests llenguatges extrauen paral·lelisme implícit, el qual és ocultatper un llenguatge seqüencial com C. Quan l’assignació de memòria i lesestructures de control són gestionades pel compilador, l’estructura iorganització de dades del programi poden ser modificades de manera segura ifiable per les transformacions d’alt nivell del compilador.Un dels dominis de l’aplicació importants és el que consta dels programes destream; aquest programes són estructurats com a nuclis independents queinteractuen només a través de canals d’un sol sentit, anomenats streams. Laprogramació de streams no és aplicable a tots els programes, però sorgeix deforma natural en la codificació i descodificació d’àudio i vídeo, gràfics 3D, iprocessament de senyals digitals. Aquesta representació permet transformacionsd’alt nivell, fins i tot descomposició i fusió de nucli.Aquesta tesi desenvolupa noves tècniques de compilació i sistemes en tempsd’execució per a programació de streams. La primera part d’aquesta tesi esfocalitza amb un compilador de streams de planificació estàtica. Presenta unnou algorisme de partició estàtica, que determina quins nuclis han de serfusionats, per tal d’equilibrar la càrrega en els processadors i en lesinterconnexions. Un bon algorisme de particionat és fonamental per tal de queel compilador produeixi codi eficient. L’algorisme també té en compte elspassos de compilació subseqüents---específicament software pipelining il’arranjament de buffers---i modela la capacitat del compilador per fusionarnuclis. Aquesta tesi també presenta un algorisme estàtic de redimensionament de cues.Aquest algorisme és important quan la memòria és distribuïda, especialment quanles memòries locals són petites. L’algorisme té en compte latències ivariacions en els temps de càlcul, i considera el límit imposat per la mida deles memòries locals.La segona part d’aquesta tesi es centralitza en la planificació dinàmica deprogrames de streams. En primer lloc, investiga el rendiment dels planificadorsdinàmics online, non-preemptive i non-clairvoyant. En segon lloc, proposa dosplanificadors dinàmics per programes de stream. El primer és específicament pera programes de streams unidimensionals. El segon és més general: no necessitael graf de streams, però els overheads són una mica més grans.Aquesta tesi també presenta un conjunt d’eines de suport relacionades amb laprogramació de streams. StarssCheck és una eina de depuració, que és basa enValgrind, per StarSs, un llenguatge de programació paral·lela basat en tasques.Aquesta eina genera un avís cada vegada que el comportament del programa estàen contradicció amb una anotació pragma. Aquest comportament d’una altra manerapodria causar excepcions o situacions de competició. StreamIt to OmpSs és unaeina per convertir un programa de streams codificat en el llenguatge StreamIt aun programa de tasques en StarSs planificat de forma dinàmica.Postprint (published version